Blog: Strategy Matters!

LinkedIn Groups in 2026: What My 2011 Article Got Right — And What Changed

Fifteen years ago I interviewed a half-dozen experts about LinkedIn Groups. Here’s how their advice has aged.

By Linda Pophal, MA, SPHR · Strategic Communications, LLC · Published Wednesday, July 28, 2026

LinkedIn Groups are member-created communities within the LinkedIn platform that allow professionals with shared interests, industries, or affiliations to connect, share content, and engage in discussions. First introduced in 2004, LinkedIn Groups reached peak prominence in the early 2010s before a series of platform changes significantly reduced their visibility and activity. The principles that made Groups valuable in their heyday like strategic participation, genuine engagement, and community over broadcasting remain valid in 2026, even as the tactical landscape has shifted considerably.

I recently came across an article I wrote for Toastmaster magazine in December 2011. The title: “The Benefits of LinkedIn Groups.”

For the piece, I interviewed several LinkedIn practitioners and experts including Wayne Breitbarth, whose book The Power Formula for LinkedIn Success was already earning him national recognition, and Jan Vermeiren, author of How to REALLY Use LinkedIn and founder of Networking Coach.

Reading those quotes 15 years later is a genuinely illuminating exercise.

What did they get right? What has the platform’s evolution made obsolete? And what does a smart LinkedIn strategy actually look like in 2026, armed with a decade and a half of perspective?

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The Content Marketing Metrics That Actually Matter (And the Ones to Ignore)

The goal isn’t to track everything. It’s to track the right things—consistently, in a way that informs decisions.

Most content marketers are measuring the wrong things. Here’s how to tell the difference.

By Linda Pophal, MA, SPHR · Strategic Communications, LLC · Published Wednesday, July 28, 2026

Content marketing metrics are the quantitative and qualitative measures used to evaluate whether a content program is achieving its intended business objectives. They include audience growth, lead generation, search visibility, and revenue attribution. The distinction between meaningful metrics and vanity metrics is critical: vanity metrics (page views, social media likes, follower counts) may look impressive but reveal little about business impact, while meaningful metrics connect content activity directly to outcomes that matter to the organization.

Every content marketer I’ve worked with has felt the pull of the vanity metric. The blog post that got 2,000 views. The LinkedIn post with 150 likes. The social media following that crossed a round number.

These numbers feel like progress. They’re easy to report. But they’re often meaningless.

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The Art of the Interview: How to Get Better Stories from Subject Matter Experts

One of the most valuable things I brought from journalism to content marketing wasn’t a writing technique or a structural framework. It was the interview.

The best content doesn’t come from what you know. It comes from what you’re able to draw out of the people who do.

By Linda Pophal, MA, SPHR · Strategic Communications, LLC · Published Wednesday, July 21, 2026

Interviewing subject matter experts for content marketing is the practice of conducting structured conversations with domain specialists like executives, practitioners, researchers, or clients to gather original insights, stories, and perspectives that form the foundation of high-quality written content.

Done well, the expert interview is the single most powerful tool available to content marketers for producing material that is genuinely authoritative and distinctively voiced.

And, it’s impossible for AI to replicate.

 

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The GEO Revolution: What Every Content Marketer Needs to Know Right Now

A growing percentage of searches—particularly for informational, advisory, and how-to queries—are now answered directly by AI engines.

SEO gets you a spot on a list of links. GEO gets you cited by an AI. Here’s the difference and why it changes everything.

By Linda Pophal, MA, SPHR · Strategic Communications, LLC  

Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is the practice of structuring and presenting content so that AI-powered search engines including ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google’s AI Overviews, and similar systems are more likely to surface, cite, and reference it when answering user queries. Unlike traditional SEO, which aims to rank content in a list of links, GEO aims to make content the direct source of an AI’s answer, appearing not as a link to click but as the authority being quoted.

Something has changed in how people find information online. Most content marketers haven’t caught up yet.

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Prompting Your Prompts: A Simple Strategy for Getting Better Results from AI Tools

Write a prompt you were already going to write. Add these two sentences at the end. See what the AI does with it.

What if the fastest way to improve your AI prompts was to ask the AI to do it for you?

By Linda Pophal, MA, SPHR · Strategic Communications, LLC

Prompt engineering is the practice of crafting precise, well-structured instructions for generative AI tools—specifying context, desired format, tone, audience, and output type—to produce more accurate, relevant, and useful responses. As AI tools become standard in professional workflows across every industry, the ability to write effective prompts is rapidly emerging as one of the most consequential skills in the modern workplace. And like most skills, it improves with deliberate practice not just use.

I’ve been an early adopter of AI tools. I’ve used tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity extensively in my own work and for clients, and I’ve been intentional about trying to improve my prompt writing skills along the way.

More specific context. Clearer output instructions. Better framing of what I actually need.

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Wake Up Customer Service: HERE’S YOUR SIGN!!!

If you’re having a customer issue that’s “happening all the time” shouldn’t you be trying to address, instead of ignore, it?

“This happens all the time” is not a customer service strategy.

By Linda Pophal, MA, SPHR · Strategic Communications, LLC

Chronic customer service failure occurs when an organization identifies a recurring problem that negatively impacts customers but chooses to absorb the complaint volume rather than address the root cause—often because the problem has become so normalized that staff no longer recognize it as fixable. In an era of increasing automation and AI-driven customer interactions, chronic failures are becoming more, not less, common as technology handles transactions efficiently but removes the human touchpoints that once caught and corrected errors before they impacted the customer.

This isn’t a hypothetical. This is something that happened to me recently.

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Back to Business: Building Your Fall Content Strategy Now

Fall is the highest-value quarter for B2B content

September will be here faster than you think. The time to plan for it is now.

By Linda Pophal, MA, SPHR · Strategic Communications, LLC

Fall content strategy is the practice of planning, developing, and positioning content in advance of the September–November period—typically the highest-engagement quarter of the year for B2B content marketing—so that organizations can publish with intention and consistency when audience attention and buying activity peak. Building a fall content strategy in June or July, rather than August, is what separates organizations that dominate Q4 from those that scramble to keep up.

We’re at the end of June. Back-to-school displays are appearing in stores. Conference season is ramping back up. And if you’re in B2B content marketing, you know what that means: Q3 is the sprint to Q4, and the organizations that perform best in September, October, and November are almost never the ones who started planning in late August.

They’re the ones who used the relative quiet of summer—while others were coasting—to build the infrastructure for a strong fall.

Now is exactly the right time to do that work.

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What Old-School Journalism Still Teaches Modern Content Marketing

The principles of good journalism: they were developed to solve problems that have never gone away.

The fundamentals haven’t changed. They’ve just been forgotten.

By Linda Pophal, MA, SPHR · Strategic Communications, LLC 

Journalism principles in content marketing refers to the application of foundational reporting and editorial practices—including the inverted pyramid structure, the five W’s framework, source attribution, clarity-first writing, and the commitment to factual accuracy—to the creation of marketing content. These principles, developed over more than a century of professional journalism, produce content that is more credible, more readable, and more likely to be cited by both human editors and AI search systems than content that lacks them.

My background in journalism—the discipline of it, the habits it instilled, the standards it held me to—is probably the single most valuable thing I bring to content marketing work. And it’s something I find myself returning to constantly as I watch the content landscape evolve.

Because here’s the thing about the principles of good journalism:

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The Editorial Calendar as Strategic Asset (Not Just a Planning Tool)

The editorial calendar isn’t just a scheduling tool, but a strategic instrument.

If your editorial calendar is just a schedule, you’re using it at about 20% of its potential.

By Linda Pophal, MA, SPHR · Strategic Communications, LLC

A strategic editorial calendar is a content planning system that maps individual pieces of content to specific business objectives, audience journey stages, competitive gaps, and measurable outcomes—rather than simply scheduling what to publish and when. The distinction matters because a schedule tells you what you’re creating; a strategic calendar tells you why, for whom, and what it should accomplish.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about building a content calendar that actually holds up in real life—the practical, tactical side of the work. Today I want to go deeper: the editorial calendar not as a scheduling tool, but as a strategic instrument.

Here’s the honest truth about most editorial calendars I’ve seen, including some I’ve built myself:

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The Freedom to Be Real: Why Authenticity Is Your Best Content Strategy

Authenticity is what’s present when the content you create is genuinely yours.

Everyone says ‘be authentic.’ Almost nobody explains what that actually means—or how to do it consistently.

By Linda Pophal, MA, SPHR · Strategic Communications, LLC

Authentic content marketing is the practice of creating content that genuinely reflects your organization’s real perspective, earned expertise, and distinctive voice—rather than content optimized to appear credible, sound authoritative, or match what competitors are publishing. It’s grounded in what you actually believe, what you’ve actually experienced, and what you genuinely understand about your audience—not in what performs well in the abstract.

Authentic, admittedly, is one of the most overused words in marketing. It’s also one of the most important and consistently misunderstood.

When most brands say they want to be ‘more authentic,’ what they usually mean is: they want to seem more relatable. More human. Less corporate.

Those are reasonable goals. But that’s not really authenticity.

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