Archive for August, 2011

BOOZ TAKES OUT TOP THOUGHT LEADERSHIP RANKING

Every year White Space ranks professional services firms in terms of their thought leadership presence.  Fiona Czerniawska, who I interviewed for this blog earlier this year, is one of the global authorities on thought leadership, particularly in the management consultancy space. 

White Space is a subscriber-based web service for anyone interested in thought leadership.  They offer qualitative and quantitative evaluation of more than 18,000 pieces of thought leadership from about 25 leading consulting firms. 

They rate consulting firms’ thought leadership twice a year, in July and in January/February. 

Thought leadership ranking criteria

What I find interesting and what is a valuable lesson for any firm interested in thought leadership, are the criteria Fiona uses to rank thought leadership at these firms.

A single ranking criteria is way too narrow and limiting and as Fiona says:  “It tends to mask the fact that firms tend to be good at different things.”  So instead she has come up with four different quality criteria:   

• Differentiation – the originality or distinctiveness of thought leadership conclusions 
• Resilience – the depth of thinking and/or extent of evident research    
• Appeal – the extent to which clients will perceive the material to be relevant to their specific circumstances
• Appropriate commercialisation – the likelihood the material will encourage the audience to take action.

Good thought leadership campaigns should…

When one dissects these criteria they reflect exactly what a good thought leadership campaign should comprise i.e.

• It should differentiate you from the competition
• It should show deep, empirical research to back up your experience, interpretation and opinion
• It should absolutely be client centric – in fact you should have first researched the client’s issues and challenges now and into the future
• It should singularly aim to achieve something with your clients or prospects e.g. to get in front of the boards of the top 100 listed companies.

The thought leadership rankings

Fiona’s rankings show that the group of firms at the top end has not changed dramatically.  Booz&company is just ahead of what Fiona has labelled “ a resurgent Boston Consulting Group” whose position went from 6 to 2.

The reason for their resurgence?  White Space says that it is not only because of some of their excellent material but also because they managed to weed out or avoid poorer-quality material.

Another firm that moved up the rankings was Accenture which moved from eight to six. 

Besides the names already mentioned, other names that cropped up across the four criteria included:  McKinsey, IBM, Roland Berger, PwC, Right Management, Hay Group, E&Y and KPMG

White Space is a subscriber-based web service for anyone interested in thought leadership.  They offer qualitative and quantitative evaluation of more than 18,000 pieces of thought leadership from about 25 leading consulting firms. 

Please download my free e book top right of this page.  Follow me on twitter @thoughtstrategy and join me on LinkedIn.

What role does content curation play in thought leadership?

I’ve always said no because to be a thought leader necessitates generating original, new content or insights that address a certain markets issues or challenges.  By doing this you display your depth of expertise on a topic or a business sector.

After some good banter on one to two websites about this I have developed two observations on content curation and thought leadership.

Curated content plays a support role to thought leadership

The first is that curated content can play a very important role in supporting and informing a thought leadership content program.  For example, curated content feeds are a great way to keep in touch with trends which can inform your thought leadership topics and in that sense help with the content calendar.

New ideas as a result of curated content  could be thought leadership

The second is that if the person curating the content is able to, through that content, arrive at new ideas or insights which they then deliver to their audience this could be construed as thought leadership.

Regurgitating content doesn’t cut it

Simply regurgitating someone else’s content is not going to cut it.  Repurposing content is not going to cut it and neither will re-packaging it.  Content curation cannot be called thought leadership.  Only when it leads the curator into a totally new hypothesis or insight can it start approaching thought leadership status and at that point it is no longer curated content but rather the curator’s interpretation off the back of the curated content.    

I don’t want to take anything away from content curation.  It is fantastic for a content/editorial calendar and it can be a great support to a thought leadership campaign.  Content curation allows you to monitor trends in your space and help inform better what you are planning in real time.

Some great sites on content curation

If you are interested in reading more on content and content marketing/curation there are some great sites such as www.contentmarketinginstitute.com  www.junta42.com  http://optimalaccess.com/ and www.getcurata.com

Please download my free e book top right of this page.  Follow me on twitter @thoughtstrategy and join me on LinkedIn.