A few years ago, life sciences executives showing up on LinkedIn typically looked like this: a marketing leader or admin would log in as them and share a company post with generic copy.
“Pleased to share this exciting news” doesn’t cut it today. The content needs to be personal and specific. It clearly needs to be from the person posting (readers can spot an AI-written post a mile away).
Leaders typically fall into three camps. Some generally enjoy sharing content but don’t like to write or create. Others are resistant to sharing content altogether. The rare bird not only enjoys posting but also enjoys the writing process. And none of them have the bandwidth to do it consistently.
That’s where a LinkedIn ghostwriter comes in (and a shout-out to anyone else who watched that PBS show diligently as a kid).
I don’t typically use the term “ghostwriter” for myself because I do so many different types of writing. But it’s a big part of what I do these days. Since ramping up our executive thought leadership program, I’ve realized how many leaders don’t know how ghostwriting works.
So in this blog, we’ll get into the challenges of ghostwriting, where AI ghostwriting can help and hinder the process, and how we tackle ghostwriting at Lauren Perna Communications (LPC).
What are the challenges of ghostwriting for executives?
You might be wondering: Is writing for an individual executive that different from writing for a corporate brand? And the answer is an emphatic yes. Ghostwriting for a person is a completely different beast than writing for a company brand.
When you’re writing for a brand, you have built-in parameters, even if you don’t realize it. These parameters act like a checklist of sorts:
Does this writing meet their goals? Writing that’s designed to sell reads quite differently than writing that’s meant to get a company noticed.
Does it align with the format (i.e., is the tone appropriate for a blog or an academic paper)?
Does it match their brand guidelines? Even if the company doesn’t have formal guidelines, you can typically get a sense of how they talk from existing content. If all else fails, you default to standard business writing, and that is usually a good place to start.
On the other hand, ghostwriting for an executive often goes astray. Personal content is much more nuanced, because people are nuanced. It can be very hard to capture someone accurately in a 150-word LinkedIn post. Sometimes it’s hard for executives to even articulate what feels off. It just does.
An individual person generally doesn’t have a brand guideline off the bat (although they should). They aren’t the brand themselves; they act as a conduit to the company brand. That means it can be hard to walk the line between being an ambassador and sharing their own personal thoughts.
Even for those of us who are their brand, there’s a difference between Lauren Elizabeth Perna, the person, and Lauren Perna Communications, the company.
The other challenge is that many executives don’t even know how they want their public voice to sound. They’re so used to the branded, corporate jargon version; finally sharing their own voice is just downright weird. But that sanitized corporate version isn’t unique.
Corporate content could sound like anyone and everyone at the company, which is kind of the point. Executive thought leadership is the counterpart to a corporate brand. It’s one person’s distinct perspective on the topics they know best.
Does AI help or hinder the executive ghostwriting process?
That distinctiveness is why AI-ghostwritten executive copy often feels off. When a post is generic, platitude-ridden slop, it’s easy to tell. It’s missing the personal experience that makes it unique to the poster. And if you don’t give AI any prompts or background, it will generate posts that lack the specificity that is so important to an executive brand.
Capturing an executive’s cadence, tone, and tells is also a challenge with AI. That’s where the human touch makes the difference. Seeing someone’s face and picking up their non-verbal cues is just as important as reviewing their LinkedIn profile ahead of time.
But AI can also help the ghostwriting process. If you give it the right prompts and background information, like our Biology of Thought Leadership worksheet, AI can generate some solid ideas for you. It’s also a good accelerator. You know that moment when you have an idea but can’t quite put it into words? AI can help there. And it makes a pretty good copyeditor, as we all know.
If you do end up creating personal brand guidelines, you can give those to AI along with your draft post and ask it to check the post against them. You can also upload voice notes and ask it to pull tone, voice, and ideas from those musings.
What does good executive ghostwriting look like?
One of the best ways to capture the things that AI cannot is to watch people’s faces and reactions. That gives you a real feel for an executive’s cadence and rhythms. It’s why we always ask for a Zoom call. Zoom is also key because it transcribes the conversation, which lets me go back to their exact words instead of just drawing from my notes.
It’s also why you’ll never find us giving executives our questions ahead of time or asking them to write anything down before the call. We want to capture an executive’s thoughts as they really are, without preparation or editing. That’s the best way to get to a real voice. And it makes for far more honest, vulnerable conversations.
While I did say “questions,” I try not to ask formal ones. Instead, I make it more of a casual conversation, like coffee with a colleague. If I ask structured questions, I’ll get structured answers. Sure, that’s fine if I’m writing a LinkedIn profile, but not if I’m trying to create content.
In the formal, traditional world of the life sciences industry, writing in a conversational, spoken tone can feel wrong. But for a platform like LinkedIn or Substack, it’s more than OK. Those platforms want to connect people and feature thought leaders, and the best way to do that is through real conversation. Even if your natural register is more formal, a LinkedIn post still isn’t an academic paper. There is a time and a place for that, and it's a topic for another day.
How do you know you’ve captured someone’s voice?
“You captured my voice exactly!”
This is the response every ghostwriter wants to hear from their clients. But the truth is, it rarely happens on the first try. It usually takes a few rounds to get it right. But once you do, future content gets a lot easier.
But I encourage folks not to go overboard with editing and tweaking. Yes, we want to get it right, but too many rounds of edits or approvals strip the personality right out of it. We call that the “filter effect.” That’s also why I actually don’t mind an unusual turn of phrase or even a typo. It adds to the honesty, and that’s what it’s all about.
If your executive’s posts keep getting stuck in review, or they’ve stopped posting altogether, book a call with us. We’ll walk you through how a monthly 45-minute conversation turns into LinkedIn posts that sound like your executive.
