Listening to Jeff Weiner, the CEO of LinkedIn—as I did yesterday in an online interview from the Tech Crunch Disrupt SF 2013 Show in San Francisco—you hear the familiar notes of today’s publishing business. He calls his LinkedIn audience “members.” “Relevant” and “curation” are two of his favorite words. And he acknowledges how crazy busy everyone is (though insistent that we set aside time to think and strategize).

Yet, content is not king at LinkedIn; the content experience is. Weiner’s goal is to create the “most relevant content experience” for his members. “The objective for us is to be the definitive professional publishing platform,” he said, “to make it as easy as possible for publishers and anyone to share professionally relevant content, and for our membership to be able to tap that business intelligence.”

Obviously, it works for them. In yesterday’s column, I wrote about the value of good storytelling, but also how hard that is. “Most small businesses go wrong because they’re creating content that’s just okay—and okay content doesn’t cut through the clutter,” an expert warned. LinkedIn has found other ways to cut through the clutter.

- Let experts speak for themselves. Weiner talked up their Influencers feature that showcases people like Richard Branson and Jack Welch.

- Curate. Weiner said they have “world-class editors” looking for the most relevant content for you.

- User content. LinkedIn now wants more than your resume. They want experiences, articles you’ve written, ambitions, any photos you’ve taken and “rich media” like keynotes you’ve given. (Video!) It’s your inferred identity, Weiner said that they’re after.

“If we were going to offer original content, I think it would be a very lightweight layer,” Weiner admitted. He ensures that LinkedIn’s editorial does not come at the “exclusion of machine learning and data optimization or social connectivity and viral dynamics. Our job is to package up the most relevant content we can find for our members…We want to be in a position where you can put your best foot forward. And that may happen through partnerships or our own platform.”

I’m not reporting on all this to promote LinkedIn. They certainly don’t need it. It’s more the model they’ve developed. They try to make everything they show us relevant and personal, be it content, our connections, or the groups we want to join. And they’re doing all this by creating “lightweight” content at best. As niche publishers, you have the heavyweight content; now you must strive to make it personal and valuable—and yes, relevant—to each of your subscribers/members.

One last thing. Weiner wrote a blog post a few months ago titled The Importance of Scheduling Nothing. He spoke of the demands that we all have, especially business leaders. “If you’re not carving out enough time to just think, or schedule impromptu meetings or get out from under your inbox, it can really start to compound and get worse,” he said. “So I’ve made it a point to carve out buffers. I gray out portions of my Outlook calendar. It’s really time to do just that, to think and think strategically, where we ultimately want to go. These are things that take time, and you don’t want to have interruptions and constant context switching that limits your time to be effective.”

He said that this has also given him time for coaching—so if someone is experiencing a problem, he can find a coachable moment and share an experience that he’s had. “This can pay huge dividends,” he said.

I believe Weiner would be very much in favor of you taking time to attend one of the in-person events that we have coming up, be it the SIPA Publishers Roundtable on Sept. 30, Data Content in mid-October or the Las Vegas Marketing Conference in December. Just the plane or train ride alone might give you that time away he’s talking about.

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Ronn Levine began his career as a reporter for The Washington Post and has won numerous writing and publications awards since. Most recently, he spent 12 years at the Newspaper Association of America covering a variety of topics before joining SIPA in 2009 as managing editor. Follow Ronn on Twitter at @SIPAOnline