Rising 30 Class of 2026: Meet B2B Social's Best | Oktopost
Class of 2026: Meet your B2B Social’s Rising 30
B2B social media is no longer a supporting act. Across every sector of the global economy, the practitioners who do it well are shaping how organizations build trust, thought leadership, and pipeline. The B2B Social’s Rising 30 Class of 2026 was created to find them, recognize them, and put their work in front of the audience it deserves.
From hundreds of eligible nominees submitted by the B2B social community, 30 standout social media leaders were selected who are raising the bar for what B2B social media can look like. They work across diverse industries, from investment banking and industrial manufacturing to companies ranging from high-growth startups to Fortune 500 enterprises. What connects them isn’t the size of their following or the scale of their budget. It’s the quality of their thinking, their creativity, the consistency of their work, and the genuine communities they’ve built around it.
B2B social has a recognition problem. It’s one of the most undervalued functions in modern marketing, and the people doing it best are rarely credited by the wider business community that benefits most from their work. The Rising 30 is a deliberate attempt to change that. It’s not a popularity contest. It’s not a customer list. It’s a nomination-driven effort to surface the practitioners, thinkers, and builders doing the most purposeful, credible work in the field, wherever they work, in whatever sector, at whatever scale.
Every person on this list earned their place. Here they are, in alphabetical order, the B2B Social’s Rising 30 Class of 2026.
What we noticed from this year’s nominations
Our nominees told us more about the state of B2B social media than we can fit into a single list. Here is what the Rising 30 Class of 2026 nominations revealed. These were the patterns that shaped the Rising 30 Class of 2026 selection.
Financial services is showing up in the Rising 30 Class of 2026. For years, the B2B social conversation was dominated by SaaS and tech. This year’s nominations told a different story. Marketers from global investment banks, fintech companies, and professional services firms made a compelling case that operating inside a regulated environment is not a reason to produce less interesting social content. If anything, working within those constraints has produced some of the most creative approaches we saw.
Employee advocacy is becoming a discipline, not a feature. Several nominees were recognized specifically for their work building employee advocacy programs, not just their personal content. The nominations described practitioners who had stood up programs from scratch, activated hundreds or thousands of employees, and measured the results with the same rigor you would expect from a demand generation team. That tells us the conversation around employee advocacy has matured significantly.
Traditional industries are catching up fast. Energy, industrial manufacturing, logistics, and healthcare technology were all represented in the nominations, and the quality of the work was competitive with anything we saw from the tech sector. Marketing professionals in those environments face real constraints around brand standards and communications governance, and the ones nominated for the Rising 30 have found ways to build authority and community within them. That is a harder brief than it looks.
B2B social has gone global. The practitioners who made this year’s list work in Sweden, France, Israel, Australia, the UK, and across the United States. What stands out is how much the work varies by market. Different regulatory environments and content cultures are producing genuinely different approaches to B2B social, and that variety shows up in the Rising 30 Class of 2026.
Experience is accumulating. Some of the most compelling nominations described practitioners who have been doing this work for a decade or more, quietly building programs, audiences, and organizational capability that didn’t exist when they started. A profession that once struggled to explain its value is now producing people who can prove it. The Rising 30 Class of 2026 is the clearest evidence of that shift we’ve seen.
Meet the B2B Social’s Rising 30 2026
The Rising 30 Class of 2026 spans 14 industries and four continents. Every person here was nominated by the B2B social community and selected on the quality of their work alone.
1. Alex Noble
Alex recently joined IFS from Finastra and brings with him a clear playbook for enterprise software social, educational, consistent, and built for the platform rather than adapted from other channels. His approach has earned him the kind of LinkedIn following that other B2B practitioners actively reference.
2. Alexandra Weigl
Connect with Alexandra on LinkedIn
A senior marketing voice at Celonis, she has built a personal brand that stands out in enterprise software. Her approach combines strategic thinking with authenticity.
3. Anna Laura McGranahan
Connect with Anna Laura on LinkedIn
Known as “Social Media Manager Barbie,” she launched a brand new employee advocacy program at Aptean that activated over 700 employees and delivered $500K in earned media value.
4. Brandon Linn
Connect with Brandon on LinkedIn
Building a LinkedIn presence at HiBob that punches above the company’s brand recognition.
5. Brian Giesen
Connect with Brian on LinkedIn
Built an authentic personal brand inside Macquarie Group, one of the world’s largest investment banks.
6. Brianna Young
Connect with Brianna on LinkedIn
The Social Media Lead for EY Americas Consulting, making enterprise thought leadership feel real.
7. Caleb Tolin
Connect with Caleb on LinkedIn
Building a LinkedIn presence in cybersecurity marketing that others reference.
8. Christina Noel
Connect with Christina on LinkedIn
Built MEDITECH’s social media presence, reflecting long-game thinking.
9. Dave Marsh
Head of Social Media Insights and Governance at HSBC.
10. Elior Doani
Connect with Elior on LinkedIn
Focuses on protecting brands from social media threats.
11. Erica Noonan
Connect with Erica on LinkedIn
Built a social presence in healthcare technology that stands out.
12. Fran Riley
Bringing modern social media thinking to a slow-embracing industry at Baker Hughes.
13. Francis McCarthy
Connect with Francis on LinkedIn
Built a precise B2B marketing voice at SafetyCulture.
14. Gil Ben-Porat
Most-nominated individual in the nomination pool, known for creating engaging content.
15. Jamil Zakaria
Connect with Jamil on LinkedIn
Bringing depth to B2B social media content.
16. Jelena Burcer
Connect with Jelena on LinkedIn
Has built a community-focused social presence at Semrush.
17. Johannah Cantwell
Connect with Johannah on LinkedIn
Shaping B2B social thinking in collaboration software at Klaxoon.
18. Jon Stona
Provides clarity on complex global payments at Airwallex.
19. Karl Reynolds
Building social media within a global industrial manufacturer.
20. Lisa Vecchio
Crafting a clear and confident voice at VEED.
21. Milena Farber
Connect with Milena on LinkedIn
Building a brand from the ground up at Guardz.
22. Natalie Stenge
Connect with Natalie on LinkedIn
Known for her humor and distinctiveness in B2B.
23. Nathan Allebach
Connect with Nathan on LinkedIn
A reference point in B2B social media.
24. Phoebe Hayles
Connect with Phoebe on LinkedIn
Running an Employee Generated Content program at 3 Sided Cube.
25. Roy Sexton
CMO at Vedder Price, known for bold and human social media.
26. Samuel Bibby
Connect with Samuel on LinkedIn
Making social media work in a large law firm at Latham and Watkins.
27. Sanchi Aneja
Connect with Sanchi on LinkedIn
Building personal equity inside a large enterprise at HPE.
28. Sarah Hankins
Connect with Sarah on LinkedIn
Making CBIZ compelling on LinkedIn with genuine engagement.
29. Solveig Rundquist
Connect with Solveig on LinkedIn
Making document technology interesting at Enigio.
30. Stef Garraffa
Producing engaging content at Cisco.
What the B2B Social’s Rising 30 Class of 2026 tells us about B2B social
Taken together, the B2B Social’s Rising 30 Class of 2026 says something meaningful about where B2B social is heading. A few themes emerged clearly.
Social is becoming a strategic function. The marketers on this list aren’t managing channels. They’re building organizational capabilities, seated in strategy conversations, advising executives, and measuring impact in ways that connect directly to business outcomes.
Employee advocacy is going mainstream. Several winners have built programs that activate hundreds or thousands of employees and measure outcomes in earned media value and pipeline influence.
Credibility is the only currency that compounds. The professionals who built the most engaged, loyal communities on this list did it the same way: sharing genuine expertise, consistently, over time.
The best B2B social thinking is global. The Class of 2026 includes practitioners on four continents, working in markets with fundamentally different communication cultures and regulatory environments.
Traditional industries are producing the next generation of leaders. Marketing professionals working in financial services, law, manufacturing, energy, and healthcare face some of the hardest briefs in B2B social.