Previously published on June 16, 2025 in
The ‘LinkedIn Run Club’: Industry Execs Adopt Influencer Tactics to Humanize Firms
Jon Gray is sweaty, panting, and red in the face. Still, the president and chief operating officer of Blackstone holds up his phone as he jogs through the streets of Montreal, Canada. “Has America lost its exceptionalism?” he puffs into the camera. “I don’t think so.”
There was a time when executives in the buttoned-up world of asset management may have balked at documenting their morning exercise routine for social media, as Gray does for his regular posts on LinkedIn.
But a growing number of industry leaders are taking inspiration from financial influencers – or “finfluencers” – and blending market commentary with chatty updates about their lives, in an effort to build trust with institutional and wealth audiences and other stakeholders.
Gray was initially reluctant to engage with social media, he told FundFire, but the firm’s global head of corporate affairs “pushed” him to use LinkedIn at the start of last year. His first posts weren’t “that exciting,” Gray said, but then, inspired by videos he sends to his daughters, he filmed himself jogging past the Sydney Opera House in Australia.
That post “sort of went viral,” he said. “I was like, ‘OK, if that works there, let’s try it in Tokyo and Bentonville, Arkansas, and London and Paris and all over.'”
Gray’s set-up is low tech; most of the time, he films solo with his iPhone.
Yet the format has proven to be an “incredibly effective means of connecting with other people and telling our Blackstone story and… humanizing what we do,” he said.
Executives have begun to share more of their personalities in a bid to humanize their brands and connect directly with their stakeholders, said Eric Hazard, a managing director at communications consultant Vested. “It’s a big shift, and it’s happened pretty rapidly.”
One of the advantages of LinkedIn is that executives can control their message “100%” of the time, he noted.
Over the next five years, Hazard believes industry executives will increasingly resemble finfluencers – though they will be sharing financial content “from a position of authority,” he added.
