Reid Hoffman flatly states that every company has to do content marketing.
Hoffman is famous for many reasons. According to Wikipedia: PayPal Mafia, LinkedIn founder, early OpenAI investor, prolific angel investor, and massive Silicon Valley pedigree. Lately, he’s been an advocate of AI, writing the long-winded Impromptu: Amplifying Our Humanity Through AI (in contrast to the excellent, but now dated The Alliance)
He takes the position that content needn’t be a one-dimensional sales ploy. It’s a bid to join the conversation. This is who we are in the world. This is what we're doing.
Quality content marketing doesn't feel like marketing. It feels like a point of view you stumbled across at the right moment — one that makes you see your own situation a little differently than you did five minutes ago. You read it, set it down, and find yourself thinking about it two days later when something relevant happens at work.
That's not a side effect. That's the whole point.
Most content programs never get there because their conversations start with the wrong question.
What Do We Want People to Do?
Better: What do we believe, and who needs to hear it?
Hoffman's point is that you have to be in the conversation. Presence without a point of view is just a higher-class version of spam. The corollary is that you,with a logo on it.
A 20-person accounting firm in Boca Raton posts tax season reminders in March, year-end planning tips in November, and team anniversary announcements year-round. The posts exist. They go out on schedule. Someone spent time on them. But ask yourself: what does that firm think about accounting? About their clients' businesses? About the way money actually moves through a professional services firm in South Florida?
You don't know. Neither do their prospective clients.
Now imagine a firm that publishes a direct, consistent take on what's actually changing in their clients' financial lives — a genuine point of view on what they're seeing and what it means. You read it and think: these people have been paying attention. When the need arises, you remember the name.
We work with one such firm, Heartland Interpretation and Translation, whose founder and HMFIC evangelizes clear communication across languages, boosts efficiency, enhances employee satisfaction, and strengthens bottom lines.
Do: Take Position. Don’t Build a Calendar.
The firms that build durable reputations through content aren't usually the ones with the biggest production budgets or the most sophisticated distribution. They're the ones who decided what they stand for and shout it from the rooftops, consistently, over time.
Taking a position means ruling things out. We see it this way, not that way. It 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 make a decision or solve a problem "extractive." It takes the reader's attention and gives nothing back. By that measure, a lot of B2B content is extractive because there's nothing underneath it worth knowing. No stance. No signal. No reason to come back.
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 hiring timeline in Q3 — that firm is doing something different. It's spending its content budget on a point of view rather than a presence.
The presence without the point of view is expensive. It costs time, money, and attention, but doesn't compound.
Measurement Tells You Whether It's Working.
It Can't Tell You What to Say.
You should measure your content program. Pipeline created. Leads generated. List growth. 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. It 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 that firm from the next result in a search.
This is the trap. The metrics look like progress. The calendar is full. Something is going 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 of this produce small declarations: what we see, what we think it means, why it matters to your audience specifically. Over time, those points accumulate. You form a shape in people's minds. It converts.
Have a Chat With Yourself
Most content programs don't fail in production. They fail upstream when you decide what to say before you decide what you believe. The eight questions below won't fix a broken content strategy. But they'll tell you if the piece you're about to publish has a position underneath it or just a publication date.
Then Just Do It
Hoffman's point is that every brand is already making a statement about who you are: what you publish, what you don't publish, and how you show up. The only question, then, is whether that statement is intentional.
