How Teranet's PurView turned power users into its most trusted sales channel

Maria Policelli-Sohrabi (​@maria.policelli-sohrabi), Digital and Social Media Marketing Manager at Teranet Inc., knew that PurView, the company's B2B property intelligence platform, had a trust problem baked into every piece of content it published: like many industries, mortgage brokers don't trust brand messaging; they trust each other. Nielsen's Global Trust in Advertising report* found that 92% of consumers around the world trust earned media—like recommendations from friends and family—above any other form of advertising... and PurView had no channel where real brokers could validate the product in their own words. 

Using Social Listening, the Teranet marketing team identified which of PurView's existing users already had credibility and reach in the mortgage broker community online, then built an ambassador program around those users instead of around centralized, brand-authored content.
 

Finding advocates with built-in credibility

Rather than starting from a customer list, the team began scoring social signals directly: LinkedIn activity, industry award nominations, speaking engagements at events like the Financial Services Regulatory Authority (FSRA) of Ontario Exchange, that they then matched up against confirmed customers. That combination of product usage and existing visibility surfaced a small group of brokers who were already talking about PurView, unprompted. Sadiq Boodoo, a PurView subscriber who had already spoken publicly at an FSRA event, was one of the first identified this way. Since joining the advocacy program, Sadiq Boodoo has headlined a Teranet fraud prevention forum, co-hosted an event at the Mortgage Professionals Canada National Conference and continues to post online about PurView voluntarily, more than a year after his initial recruitment to the advocacy program.

"We realized these weren't just satisfied customers, they were untapped distribution channels with pre-built trust that brand content could never replicate." — Maria Policelli-Sohrabi, Digital and Social Media Marketing Manager, Teranet Inc.
 

The how

The Teranet marketing team built a repeatable process for turning listening data into a scaled advocacy program:

• Scoring candidates on real signals, not follower count: The team evaluated prospects across Ontario, Alberta and British Columbia on existing product usage, engagement quality across LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook and TikTok, and third-party credibility markers like award wins and speaking roles. This produced a scored shortlist and a documented backup list, so the final ambassador group represented genuine influence rather than brand loyalty alone.
• Letting ambassadors lead, not promote: Instead of brand-scripted testimonials, the program runs on named, bylined content built around each ambassador's real expertise, like Sadiq Boodoo walking brokers through new anti-money-laundering requirements, or Christine Xu explaining how she uses PurView's ownership verification tools to catch fraud red flags.
• Positioning ambassadors alongside industry leaders: At the Combatting Fraud Market Insight Forum, ambassadors shared a stage with legal and regulatory authorities entirely outside the mortgage industry. Because the content was framed around the ambassador's expertise rather than PurView's product, attendance in the session grew nearly 35% year over year.
• Using ambassador voices to recruit the next cohort: PurView now features ambassador quotes directly in its own recruitment content. A post using Sadiq Boodoo's testimonial about the program reached 59% non-follower accounts and earned a 21.4% engagement rate, far above what brand-authored posts typically see.

The business impact

Across 32 tagged posts since launch, the ambassador program has generated 12,587 impressions, 921 engagements and 470 post clicks, with roughly 90% of tracked views coming from non-followers, meaning nearly all of that reach was net-new to PurView. The program continues to grow, with the 2026 ambassador cohort now underway and an ongoing application process that allows mortgage brokers to apply to become future PurView Brand Ambassadors. Nearly half of all traffic to the Ambassadors section of PurView's website goes to an individual ambassador's profile rather than the general hub page, a sign that visitors are seeking these brokers out by name. 
 

What could this look like for your team?

If you have customers who are already talking about your product without being asked, what would it take to find and activate them systematically? What would you include in a scoring rubric to assess their fit for your advocacy program? We'd love to hear how you're thinking about turning existing advocates into a distribution channel of their own.

*Source: Nielsen. Global Trust in Advertising and Brand Messages. April 2012. https://www.nielsen.com/insights/2012/global-trust-in-advertising-and-brand-messages-2