Ahhh, the deafening buzz of “me-too” content. Open LinkedIn, X, or your inbox, and what greets you? A ceaseless chorus of “Five tips,” “Ultimate guides,” “State-of-the-industry” PDFs—each one a karaoke rendition of last week’s greatest hit. Instead of producing original research content marketing, everyone’s covering someone else’s song, praying the algorithm tosses them a pity like. 🤔
Yet every so often a solitary voice slices through the static. Why? Because it isn’t repeating. It’s creating. In an era where the volume knob is permanently welded to MAX, the only way to be heard is to broadcast something the world has never tuned in to before—brand-new knowledge.
That premise isn’t theory; it’s autobiography. Over the last fifteen years I’ve watched original research and experiments carve out more pipeline for my agency than any “thought-leadership” hot-take ever could.
MyMardiGras.com: Turning beads into business
Rewind the clock to 2010. Social media was still a teenager, and most brands viewed Twitter as a novelty. But one day, while sitting in my car, wolfing down a Whopper with Cheese, I looked at all the Mardi Gras set up happening around me and wondered: could we use that to rebrand Mardi Gras from"girls gone wild" to “family-friendly fun ”?
So I recruited a small team to build MyMardiGras.com and live-tweeted, blogged, and streamed the carnival season. We mapped parade routes, streamed live video and pictures in real time, and answered questions from families planning a trip. No one else was doing it, so traditional media picked it up. Marketing blogs, morning shows, Ad Age, and the cherry on top: NPR did a 4-minute story on Fat Tuesday!
That single experiment birthed Converse Digital. Tourism boards, hotel groups, and marketing conferences called because we owned knowledge they craved: how to engineer brand perception change through social engagement at scale. For years, leads referenced that project. They saw the case study and knew they had to talk to us.
Lesson #1: Create the data the market doesn’t have; the market will chase you to get it.
The LinkedIn Engagement Paradox
Fast-forward to late 2024. Feeds are louder, audiences crankier, and conventional wisdom insists agencies must post helpful, “educational” content to win engagement. I wasn’t convinced. So I mined 6,547 LinkedIn posts authored by agency owners to see what actually moved the needle.
Spoiler: the consensus advice was wrong. Engagement wasn’t driven by how-to generosity or over-polished "thought leadership". The top-performing posts varied wildly in subject, but they all shared one single attribute.
What Really Drives Engagement? Register for my next LinkedIn Engagement Paradox briefing to find out.
I packaged the findings into an interactive Zoom session. Word spread, and seats filled. Attendees told colleagues, who told friends, and suddenly, conference planners and podcast hosts were pinging my inbox.
Dozens of new conversations have already blossomed, with a handful inching toward signed SOWs. All because I asked a contrarian question, gathered fresh evidence, and refused to spill every bean in a single blog post.
Lesson #2: Surface data that challenges dogma, tease just enough to spark curiosity, and prospects will move mountains to hear the rest.
Want to Join Me?
Register for an upcoming LinkedIn Engagement Paradox Briefing. We analyzed 6,547 posts to discover the secrets of creating engaging posts on LinkedIn.
All times are CENTRAL TIME zone.
Bootstrapping AI—No Code, No Problem
By mid-2025, AI hype threatened to out-scream even the loudest content marketers. Every techno-blogger warns that “AI is coming for your job,” especially in advertising. But I had a different itch to scratch:
Could a non-coder with limited free time harness AI to automate the drudgery of agency life—prospecting, data crunching, research—without hiring a dev team?
I rolled up my sleeves, opened Make.com, drafted ChatGPT as my on-call coding coach, and binge-watched more YouTube tutorials than I care to admit. Nights and weekends later, three “good-enough” workflows were humming:
- Post Miner – Scrapes thousands of LinkedIn posts from any user list, tags each by content type, and pipes the data into a spreadsheet. (It powered the Engagement Paradox dataset.)
- Engagement Harvester – Builds a real-time prospect list of every person who likes or comments on a specific creator’s entire post history—or, if I choose, a single high-engagement thread.
- Podcast Prospector – Searches Spotify for shows inside a target vertical, analyzes guest fit and audience overlap, and spits out a tidy report while I’m off having lunch—or a cocktail.
None of this required knowing how to write a line of raw code. It demanded curiosity, coffee, and a willingness to debug at 1 a.m.—but not a CS degree.
I shared the concept—screenshots, not schematics—on LinkedIn, on my blog, and in a short talk at a local networking breakfast. Before I was back in the parking lot, two businesses had already messaged me.
"We want to explore how we can implement the kinds of tools you talked about to improve our own content marketing and sales prospecting efforts."
Those meetings are on the calendar; one is already stalking the contract stage.
Lesson #3: Original experiments—even cobbled-together ones—prove feasibility, inspire imagination, and signal that you’re a practitioner, not a pundit.
Why “rehash & remix” has a half-life of zero
Scroll back and see if you can find the common DNA in these stories:
- Original question. “What if…?”
- Original method. Experiment first, write second.
- Original evidence. Screenshots, spreadsheets, or survey deltas no one else can fake.
- Strategic transparency. Show the sausage-making while holding back the secret spice until the briefing or the pitch.
Contrast that with “Top 10 Trends for Q3.” Google indexed two million versions of that before you hit publish. The algorithm yawns. Prospects yawn harder. You end up preaching to competitors, not customers.
Ask yourself: If your latest whitepaper vanished tomorrow, would the internet notice? Would your dream client notice? If the honest answer is “probably not,” you’re remixing, not researching.
The compounding flywheel of knowledge creation
Original knowledge does more than open doors; it powers an ever-accelerating flywheel:
- Attention – Novel ideas pierce feeds like a flare
- Authority – Data proves you deliver, not just discuss
- Advocacy – Readers cite your work, seeding backlinks and word-of-mouth
- Advances – Each project uncovers a new question, setting up the next cycle
“We don’t have time for research” (Yes, you do)
You’re already spending hours writing LinkedIn posts, designing e-books, and hosting webinars. Redirect 30 percent of that energy into one experiment:
- Interview fifty prospects about a pain point
- A/B-test ten paid-search accounts and publish the anomaly you find
- Build a no-code dashboard that visualizes an overlooked KPI
Document your journey; a single experiment morphs into a season of storytelling fuel.
The whiteboard hypothesis becomes a “why we’re doing this” teaser post; each late-night bug hunt is a humanizing LinkedIn carousel; mid-course pivots turn into teachable-moment threads; and the final case study crowns the series with proof that you deliver.
One act of creation blossoms into podcasts, slide decks, email drips, and conference pitches—enough material to feed your editorial calendar for a quarter or more while simultaneously broadcasting the three signals prospects crave most: transparency, tenacity, and undeniable authority.
It Doesn't Just Happen in a Field of Dreams
Remember the whisper in Kevin Costner’s cornfield? “If you build it, he will come.” In 2025’s attention economy, I'd state it slightly differently.
If you build NEW knowledge, they WILL call.
They are the clients who write seven-figure checks, the conference planners hungry for next year’s marquee talk, the partners who can 10× your reach.
They scroll past recycled “insights” all day; what stops their thumb is a sliver of discovery that hints at more behind the curtain. Deliver that spark, and the phone rings because genuine breakthroughs don’t need an ad budget. They carry their own gravity, pulling opportunity straight to your door.
Your Mission: Should You Choose to Accept It
Block one day this month to frame a question no one in your niche is asking—and define a plan to answer it with research, code, or creative audacity.
Then do it! Tag me when you ship it. And if it's good, I’ll gladly amplify your signal.
Because the world doesn’t need more content. It needs more questions with answers. And the agencies bold enough to supply them will own the conversation—and the pipeline—for years to come.
Need help building something worth calling about? The line is open.
Before you go, if you're a first-time reader and liked this piece, why not consider subscribing so we can stay in touch? Of course, you can break up at any time if you don't like what we send 
. Till next time.
This post was originally published on Painless Prospecting, the weekly sales and marketing blog created by the fine folks at Converse Digital. If you want to learn how to create, engage in, and convert conversations into new clients and customers, give them a call.
