Excellent review of #Thought Leadership Tweet by Craig Pearce

Craig Pearce is a well known PR blogger in Australia and anyone who hasn’t read his PR blog should.  Its full of interesting and informative views on a broad range of PR topics.  He has penned this review on his blog of #Thought Leadership Tweet 140 Prompts for Designing and Executing an Effective Thought Leadership program. 

Thought leadership is a strategic approach to business communication which helps organisations positively position and differentiate themselves, in the process creating and enhancing relationships with key stakeholders. It contributes to excellent organisational reputation and the achieving of organisational objectives, including selling products and services.

It is one of the first approaches public relations professionals should consider as part of their communication arsenal. And as anyone who is inquisitive about public relations and/or is committed to continual professional development will tell you, the musings of experienced corporate communicator Craig Badings on his Thought Leadership blog are required and compelling reading.

Craig and Dr Liz Alexander have just published a fascinating, thought provoking and eminently practical e-book entitled 140 Prompts for Designing and Executing an Effective Thought Leadership Campaign, which as the title implies contains a series of tweetable insights into the practice of thought leadership.

The e-book also provides additional perspective and context to assist in applying thought leadership as well as referencing a range of resources to help kick your brain into gear, increase the potency of your thinking on the discipline and help achieve the best results possible.

Such is the depth of information in this e-book, a single post discussing it will not do it justice, but some of the many aspects I found interesting are highlighted below.

The culture of thought leadership

Like CSR, thought leadership needs to be built-in, not bolt-on. As thought leadership is about providing perspectives and insights different (i.e. leading the way) to competitors, it makes sense for content/platforms to reflect the innovation and point of difference an organisation offers.

It will be difficult for organisations that do not behave in an innovative manner to think outside the square, or to at the very least seek to expand the boundaries of the square, which is essentially what thought leadership entails.

Conversely, the tail wagging the dog is a well-known means of instigating change! If it takes a communication program to help galvanise an organisation into behaving differently, perhaps by seeing the impact a thought leadership campaign or approach can have, then why not!

Too often organisations (and public relations practitioners for that matter) rely on a crisis to help change organisational culture and behaviour. Why rely on bad news or bad things happening to motivate organisational evolution?

As Craig and Liz point out, thought leadership takes bravery to instigate as it sometimes means sticking your neck out, challenging orthodoxies. In pure business action, Henry Ford did it; Richard Branson did and does it; Dick Smith did and does it – and look at them.

Preparation and thinking for thought leadership

Craig and Liz hit on one of the biggest bugbears of the practice of public relations when they point out allowing time to think (and by extension, prepare) is a critically important element of thought leadership. Too often communication programs are undertaken without sufficient thought being put into them.

Whether it is the fault of the organisation/client or the PR practitioner, this is a risk-laden approach. And especially so with thought leadership.

Here are some steps to thought leadership that take time to get right:

• Understanding what thought leadership positions       competitors inhabit
• Determining what the most productive thought leadership       platforms are your organisation can inhabit
• Identifying thought leadership business objectives and       putting in place mechanisms to measure the impact of the campaign
• Deciding – is this a campaign (e.g. does it have a       limited lifespan) or is this a way of life (e.g. is the thought       leadership program so embedded into, and driven by, organisational       culture its intent is to continue and evolve on an ongoing basis?).

Listening in thought leadership public relations

It’s interesting the term ‘public relations’ doesn’t appear in the e-book narrative itself. Yet thought leadership is clearly a PR 101 strategic approach.

Why are Craig and Liz shy about flagging this? I bet it’s so as not to marginalise thought leadership in a perceived PR ‘ghetto’. This is somewhat of a shame as it’s reflective of a malaise within PR not to shout out the business relevance and potency of the discipline, but such is life.

Certainly, I can’t see how any other business discipline can lay claim to managing the approach effectively. Not marketing, that’s for sure.

One reason why PR is the only business discipline to practice thought leadership is because, as Craig and Liz imply, listening is an important aspect of not just thought leadership, but any communication strategy. This is to help understand the needs, wants and issues of stakeholders, then to help identify opportunities and threats relevant to stakeholder relationship enhancing.

(Or I guess we could call it stakeholder relations, which as I’ve written previously is simply a self-hating term for PR that we as practitioners have Harry Pottered up out of our shame in working in PR…or so it seems.)

One manifestation of listening is undertaking market research, and whilst there are inexpensive means of undertaking market research, other approaches include media and internet scanning, conversations with key stakeholders (including influencers over target audiences) and undertaking internal reviews with employees to gather intelligence from them as to what turns organisational stakeholders on…and off.

The fear of thought leadership

A fair criticism of thought leadership is it gives up organisational intellectual property other organisations can leverage to position themselves favourably. The IP can also give potential clients a resource for free that otherwise they would have paid for.

These comments are both true, so thought must clearly be given to the specific thought leadership platforms and what aspects of the platforms organisations will give up information on.

It is vital to remember that in an internet age it is increasingly expected organisations will give up information for free (an inbound marketing approach). This is partially because it has been proven the viral impact of sharing useful information positively impacts on organisational reputation and business results.

These results are equally relevant to the B2C and B2B environments, as well as a third paradigm I like to call B2Community.  This third paradigm is relevant in communicating with target audiences who are not necessarily going to buy a product or service. Examples are ratepayers in a local government area, or residents near large parklands or close to schools.

I have merely dipped a toe into the water of 140 Prompts for Designing and Executing an Effective Thought Leadership Campaign and plan on returning to it in the future. What did you think about aspects of thought leadership and its salient issues discussed in this post? Can you give examples of effective and failed thought leadership programs? Do you have any insights and recommendations to share?

#Thought Leadership Tweet – What will be your unique point of view?

Thought leadership is about two key things: First, making sure your platform is client centric and goes to the heart of their issues or challenges and second, delivering new insights that anticipate, solve or lessen the effects of these challenges.
If you are able to achieve this you will be sought after by your clients and prospects.

Tweet #80 in the book #Thought Leadership Tweet sums this up: “What keeps your clients or prospects awake at night? Why? How can you use this to inform your thought leadership point of view?”

Critically to identify you unique point of view you need to be asking a lot of the right sort of questions. As tweet #85 says: “Thought leaders ask “why?” a lot more than what?” or “how?” Are you asking the questions from the start?”

First do the research

From experience, you should do your homework before embarking on your thought leadership journey. First identify what you are really good at, what great intellectual property do you have. Second does this or can this be adapted to answer/address your clients or your prospects issues/challenges.

Next identify whether anyone else already occupies this space. If so you may be two steps behind already. Thought leaders are always two steps ahead. Then research your market to gain an in depth understanding of their issues and possible solutions.

Thought leaders don’t play it safe

Look at some of the great thought leadership material out there: BMW’s Activate the Future, IBM’s Smarter Planet, McKinsey’s focus on the art and science of Management. It’s all new and ground-breaking stuff.

Being faint-hearted is not for thought leaders.

#Thought Leadership Tweet 140 Prompts for Designing and Executing an Effective Thought Leadership Campaign covers the seven essential elements of a thought leadership campaign. I have covered off some of these in previous posts.

Already covered in this series:

1. Your guide to winning the content war and what is thought leadership? Covered in past post.
2. What does it take to become a thought leader? Covered in past post.
3. What impact do you want to achieve? Covered in past post.
4. How will you know you’ve succeeded? Covered in past post.
5. What space has already been claimed? Covered in past post.
6. What will be your unique point of view? Covered in this post.

Still to come:

7. What’s your communication strategy? Still to come…

Craig Badings is a director at Sydney-based, Cannings Corporate Communications. He has consulted to companies small and large, listed and unlisted across Australia and South Africa about their communication strategies, corporate reputation and thought leadership. He is the co-author of #THOUGHT LEADERSHIP Tweet: 140 Prompts for Designing and Executing an Effective Thought Leadership Campaign. He published his first book in 2009: “Brand Stand: seven steps to thought leadership”

Join him on twitter @thoughtstrategy and on LinkedIn.

#Thought Leadership Tweet – what space has already been claimed?

Thought leadership is not merely an opinion, opinions are everywhere and everybody has one, instead, thought leadership should be based on evidence/data/research.  I cannot stress enough how important research is for a thought leadership campaign to succeed.  And critically it should be across a number of areas.

First research the space you want to own, who else is covering this and are they doing it well – you don’t want to compete in an already overcrowded space unless you have something really different or a unique angle to share.  Then most importantly research the key issues affecting your clients’/consumer’s lives – Tweet #67 in the book asks: “What key trends are impacting your clients? Can these inform your thought leadership or is someone else already providing insights on these?”

The tweet prompts under this section in the book will help you in your discussions on where your focus should lie.  For example would you take on Dove on real beauty or IBM on a smarter planet?  Probably not as you would face an up-hill battle.

Thought leadership and content curation

The chapter also covers off our views of content curation and where it fits in the thought leadership mix.  If you are curating other peoples content and you want to use it to help drive a thought leadership position, you’d better be sure that you are adding something new or something of value to your clients if that is the case.  After all since when was merely collating other people’s content thought leadership?!

Our view is that content curation does two things:  It adds value to a conversation about a topic by assimilating a range of information on that topic, and; it can help you discover, inform and articulate your thought leadership point of view.

#Thought Leadership Tweet 140 Prompts for Designing and Executing an Effective Thought Leadership Campaign covers the seven essential elements of a thought leadership campaign. I have covered off on some of these in previous posts and in the new year I will conclude with the final two.

Already covered in this series:

1. Your guide to winning the content war and what is thought leadership? Covered in past post.
2. What does it take to become a thought leader? Covered in past post.
3. What impact do you want to achieve? Covered in past post.
4. How will you know you’ve succeeded? Covered in past post.
5. What space has already been claimed? Covered in this post.

Still to come:

1. What will be your unique point of view? Still to come…
2. What’s your communication strategy? Still to come…

Craig Badings is a director at Sydney-based, Cannings Corporate Communications.  He has consulted to companies small and large, listed and unlisted across Australia and South Africa about their communication strategies, corporate reputation and thought leadership.  He is the co-author of  #THOUGHT LEADERSHIP Tweet: 140 Prompts for Designing and Executing an Effective Thought Leadership Campaign.  He published his first book in 2009: “Brand Stand: seven steps to thought leadership”

Join him on twitter @thoughtstrategy and on LinkedIn.

#Thought Leadership Tweet – how will you know you’ve succeeded?

One of the classic errors of a thought leadership campaign is a) not having campaign objectives clearly defined up front and b) not continually measuring and making informed adjustments to your campaign along the way.

The tweet prompts under this section in the book help you in your discussions around how best measure, evaluate and recalibrate your campaign.

The following tweets will give you an example:

Tweet number 54: “How do you plan to measure the internal (not just external) effects of your thought leadership campaign?”

Tweet number 56: “Have you created and communicated a detailed briefing document for all the parties involved, outlining expectations and deliverables?”

Finally be wary of measuring only the normal stuff like media coverage, speaking engagements and the like.  What you want to be measuring is the impact your campaign is having in steering clients and customers towards territory that will have major benefits for them and for you.

#Thought Leadership Tweet covers the seven essential elements of a thought leadership campaign.  I have covered off on some of these in previous posts but over the course of the next few weeks I will be adding to these in more detail.

1. Your guide to winning the content war and what is thought leadership? Covered in past post.
2. What does it take to become a thought leader? Covered in past post.
3. What impact do you want to achieve? Covered in past post.
4. How will you know you’ve succeeded? Covered in this post.
5. What space has already been claimed? Still to come…
6. What will be your unique point of view? Still to come…
7. What’s your communication strategy? Still to come…

Look out in the next few days for the next blog piece in this series covering #Thought Leadership Tweet which will touch on how to identify what space has been claimed.

Craig Badings is a director at Sydney-based, Cannings Corporate Communications.  He has consulted to companies small and large, listed and unlisted across Australia and South Africa about their communication strategies, corporate reputation and thought leadership.  He is the co-author of  #THOUGHT LEADERSHIP Tweet: 140 Prompts for Designing and Executing an Effective Thought Leadership Campaign.  He published his first book in 2009: “Brand Stand: seven steps to thought leadership”

Join him on twitter @thoughtstrategy and on LinkedIn.

Three challenges of leveraging your thought leadership internally

Please check out my guest post on this subject at Firebrand’s blog.

While your own people are your best thought leadership ambassadors, there are three challenges a company faces when driving the best possible outcomes for its thought leadership internally.  Briefly they are:

1. Thought leadership engagement
2. Thought leadership connectivity, and
3. Thought leadership packaging

Read in more detail here.

I’m a director at Sydney-based, Cannings Corporate Communications. Check out my forthcoming co-authored  book #THOUGHT LEADERSHIP Tweet: 140 Prompts for Designing and Executing an Effective Thought Leadership Campaign.

Or read my current book: Brand Stand: seven steps to thought leadership, follow me on twitter @thoughtstrategy or join me on LinkedIn.

Thought leadership’s powerful impact on your employees

Thought leadership can have a massive impact on your employees

Anyone who thinks that thought leadership is purely an external function aimed at influencing clients and new business prospects, is seriously limiting its potential.

Used properly, it is a very powerful tool for motivating and inspiring employees.  It can play a big role in your retention strategy and act as a great talent magnet.  These days talent scans the sector for the innovators and lead thinkers in the industry – they want to work at these organisations because the perception is this is where the action happens and where the leaders in their industry congregate.

I often advocate  that thought leadership is not and should not purely be seen as a marketing or PR tactic – rather it should be part of the culture of an organisation the same way that sales, training or innovation are part of the culture of some organisations.

The really deep-seated, effective thought leadership is often closely aligned with the values of an organisation and typically has the
buy-in and ownership of senior management.  As such is it part of the culture of the organisation and has the buy-in and ownership of management.  This permeates the rest of the company.

The positive effects of thought leadership on the employees

The organisations that strategically take their employees on the thought leadership journey will find not only do they become its best campaign ambassadors but it also has a number of positive knock-on effects:

• It gives employees something to talk about over and above the products or services you sell empowering them to have
  conversations externally they previously wouldn’t have
• It delivers a deep sense of pride about where they work, what they do and the difference the organisation makes to its client’s lives
• It instils a passion about the organisation
• It makes them feel part of a now, happening brand – an industry trendsetter
• The positivity it generates rubs off on their enjoyment of being at work and the way they talk about their company to friends, family and prospects
• Through a process of osmosis, thought leadership campaigns that run over a period of years e.g. Booz & Co (innovation), results in the employees becoming well versed on the topic.  Using the Booz & Co exampale, after years exposure to research and lead thinking on innovation they are able to have discussions with clients on innovation that no other firm can
• It imbues a culture of thinking and innovation across the organisation
• It increases morale.

Not only does the business benefit externally but internally it entrenches thought leadership as a way of doing business.  This fosters the emergence of other thought leaders thus creating a virtuous circle.

I’m a director at Sydney-based, Cannings Corporate Communications. Please check out my book: Brand Stand: seven
steps to thought leadership,  follow me on twitter @thoughtstrategy or join me on LinkedIn.

Booz & Co share their thought leadership insights

Barry Jaruzelski from Booz & Co shares his insights on their thought leadership program

The Economist called the Global Innovation 1000 “the most comprehensive assessment of the relationship between R&D investment and corporate performance,” and
Tom Peters praised it as a “provocative, research-based article that is
sure to get you thinking.”

I have long been an admirer of Booz&Co’s thought leadership work around their Innovation 1000 project.  For two years they were voted as generating the best thought leadership across all professional services firms according to Source for Consulting.

So I took the liberty of approaching Barry Jaruzelski who heads up the program to ask him a few questions about it.  This is what he had to say:

1. First off could you give a brief overview of Booz & Company’s Innovation thought leadership campaign?

Every year since 2005, Booz & Company has conducted the Global Innovation 1000 study, which investigates the relationship between how much companies invest in R&D and their overall financial performance — and every year, we reinforce the core conclusion that there is no statistically significant correlation between the two.

The study examines the R&D spending of the 1,000 largest public companies and also explores a particular “deep dive” topic on innovation.  The Innovation 1000 study serves as an umbrella for a range of other viewpoints, articles, and conference and
university speaking engagements on innovation.

We release the results in October of each year to the public via a press release, targeted media outreach and distribution to our client community.   In addition, at launch we conduct a series of webinars for our firm’s alumni, study participants, and clients.

2. Please explain the business rationale behind Booz & Company’s focus on a thought leadership platform
and why Innovation was chosen as a topic?

As a firm, we have had a 60 plus year commitment to consulting on innovation, starting with a seminal article in 1950 in the Harvard Business Review which defined the concept of the Product Life Cycle for the first time.  We conduct a wide variety of engagements and research on product development process improvement, R&D strategy, engineering effectiveness, and innovation organization for a broad range of clients.

Innovation is one of the eight core functional client service areas that we offer across our full range of industry groups.  The Innovation 1000 study is a conversation starter with senior executives and serves as an umbrella for a wide range of intellectual capital on various aspects of innovation.

This study is important because it both builds our profile and builds our knowledge bank.

3. What business objectives did you/do you put in place, how do you measure them and how is your thought leadership campaign delivering on these?

In broad terms, we expect this study to achieve the following objectives:

1)  Place Booz & Company in top tier business media worldwide  as a leader in innovation thinking and research.  In order to
evaluate our campaign we track media coverage , social media mentions, traffic to booz.com and strategy-business.com .
The study is cited each year in nearly 200 publications around the globe, spanning 27 countries.

2)  Provide an effective vehicle to interest and engage clients and prospective clients. This is more difficult to track and measure, but we try to track the interest, leads and sales we generate that are directly and/or indirectly related to Innovation 1000.

3)  Help secure  speaking engagements –  We track this in comparison to targets and the number of speaking engagements in prior years.

4. How do you ensure audience relevance in what you are publishing / researching?

Each year, we begin with a set of “candidate” subject focus areas which are discussed among a diverse set of partners and principals from various practice groups. The subject areas are debated for macro relevance, interest among clients and
overall feasibility.  Every year we also discuss potential topics with clients and invite them to participate in the research via interviews on the “deep dive” topic.

5. What’s the biggest change you’ve seen in your thought leadership over the past few years?

We now spend much more time translating each piece of thought leadership into multiple formats to reach a wider variety of audiences more effectively.  This includes translating our ideas into multi-media, social media and media-friendly formats.

There is such a barrage of information that our clients and audiences face that we have to work harder to stand out, attract attention and ensure our “big ideas” get heard. As well, while we still generate an incredibly extensive amount of IC, we are even more strategic about our focus areas and resource allocation. What hasn’t changed is our focus on thought leadership as a critical area of differentiation for our firm. The company White Space actually tracks the intellectual capital efforts of the consulting
industry and it has has rated Booz & Company #1 in Thought Leadership for the past two consecutive years. This is an honor we are extremely proud to achieve.

6. What have been some of the spinoffs of your focus on innovation?  These could be internal (within Booz & Company) or external.

We have received invitations to write bylined or guest articles in other publications and to join advisory boards of clients and innovation-related associations (e.g. PDMA)

7. Given your experience, what are some of the tips you can share in terms of arriving at and getting a thought
leadership program off the ground?

Build a smart and strong team that is consistently committed to “putting in the work” over a number of years to build name recognition and profile.

Ensure that certain elements of your program are repeatable so you can scale and build success that you can recreate annually.  And perhaps most importantly, do not over reach and create a program that collapses under its own weight after just one year
because it is too ambitious and demanding to sustain.

Take the long view and build something that is sustainable and focused on quality.

8. What have been the top three outcomes of Booz & Company’s thought leadership campaign?

1)  Top Tier media coverage globally, client interest and engagements

2)  Building a strong brand as a firm with proven expertise in innovation (from ideation to process to execution and everything in between)

3) Being ranked as one of the top firms in innovation consulting

Thought leadership = emotional connections on steroids

Thought leadership creates an emotional connection

This is typically the first question I receive when speaking to companies about their thought leadership program.  While I can talk passionately about this and rattle off numerous benefits, there is one sentence I read the other day which I think absolutely captures it.  It is from well-known blogger Gary Vaynerchuk , who said:  “You will not catch up with money, because the people who have the emotional relationship will stay ahead.”

In this one sentence, Gary sums up the very essence of why thought leadership or valuable content is so important to a company’s marketing efforts.

It’s about the emotional connection!

How powerful is that – we all know what happens when we have an emotionally rewarding experience with a brand.  Not only do we consciously say to ourselves: “These guys really get me/make me feel special…”  but we tell other people about our experience – we become brand ambassadors.

Thought leadership is the extra mile

We hear ad nauseum about going the extra mile for the client, adding that magical quality ‘value’, and the need to differentiate ourselves.  Well I’ve got news for you – the right thought leadership content aimed at the right audience and preferably information that addresses that audiences’ major business issues and challenges delivers all three in spades.

What better way to engage with your clients, imbue loyalty and position yourself and your company as the ‘go to’ expert in your field.  

I have a list of 70+ thought leadership benefits in an earlier post but the stand out return is the emotional connection it creates. 

It’s amazing how much easier the sale is once an emotional connection has been established.    

The internal power of thought leadership

Thought leadership delivers huge internal organisational benefits

In fact, used properly, it can also be a very powerful vehicle to motivate and inspire an organisation’s employees.

I have written before in this blog that thought leadership is not and should not be a marketing or PR tactic – rather it should be part of the culture of an organisation the same way that sales or innovation are part of the culture of some organisations. 

Thought leadership should be “a way of doing things around here” and from my experience, true, long-term, thought leadership campaigns typically closely aligns with the values of an organisation.  In order to do this it needs the buy-in and ownership of senior management.

And herein lies the rub.  If it is part of the culture, if it is aligned to the values of the organisation and if it has the buy-in and ownership of management then the rest of the organisation’s employees should be part of the thought leadership campaign.

Employees will become a thought leadership campaign’s best ambassadors 

If an organisation does plan strategically to take its employees on the thought leadership journey, it will find that they in fact will become its best thought leadership ambassadors.   Communicated properly, this will become one of the most effective ways to get your thought leadership material out there.  It will also be one of the best forms of word of mouth you can hope to get.

It gives employees something to talk about over and above the products or services you sell while at the same time delivers to them a deeper sense of pride about where they work, what they do and the difference the brand makes to other people’s lives.

It also has the habit of instilling longer-term behavioural changes that come as a result of the organisation being viewed as ahead of the game.  This has a whole heap of benefits from increased morale, a magnet for top talent, increased sales to mention a few.

All powerful stuff.

Furthermore, not only is the business benefitting externally but internally it further entrenches thought leadership as a way of doing business – it becomes a habit.  This in turn can foster the emergence of other thought leaders thus creating a virtuous circle.

I’d love to hear your thoughts and whether any of you have seen this in practice?

70 reasons to be a thought leader

When I speak to people about thought leadership for the first time, one of the first questions they ask is: “What can it deliver to my business?”

It’s a great question and one that has had me thinking for a while.  The more I think about it the more complex and multi-faceted I realise the answer is which is why I have developed a listof 70 thought leadership outcomes/benefits in a table.

But to all those thought leaders and writers on thought leadership out there, I need your help please.  While I may already have 70 benefits, I’m sure there are many more.  I would really welcome any further inputs either via e mail to cbadings@cannings.net.au or in the comments section at the end of this blog: