Sound like yourself. Get heard where it matters. Frictionless is a twice-monthly newsletter for leaders who get judged by what they write: founders, executives, and anyone whose words get read by boards, investors, reporters, and prospects. Each issue gives you practical ways to clear the Brand Garbage from your writing so you sound like yourself and get heard in the rooms that decide careers, deals, and reputations. I'm an executive ghostwriter and award-winning business journalist who spent decades in boardrooms and newsrooms helping leaders say what they mean. You'll get templates and scripts you can use today, stories I usually save for private clients, and a few curated reads worth your time.
132,334 people saw it. Seventeen followed me.
STARTING LINELinkedIn told me that a quick "newsjacking" post about amusement park ticket prices had reached more people than anything I have written in 40 years. Then I scrolled down and found out what it was worth. On the day Dolly Parton died, Hersheypark replied to a stranger's post praising Dollywood for keeping ticket prices low. The reply was about Hersheypark's own pricing. Wrong conversation, wrong afternoon, and the internet noticed within an hour. This is not rare. Neutrogena did something similar the day Hayden Panettiere died. Somebody sees a mention, answers the question in front of them, and never looks three posts up. What I wrote was nothing fancy, just a short post about what a process should have caught. Here is what the platform gave it. 132,334 impressions. 87,324 different people reached. 99% of them were outside my network. Here is what I got back. 17 followers gained. 54 profile views. 8 saves. 3 comments. 0 reposts. Eighty-seven thousand people. Seventeen followers. That is 0.0002 percent. Sigh. LinkedIn also tells you the crowd's demographics, and that is the part that should have stung faster than it did. Top industry: Advertising Services, 7 percent. Top seniority: Senior, 28 percent. Founders: 2 percent. I sell brand positioning and executive ghostwriting to B2B and B2C founders and financial services executives. What arrived instead was people watching a dumpster fire. Colleagues and bystanders, not prospective clients. This is the Mirror Test, and I failed it. My pre-publish checklist includes a question: Buyers or bystanders? If bystanders, cut. I have been advising clients for two years and didn't ask it of myself, because a news story was doing the asking for me. So I sorted my last 90 days by reach. Hersheypark and Dolly Parton: 132,334 impressions, 54 reactions, 3 comments. Retirees going back to work: 6,373 impressions, 10 reactions, 0 comments. Why I changed who I work with: 901 impressions, 13 reactions, 1 comment. A friend named to a board list: 740 impressions, 19 reactions, 4 comments. Why LinkedIn buries generic writing: 528 impressions. A plug for my own email course: 106 impressions, 15 reactions, 3 comments. Read it from the bottom up. The course post reached 106 people, and 18 of them did something. That is 17 percent, but sadly none of them signed up. The Hersheypark post reached 87,324 people, and 57 of them did something about it. That is almost (and only) 0.0007 percent. Engagement ran exactly backward to reach. Every step of the ladder. The best thing I wrote in that stretch reached 528 people. It was about a founder who told me in our first interview that he loved profanity. Nobody would believe I wrote it if you left it out, he said. Then the drafts went over, he got cold feet, and he asked me to pour vanilla over all of it. What he wanted instead was "I work best when I have ownership over my decisions." Clean, true, and interchangeable with forty thousand other sentences. The numbers on his posts came in soft. I still wonder whether I argued hard enough. Five hundred and twenty-eight people saw that one. Not eighty-seven thousand. But the right five hundred and twenty-eight. Impressions are weather. A big number means a news cycle blew through your feed. It says nothing about whether you wrote something worth a stranger's Tuesday. Reach counts how many people the platform handed you. Relevance counts how many of them were yours to begin with. The algorithm doesn't read my strategy doc. It reads what I feed it. Feed it somebody else's disaster and it will find you an audience that came for the disaster. The only figure on that dashboard I still care about is the eight saves. A save is somebody deciding they will need this again. That is a different decision from a scroll-pause, and it is the closest thing on LinkedIn to a stranger putting your card in their wallet. Try this: Open your last 10 posts and find the one with the worst reach and the best engagement rate. That post found your buyers. Write 10 more of those, and let the weather do whatever the weather does. If you would rather have an outside ear on what your own numbers are telling you before you rebuild a content plan around them, my inbox is open. THREE GREAT POSTS1. Making great content is hard but not complicated, says Will McTighe 2. Torn on whether a LinkedIn newsletter is useful or a waste of time? Here's a case study on how one creator gets about 100 new subscribers per send. 3. AI is evolving. April Dunford asks: How do we know when our positioning needs to change? HOW CAN I HELP?Client renewals don't happen in the final 30 days. They're built month by month, conversation by conversation. My Build Strong Partner Relationships workbook helps you step back, evaluate the relationship honestly, and plan how to strengthen it before renewal season arrives. I've worked with many senior-executive clients over the years on their preparations; I can help you too. I welcome your comments or suggestions for future issues. Drop me a note here. If you found this on LinkedIn or had it forwarded to you, you can subscribe by clicking the button below.
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Peter Osborne
Sound like yourself. Get heard where it matters. Frictionless is a twice-monthly newsletter for leaders who get judged by what they write: founders, executives, and anyone whose words get read by boards, investors, reporters, and prospects. Each issue gives you practical ways to clear the Brand Garbage from your writing so you sound like yourself and get heard in the rooms that decide careers, deals, and reputations. I'm an executive ghostwriter and award-winning business journalist who spent decades in boardrooms and newsrooms helping leaders say what they mean. You'll get templates and scripts you can use today, stories I usually save for private clients, and a few curated reads worth your time.
STARTING LINE One of our credit letters opened with “Dear Valued Customer.” The news in the second paragraph was that we were cutting her credit line. Nobody at MBNA wrote that letter to be cruel. Somebody wrote it years earlier, ran it past Legal, dropped it into the system, and moved on. Then the company built a brand promise on top of it and never revisited it. One of our “computer-generated” letters ended up in front of our CEO after one of his close friends called to complain. It’s an...
THE LINE THAT MOVED MY STORY TO PAGE 1 March 2022. I was a business reporter at the local daily, and the head of HR at DuPont handed me a front-page story in one sentence. We were talking about an upcoming downsizing. He was calm and matter-of-fact, walking me through the business logic the way you would with a trade reporter who covers this company every day. Then he said it: “DuPont can no longer afford to be paternalistic.” I had my lead. What was shaping up as a business page item ran the...
A note about where this newsletter is headed, and a clean way out if it's not for you. Frictionless started as a grab bag. Leadership, writing, a few personal essays, some links. Whatever I was chewing on at the time. From here, it gets sharper. The new focus: Brand Garbage, and how to clear it. Most founders and executives write board letters, investor updates, and LinkedIn posts that sound like everybody else's. The words are fine. Nothing is technically wrong. But nothing differentiates...