Hello Again,

I’ve been hearing from Reid Hoffman a lot lately. Not because we talk, but because he talks to a lot of pod punditry I listen to, and I’ve been hiking up north a lot lately, so I’ve been getting an earful.

Like most captains of industry who aren’t in the oil and gas racket, he’s talking AI, AI, AI. When discussing hyperscalers in this context, it’s customary to talk about what will be disrupted: the social contract, jobs, brands, and basically everything else.

So how do brands stay in the undisrupted? Good content helps.

Reid Hoffman says every company has to do content marketing. He's right. The harder problem is having something worth saying.

Hoffman's point is that content is a bid to join a conversation — This is who we are in the world. This is what we're doing. Quality content doesn't feel like marketing. It makes you see your situation a little differently than you did five minutes before. You read it, set it down, and find yourself thinking about it two days later.

Most content programs never get there because they start with the wrong question.

Wrong: What do we want people to do?

Better: What do we believe, and who needs to hear it?

Presence without a point of view is a higher-class version of spam. A 20-person accounting firm that posts tax season reminders in March and team anniversaries year-round has a calendar. It does not have a position.

Ask yourself: what does that firm think about accounting? About their clients' businesses? About the way money moves through a professional services firm?

You don't know. Neither do their prospective clients.

Now imagine a firm that publishes a direct, consistent take on what's changing in their clients' financial lives. You read it and think: these people have been paying attention. When the need arises, you remember the name.

The firms that build durable reputations through content aren't the ones with the biggest budgets. They're the ones who decided what they stand for and repeated it, consistently, over time.

Taking a position means publishing something a competitor could disagree with. A lot of content programs never get there because they stay comfortable with consensus rather than conviction.

Hoffman calls content that doesn't help a reader decide or solve a problem "extractive." It takes attention and gives nothing back. By that measure, most B2B content is extractive — there's nothing underneath it worth knowing.

A staffing firm that tells you the South Florida labor market is "competitive" is describing weather. A staffing firm that tells you exactly which roles are impossible to fill right now, why, and what that means for your Q3 hiring timeline — that firm is doing something different. It's spending its content budget on a point of view instead of a presence.

The presence without the point of view is expensive. It costs time, money, and attention. It doesn't compound.

You should measure your content program. Pipeline created, leads generated, list growth — measure all of it. But measurement is a diagnostic tool. It tells you whether the engine is running. It doesn't tell you what the engine is for.

Track X LinkedIn impressions per post, and you have a number. That number is not a signal. If the post could have been written by any competitor in the same vertical, then X people saw something that won't distinguish your firm from the next result in a search.

The metrics look like progress. The calendar is full. Something goes out every Tuesday. But impressions without identity are just reach — and reach without something worth reaching for is a treadmill. You stay in motion. You don't move.

The firms that break out produce small declarations: what they see, what they think it means, why it matters to their specific audience. Over time, those points accumulate. You form a shape in people's minds.

That shape converts.

Most content programs don't fail in production. They fail upstream — when you decide what to say before you decide what you believe.

Before hitting publish, ask: does this piece have a position underneath it, or just a publication date?

Every brand is already making a statement about who it is: through what it publishes, what it doesn't, and how it shows up. The only question is whether that statement is intentional.

What I'm reading: