Why Copy-Pasting From ChatGPT Is Not a Content Strategy

A lot of professional content on LinkedIn starts the same way now. Someone opens ChatGPT, types a prompt, and posts whatever comes back a few seconds later. That is not something I see as a problem to fix. Posting something is often better than posting nothing, and for many people, AI is the reason they show up on social media with any regularity at all.

What gets skipped in that process is the step before the prompt: the point a person is actually trying to make, the outcome they want a specific post to create, and how that post connects to everything else they have already published. AI can accelerate language. The reasoning behind it belongs to the person publishing, rather than to the tool being used.

In my experience, the sequence that holds up over time follows a consistent order. A strategy gets worked out. A personality gets connected to that strategy. Only after that does AI enter the process, shaping material that already has direction rather than generating a post out of nothing.

Skip that sequence, and the output can still look complete, with the right structure, the right length, and paragraphs that land where they should, while missing a reason for the post to exist beyond the post itself. Readers pick up on this pattern faster than most people expect, even when they cannot name what feels off about it. A feed built from generic AI paragraphs reads more like noise than a voice, and over time, the account blends into every other account doing the same thing.

The process we use with clients at Heitland Media Group starts before any content gets written. A strategy comes first, a personality connects to that strategy, and only after that do we build what we call the origin: a recorded video conversation that becomes the source material for everything else. Articles, LinkedIn posts, and short clips all get built from that conversation rather than the other way around.

Video tends to carry more weight than a standalone written post. Being seen and heard with some consistency builds a kind of authority that text alone rarely creates, regardless of how well the text is written. AI still has a role in that process. Its role has simply moved further down the sequence than most people currently place it.

Highlights:

00:00 AI Content Creation Basics

00:03 Beyond Copy Paste Posts

00:19 Strategy Before AI

01:07 Client Workflow Framework

01:23 Video Builds Authority

Links:

https://www.jensheitland.com/links

Why Board Members Are Never Chosen Through Applications

A few months ago, I was on a podcast talking about what people are really looking for when they choose where to work. The conversation drifted into a distinction I keep noticing across levels of seniority, and it has stayed relevant every time I look at how careers actually move inside organizations.

Someone trying to find a job quickly is operating in one environment. There is a lot of noise, many open roles, and a volume of applicants large enough that individual attention becomes scarce. In that environment, applying to many companies at once is a rational response. The noise around each individual opening protects almost no one, so the strategy shifts toward reach over precision.

Senior and board-level positioning happens inside a completely different environment. There, the number of open seats is small, the number of people already inside the room is limited, and almost none of the movement happens through a visible process.

Take a board seat, for example. There is no application for it, and nobody submits a form to be considered for a board role. Instead, a committee makes the selection, and that committee sits inside a wider management ecosystem built on existing relationships. People within that ecosystem recommend others they already know. The candidates being discussed are rarely strangers to the room; they are already somewhere near it.

Positioning for consideration is built on proximity, which means being inside the relevant circles long before any seat opens, a different kind of work than writing a strong CV or tailoring a cover letter. The relationship has to exist first, and only afterward does anything resembling an application take shape, if it takes shape at all.

The two systems require two different kinds of effort, and confusing them tends to cost people time. Someone applying at volume to entry- or mid-level roles is playing a numbers game inside a system designed for that kind of engagement. Someone trying to reach a senior or board-level position through the same volume approach is playing a different game, because the system they are trying to enter does not select through applications in the first place.

More recently, the sheer amount of AI-generated material arriving in company inboxes has added another layer to this. Application volume was already high, and it has grown further, making it harder than before to stand out through a form at every level, not only the senior ones. That shift is pushing a reconsideration of how individuals present themselves to the market at large.

Underneath both systems sits the same factor, an individual's actual strategic advantage, and where it creates leverage. For someone sending out applications at volume, the advantage is often speed and range. For someone aiming at a board seat, the advantage is usually the relationships already built and the visibility already earned inside a specific circle.

Either way, the sequence tends to hold. The relationship comes before the formal step, when there is one at all. What gets called an application at that level is often just a record of a decision made elsewhere.

Highlights:

00:00 How People Choose Employers

00:09 Spray and Pray Job Search

00:22 Senior Roles Need Positioning

00:32 Board Seats Are Selected

00:51 Get Into the Right Circles

01:12 Strategy Leverage and Relationships

01:38 AI Slop Changes the Game

Links:

https://www.jensheitland.com/links

Why do so many executives who build a following on LinkedIn end up hurting the exact business they're supposed to represent? In this episode, Jens Heitland breaks down a pattern he keeps seeing among senior leaders: copying the tone, structure, and topics of well-known influencers until an audience starts crediting them as the originator of ideas that were never theirs.

He gets into why that's not really the problem. The problem is what gets lost in the process: the connection between the content and the business the executive leads, and the connection between the content and who that person actually is outside the platform. He talks about why authenticity for a senior leader isn't a soft skill but a functional requirement, why every public post from a CEO reads as one signal with the company rather than two separate things, and a simple two-question test to run before anything goes out under your name.

There's also a case for why the goal was never to become an influencer in the first place, and what it actually means to build a social media presence that moves the business forward rather than just boosting engagement numbers.

If you're an executive trying to figure out what you should actually be posting, this one will feel familiar.

Highlights:

00:00 Copying Influencers Trap

00:08 LinkedIn Copycat Example

00:46 When Content Hurts Business

01:07 Build Authentic Presence

01:30 Executive Goals Not Fame

Links:

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Why Every CEO Should Document Their Life Lessons

My father died in 2021. We had lived abroad for years before that, and the time we spent together was always centered on family. We never got into the conversations that would have helped me later, how to drive a business, how to work through a hard problem with a team. Those are the conversations you only have if you spend a certain kind of time together, and we hadn't had that kind of time in years.

When he died, I felt the absence most clearly in a specific way. I no longer had someone I could go to and say, I have this problem with a team member, or I am not sure how to think about this decision. He was simply not there to respond anymore, and that gap became one of the clearest realizations I had during that period.

My daughter and I went looking through his things and found something we had almost forgotten about. He had recorded small radio clips years earlier, and we found the old CDs. We sat down and listened to them together. What struck both of us was how much wisdom was in those short recordings, wisdom that had gone untouched for years because nobody had looked for it.

That experience is part of what led me to build the business I run now. If you document certain things in your life, your children and the people around you can learn from them long after you are gone. In earlier generations, this transfer of knowledge happened naturally, through daily proximity and shared time. Families talked, worked, and lived closely enough that wisdom passed along without anyone deciding to document it on purpose.

That kind of proximity is harder to come by now. Families live apart, careers pull people in different directions, and the natural transfer of knowledge that once happened through simple closeness no longer happens in the same way. What used to be automatic now has to be intentional.

I believe this is something worth doing deliberately, in a digital form. Every CEO, every parent, carries decades of decisions, mistakes, and lessons that would be valuable to the next generation if they were ever recorded. Right now, most of that knowledge disappears the moment someone is no longer here to share it in person. As tools evolve, including where AI is heading, documenting a lifetime of thinking may become easier, closer to building something like a second brain that outlives the person who built it.

This is part of what drives me now, beyond the business itself. I am documenting things for my daughter, not because I expect her to need every answer I leave behind, but because I want her to have access to what I learned, in my own words, whenever she wants to go looking for it.

Highlights

00:00 Why Legacy Matters

00:10 Losing an Anchor

01:00 Searching His Recordings

01:17 Wisdom for the Next Generation

01:40 Digital Legacy and AI

Links:

https://www.jensheitland.com/links

When a CEO's Presence Never Made It Online

I was on an audit call with a CEO who described himself as completely silent when it came to being visible. He told me directly that he was not interested in personal branding, not interested in being seen. He said it the way people say things they have already decided, not things they are still weighing.

At some point in the conversation, I asked him a direct question. How many businesses do you think you are missing out on because you are not visible? He paused, then turned the question back toward me. He asked directly whether more visibility would translate into more business.

I did not answer with theory. I gave him examples from clients we work with, businesses across different industries and sizes. In every case, the outcome came down to a combination of the company, the service, and the personality of the person behind it. That combination determines whether someone trusts the business enough to move forward.

He sat with that for a moment, and then he said something that captured the whole conversation. He said that is exactly what he does in the physical environment. In meetings, in negotiations, in the room, he shows up as himself, and people trust him because of it. What he had not done was carry that same presence into a digital context.

I see this pattern repeatedly with senior leaders who built their credibility inside physical rooms over decades. They know how to build trust in person. They read the room, adjust their tone, and let people see enough of them to feel safe doing business together. None of that disappears once the conversation moves online. It just stops happening because nobody told them the same instincts apply.

The consequence is quiet and hard to measure. A CEO rarely realizes a deal was lost because he was invisible online. A prospective client researches the company, finds nothing that lets them read the person behind it, and moves on without ever saying why. The CEO never sees the business that was lost, because it was lost before contact was made.

In this call, the shift happened quickly once the framing changed. He was being asked to extend a skill he already had into an environment he had been avoiding, not to become someone different. Once he saw it that way, resistance turned into curiosity, and curiosity is usually where change actually begins.

CEOs who avoid visibility are often avoiding a version of themselves they have not seen modeled well, rather than avoiding attention itself. They have seen personal branding done badly, and they have decided the entire category is not for them. What they have not considered is that the trust they build in a room can be described, not performed, in a digital context, and described trust travels further than most people expect.

That is usually where the real conversation starts, with a simple question about what is already working and where it stopped being visible.

Highlights:

00:00 CEO Resists Visibility

00:19 The Cost of Being Invisible

00:54 Connecting Trust to Branding

Links:

https://www.jensheitland.com/links

Why Follower Count No Longer Predicts What a CEO Reaches

We had a conversation the other day about follower growth, the kind of number most executives glance at without really questioning what it tells them. It's a reasonable number to look at. It is not the number that matters, and the reason why has changed more in the last two years than most people watching their own LinkedIn analytics have noticed.

The old model was simple. You posted, your followers saw it, and the count of those followers roughly predicted your reach. That model no longer describes what LinkedIn actually does. The platform now runs something closer to a live test. A new post goes out to a small sample first, a handful of people who follow you and a handful who don't, and the platform watches what happens. Who stops scrolling? Who reads to the end. Who reacts, comments, or shares. Based on that early signal, the post either gets pushed further into a wider audience or it quietly stops moving. Your follower count barely factors into that decision. What factors in is whether the fifty or so people who saw it first actually cared.

This changes what a follower count can honestly tell you. It used to function as a rough proxy for reach. Now it functions mostly as a vanity number, visible on a profile, satisfying to watch climb, but disconnected from whether any individual post performs. A CEO with 200,000 followers can post something that reaches 3,000 people. A CEO with four thousand followers can post something that reaches two hundred thousand. The algorithm is not rewarding the account. It is rewarding the specific piece of content, tested in real time against a small sample of real reactions.

The consequence of missing this is that a lot of leadership time gets spent optimizing for the wrong thing. Chasing followers feels like progress because the number moves, and moving numbers feel like results. But a follower count has never driven a deal, closed a capital raise, or convinced a board member that this CEO understands where the market is going. What drives those things is whether the content itself, when tested against real engagement, actually reaches the people who matter and represents the company as it needs to be represented.

This is where I think most people lose the thread. As a CEO, your public presence is not there to accumulate an audience for its own sake. It exists to drive business results, and in a public-facing role, that means every piece of content is functioning as a representation of the company, tested in real time by an algorithm that does not care how many followers you have. The follower count will keep climbing regardless, slowly, as a side effect of good content. But it was never the goal, and treating it as one means optimizing for a number that stopped mattering the moment platforms started testing content before they ever look at who is following you.

Highlights:

00:00 Followers Don’t Matter

00:13 How LinkedIn Tests Posts

00:58 Why Followers Aren’t The Goal

01:09 CEO Focus On Results

Links:

https://www.jensheitland.com/links

The Core You Own vs the Platforms You Rent

Most of what gets called a content strategy today is really a collection of rented rooms. LinkedIn is rented. Instagram is rented. A Substack newsletter, however well it performs, sits on infrastructure someone else controls. The post goes up, the algorithm decides who sees it, and the account itself can be switched off tomorrow without explanation. None of that is a criticism of these platforms. It is simply a description of what they are. Earned presence is presence you have built inside someone else's system, and that system was never obligated to keep you in it.

Working inside large organizations for close to thirty years has taught me to notice where control actually sits, not where it appears to sit. A CEO with 200,000 followers looks powerful on the surface. But if that account disappears, so does the audience, the archive, and often the proof of everything that was ever said. The presence was real. The ownership never was.

The system that solves this is not complicated, though it does take one extra step. Every piece of content is first placed into a structure the organization actually owns, usually the website, in a form built for that environment rather than copied over as an afterthought. Only after that does the same idea go out on LinkedIn, in a newsletter, or on whatever platform makes sense for reaching people that day. The external platforms become channels. The website becomes the asset. Nothing changes about how much a company shows up externally. What changes is where the center of gravity sits.

Over time, this produces something platforms cannot: a compounding record. Every post, every clip, every conversation adds to a structure that still exists next year, still gets indexed, still gets found, regardless of what any single platform decides to do with its algorithm or its terms of service. The earned channels keep doing their job: providing visibility and reach. The owned structure keeps doing its job: permanence.

The consequence of skipping this step usually shows up quietly. A platform changes its rules, an account gets flagged for reasons that are never fully explained, or a service simply shuts down, and years of documented thinking go with it. Nobody plans for this. Almost nobody thinks about it until it happens to someone they know. And by then, there is nothing to rebuild from, because there was never a core to rebuild.

What tends to happen with organizations that get this right is not that they use fewer platforms. If anything, they use more of them, more confidently, because none of them individually carries the risk. The risk has already been absorbed by the structure sitting quietly in the middle, the one built to still be there regardless of what any platform decides tomorrow. That is the difference between presence that is earned and presence that is owned. One is borrowed attention. The other is a structure that keeps compounding, whether or not anyone is watching that day.

Highlights:

00:00 Earned Presence Explained

00:09 Why You Don’t Own Platforms

00:19 Own Your Content First

00:32 Repurpose Into Your Website

00:46 Build a Compounding Asset

01:06 Keep the Core In-House

01:08 Final Takeaway Own It

Links:

https://www.jensheitland.com/links

Why We Built Our Thought Leadership Strategy Backward From a Funding Round

When a company prepares to raise capital, most of the visible work happens in the numbers, sharpening revenue models and stress testing projections until the legal structures behind them hold up under scrutiny. That is the part everyone anticipates, and the part everyone spends months preparing for.

What gets less attention is the second layer of due diligence, the one that looks at people rather than spreadsheets. Investors do not only ask whether the business case holds. They ask whether the people standing behind it are truly operating at the level the investment depends on, and whether that can be confirmed from the outside, without a single internal conversation.

In one pretest we ran ahead of a funding round, this question exposed a gap. The team members who were meant to represent the company, the ones whose credibility the raise partly rested on, had real expertise inside the business, but almost none of it was visible from outside its walls. An investor searching for proof of their standing would have come up short, unable to find the confirmation their own diligence process required.

That gap changes how a raise is perceived before a single meeting takes place. Due diligence increasingly begins online, quietly, before any data room is opened. If the people representing a company cannot be found or verified in early search, doubt enters before trust has a chance to form, and the strongest financial model in the world still sits next to a question mark about the humans responsible for executing it.

The response was to reverse the usual order of operations. Instead of treating thought leadership as a separate marketing initiative running alongside the fundraising strategy, we looked at the strategic pipeline first and asked which team members needed to be externally credible for this specific raise, and in which field of expertise that credibility needed to show up. From there, a thought leadership approach was built backward from that requirement, aligning the visible presence of each person with the exact competence an investor would be trying to verify.

That reversal changes what thought leadership is for. It stops being a general brand exercise and becomes part of the due diligence infrastructure itself. When the right expert is visible in the right field, an investor doing background research finds confirmation instead of a void, and the trust that would otherwise need to be built during the meeting has already been partially established before it starts.

There is a broader pattern underneath this specific case. Organizations often separate their communication strategy from their operational strategy, treating one as support material for the other rather than as a structural part of the same system. But when the goal is significant enough, raising capital, closing a partnership, entering a new market, that separation becomes a liability. The people who need to be trusted have to be visible in a way that matches the trust being asked for.

What this pretest made clear went beyond marketing into how the whole system was structured. Sometimes the most useful move is to step back from the immediate task and look at the totality of what is required, then work out which people, which experts, and which visible proof points actually connect to that outcome. The capital raise did not need louder marketing. It needed the right people to already be seen as who they were.

This holds true well beyond fundraising. Any process where trust is assessed from the outside, a partnership, a board appointment, a key hire, runs on the same quiet mechanism. Visibility either confirms what is true internally or leaves a gap for doubt to fill.

Highlights:

00:00 Align Raise and Leadership

00:13 Investor Due Diligence Basics

00:32 Team Credibility Gap

01:08 Activating Team Thought Leaders

01:29 Step Back and Integrate

Links:

https://www.jensheitland.com/links