(2025-06-30) Precopio As Seo Falls Apart The Attention Economy Is Coming For You

Joe Procopio: As SEO Falls Apart, the Attention Economy Is Coming For You. There’s a race underway for authentic thought leadership. Here’s what that means for you.

We’re about to learn a lot more about businesses and businesspeople than we ever wanted to.
Because they’re all going to be clamoring for our attention.

businesses and the businesspeople that lead them are figuring out that the last effective way to stand out in a crowd is to seek good old-fashioned attention via every channel and by any means necessary.

The firehose of authentic thought leadership is about to be turned on

*Six months ago, I told you SEO was headed for irrelevancy, and people screamed at me that it was just going to evolve.

Last month, I told you Google hammered the last nail into the SEO coffin and people screamed at me that it was still just evolving.*

LinkedIn figured it out a couple years ago.

One of the signs I saw was over a year ago when LinkedIn launched the beta of their new creator-style membership, and they offered me early access to switch over to a creator profile. Well what the hell? All I do on LinkedIn is post my columns, so I switched over, and it changed… next to nothing.
But the seeds were planted back then, and now they’ve taken root

Did everyone suddenly want to become a famous thought leader? Nah, that’s the worst and stupidest kind of famous.

Reckless speculation: LinkedIn has been seeding attention as both a personal and professional marketing currency for a couple years now, as they continue to evolve into a social network. I’ll do more on this in another column, but my point is it’s all about getting noticed now for what you think, not for what you’ve done.

I called this out in September of 2024, saying when everything is broken, you go back to the basics, and one of the reasons I get hired is I have continually, throughout my career, written about real stuff I’m doing.

I’m gonna go full-old-person here but there are too many automated options for everything, too many services trying to automate validation and recommendations for those options, too many channels that those recommendations and ads automatically flow through, and too many automated salespeople sending too many AI-generated emails and now even phone calls.

Now that we’ve taken the human out of everything, we’re lost. We need humans to hold our hands again and everyone is trying to be that hand-holding human.

But this deluge of authentic humanity isn’t going to last. Because attention doesn’t automatically lead to engagement, no matter how good the automation is at creating and distributing it.

Engagement is good storytelling. Attention is slapping someone across the back of the head.

Authenticity is a full time job, not a setting to tweak. Did we learn nothing from the rise and fall of SEO?

It’s like trying to have an intelligent conversation in a dance club. What you say has to be brief and important, using words that get the meaning across quickly.
No bullshit.