Low-value, low-quality content on the internet isn’t new, but now there’s an unending supply of synthetic garbage. Our attention, on the other hand, is a finite resource. To stand out in the feed, you need to focus on what cannot be prompted into existence. Here’s how.

Everything you read on LinkedIn is now potentially synthetic. So you need to show, not tell to stand out, to actually win trust and to inspire action among your audience. 

That’s something I frequently tell my clients. The logical question that follows is, but what do I show? The answer is highly individual and specific to you. It’s the stuff of your humanity, your quirks, your real-world dealings. It’s how you do what you do. It’s your true colours. Showing up in this way is a form of resistance to the Big Tech machine trying to automate away our critical thinking skills. 

But what if I told you it’s also your competitive advantage in an era of infinite slop? 

First, it’s important to understand what you're up against. Right now, there’s a lot more content than ever before. Some say there’s a recession in social media, partly because of how much slop, spam and snake oil is out there now compared to just a few years ago. Active social media accounts hit a peak in 2022 and have been declining ever since. 

There’s a tonne of clearly fabricated, quasi-inspirational, mostly ludicrous work anecdotes clogging up our feeds. Typically, they’re published by someone with some combination of ‘AI’, ‘thought’ and/or ‘leader’ in their headline — often with the nebulous contents of said headline being ‘10x-ed’. They’re often purportedly in the HR and recruiting industries, preying on the very reasons people log onto LinkedIn in the first place. That, or they’re shilling their $97 AI prompts library to help you earn 6-figures while you sleep (comment ‘grifter’ and I’ll DM you the download link).

No, this isn’t the worn-out refrain of ‘I remember the good old days’. Even before Generative AI tools, LinkedIn feeds were filled with human-generated slop. But we’ve moved into a new era.

A half decade ago, these clearly false business parables were easily identifiable as such. They were also written by a human, even if it wasn’t the human who posted it. We all know the joke about the CEO who was a hungry dog, which did the rounds circa 2020. These parables popped up like mushrooms as engagement-hungry users clamoured to copy, paste and pass off the story as their own. 

But it’s even faster now. Anyone can generate an opinion on any subject in a race to the bottom. We’ve reached a point where AI can enable anyone to ‘tell’, to express an opinion, to produce something generic. (I recently created a blueprint you can use to create your very own AI snake oil LinkedIn post.) In this climate, I’d argue that those who can actually ‘show’ will win.

Yes, that’s an overused, generic writing trope: ‘show, don’t tell’, the domain of novelists who know readers connect more with something when you show characters are sad rather than telling us they are sad. 

Yet I want to put a finer point on this for our era: To business people with actual expertise, there’s a specific approach to showing rather than telling which is most powerful in my experience. It’s what I call workshop tour content.

Content that cuts through the noise takes the audience on a tour of the workshop. It stands out because it demonstrates expertise, experience, real lessons learned through doing, winning and failing. 

Like a high school maths student showing their work rather than scribbling down an answer they copied, workshop tour content demonstrates deep understanding and mastery of your craft. Quite frankly, it can’t be faked. Oh, some grifter has probably tried, but it will fail again and again, because the audiences who matter will sense something is off.

Learning how to show, how to take your niche audience on a workshop tour, is the critical skill to build trust in these sloppy times.

The market for attention now has infinite supply. Generative AI is the jet fuel on the bonfire. But we humans also have a strictly finite store of attention we can spend. In other words, there’s a lot more supply than there is demand. This excess creates noise, making it harder for genuine content from human creators to break through. 

This concept of the attention economy isn’t new, of course. American computer science researcher Herbert A. Simon coined the phrase in the 1960s, arguing that the rise of the cheap, daily newspaper in the 20th century created the first true attention economy. This was the birth of an endless churn of sensation and pre-digital clickbait, which remade how people engaged with the world. 

If Simon could only see the world today he’d have an extreme case of whiplash. Generative AI has cut the brake cables. We’re barrelling into an infinite supply of low-value, low-quality content. As the volume of stuff to pay attention to — from Netflix to LinkedIn posts to completely synthetic Sora videos — grows infinitely, there’s an inverse relationship with the level of trust we can assign to a given piece of content. 

But slop, spam and snake oil also create an opening for those who are doing the opposite. It may not be as easy as it once was, in the early days of social media. But there is a way. And with the right intentions, resisting the slop and saying something original can really pay off.

In the era of infinite slop, figuring out who to trust becomes the only way audiences can filter what we actually allow into our consciousness. We’ve all got the outlets, publications, content creators, friends and family members we trust as sources of information, news and yes, content. Once we have those sources, we know who we should pay attention to. It’s like a safe port in a sea of misinformation and flat-out garbage floating all around us. 

Unsurprisingly, trust is deteriorating faster than ever online. But it’s precisely trust that makes us take action as consumers, as audience members. The choice to like and subscribe to my YouTube channel, newsletter or LinkedIn really means to like and subscribe to my ideas, my taste, my worldview. That begins with trust. 

And if you want to build trust with an audience in a respectful, ethical and honest way, you simply cannot prompt that into existence. You’re also not going to find the way staring at a blinking cursor on a blank page. (That’s a surefire way to get writer’s block — and little else.)

Rather, you find this stuff in your workshop, so to speak — the interactions you have with customers, peers and people in the real world. Content harvested in this way gives the audience a tour of what you do best; insights into how the proverbial sausage is made. In internet business circles, this is closely related to the idea of selling your sawdust — taking the byproducts and offcuts of the value you deliver and using it to create value in a different way. It’s also closely related to what some product designers in the startup world call building in public.

High-quality, trust-building, action-driving workshop tour content focuses on the strategy, the outcomes, the ideas, the roadblocks and the wins that aren’t otherwise publicly visible.  

What does that look like in practice? In my work as a LinkedIn ghostwriter and strategist, I’ve found vanity metrics (likes, impressions and virtual pats on the back) are alluring, but shouldn’t be your focus unless your core goal is building a large audience for no other reason than having a large audience (and even then, going on a reality TV dating show might be a faster way to grow). 

Truth is, workshop tour content isn’t for the masses. And that’s what makes it so effective.

In the social media agency I run, the most effective content we create for clients doesn’t go viral. It hardly amasses dozens of likes. Instead, it speaks very clearly to a particular audience at a particular moment. 

Recently, we helped one client review a sales conversation that didn’t result in a sale. The prospect asked a few key questions. Our client answered them well, but on review it was clear that a few things went unsaid by the prospect, a few questions they left unasked. That probably cost the sale. We created a series of posts which pre-emptively addressed these questions and explained the client’s approach to each one, or ‘objection handling’ in sales parlance. The result was detailed, niche, arguably boring content for anyone not actively considering using the client’s services. And the result was also detailed, niche, highly valuable content for a small group of leads who were actively considering the client’s services. This content reignited a conversation with a prospect who’d gone cold, and by educating the prospect through content, a simple follow-up turned into a yes and a new project. Showing won. Being intentionally niche won.

Another client, a founder in the non-profit sector, had been knocking on virtual doors to find new partners who could provide employment opportunities for people facing homelessness. We drafted a LinkedIn post that outlined the full ‘deal story’ on how a separate employment pathway partnership came to be. The ins and outs, the process of pitching it to senior management, the questions, concerns and details raised. Within two days of the post going live, our founder client received a DM from a senior HR leader at a target organisation; she’d seen the post and wanted to chat about establishing a partnership. 

It can work for anyone, but it also won’t look the same. Standing out isn’t easy when you use the same tools, the same synthetic voice as everyone else. Instead, take your audience where no one else can. Bring them inside the workshop, show them the ideas, conversations, the rough workings, the sawdust and the off-cuts that drive your work. 

Trust is the difference between consuming, believing and taking action. Now that we all have synthetic content machines at our disposal, the experts who can show have the greatest opportunity to cut through the noise.