JOB ADS GETTING IT WRONG ON THOUGHT LEADERSHIP

By Craig Badings and Dr Liz Alexander. (This piece first appeared in Human Capital, an Australian HR magazine)

A leading magazine publisher is recruiting for a Senior Editor, Thought Leadership Asia. A global law firm has posted a position for a Thought Leadership and Client Publications Manager.  A professional services firm is looking for a Thought Leadership Manager.

 Exciting positions but something is fundamentally wrong with each one of these adverts.  

 Job ads targeting positions such as those listed above reveal how little most of these organizations really understand about thought leadership and how they’re selling themselves and the position short. 

The term “thought leader,” once reserved for influential academics and visionary leaders such as Charles Handy, C.K. Prahalad, and Stan Shih (Founder, Chairman, and CEO of Acer Group), is now showing up in a wide range of job postings. In the majority of cases this is not only misleading but serves to further dilute and undermine the concept of thought leadership.

Why? Because most ads that mention thought leadership in the job titles are offering little more than glorified editorial or content marketing positions.

Don’t confuse content with thought leadership

Despite the fact that many companies like to think of themselves as “thought leaders,” few really are.

But before we dissect some of the job descriptions we found in a wide variety of adverts, let us address what we mean by thought leadership:

“Thought leaders advance the marketplace of ideas by positing actionable, commercially relevant, research-backed, new points of view.  They engage in ‘blue ocean strategy’ thinking on behalf of themselves and their clients, as opposed to simply churningout product-focused, brand-centric white papers or curated content that shares or mimics others’ ideas.”

Don’t mistake thought leadership for sharing or “curating” other people’s viewpoints or simply having your own strong opinions about a topic. And it’s certainly not about pumping out regular content.  If what you are producing doesn’t deliver new insights that influence your target audience to change the way they think, feel, or behave about an issue, then it isn’t thought leadership.

Here’s the problem

Let’s take a closer look at this ad for a Thought Leadership Manager that we discovered recently:

“The successful candidate will have a great track record of content development and managing multi-channel campaigns, ideally in a professional services environment or large corporation. Experience or understanding of thought leadership is desirable, ideally relating to the financial services sector.”

So experience or understanding of thought leadership—for someone with the job title of Thought Leadership Manager– is merely desirable? That’s like saying you’re prepared to hire an engineer who may not be fully cognizant of the principles of engineering. Who would do that?

Companies serious about finding someone to drive their thought leadership approach need to elevate it to a strategic level and ensure candidates have the insight and knowledge to plan, build and evaluate a true thought leadership position.

Some thought leadership ads are starting to get it right

It’s not all doom and gloom, however. Despite many poor thought leadership job adverts out there, a few organizations are on the right track. Here’s the best (edited) example we’ve discovered to date for a Director of Thought Leadership.

Job description:

Responsible for managing all public relations and thought leadership activities for X company, including creating the thought leadership plan, managing the company’s public relations agency program deliverables, coordinating editorial interviews with executives, coordinating news release approvals, placing executive speakers as part of the Corporate Executive Speakers Bureau program and creating their presentations, creating customer case studies, and both organizing and executing online webinars and live, multi-speaker seminar events.
Consults with Corporate and Business Unit Marketing leadership to ensure activities support overall corporate communications objectives and associated initiatives. Works with partners in Corporate Marketing, as well as business unit leaders and subject matter experts to support the company’s over-arching brand and image goals, both internally and externally.

Responsibilities:

• Ensures alignment with broader Corporate Marketing thought leadership program, coordinates with corporate marketing and X teammates, business unit leaders, legal/compliance and subject matter experts, and both internal and external vendors to create a comprehensive PR and thought leadership plan. Plan components will span all of the necessary elements from coverage analysis and thought leadership messaging development and media outreach through executive speaker topics and venues, webinar and seminar topics and participants, and the maintenance of a calendar of all activities and events.
• Understands and monitors coverage of industry issues and key thought leadership themes, and X’s comparative share of voice.
• Identifies new industry issues and thought leadership themes for which X may need to develop and communicate a position.
• Secures strategically effective speaking engagements for executives and ensures that they have everything they need to perform effectively.
• Manages all planning, coordination, budget and logistical elements of both on-line and in-person thought leadership events, including digital webinars as well as seminars for clients and prospects that typically feature analyst, client and company speakers.
• Works with Advertising & Branding leader to incorporate company’s branding philosophy in all thought leadership events.
• Prepares ROI evaluations of our participation in various thought leadership events, and measures and reports on the effectiveness and impact of activities through scorecard.

This advert is far more strategic.  With ten mentions of the term no one could mistake this for a purely content creation, marketing, or PR role. Indeed, it’s clear that company X understands that thought leadership needs to be an integrated part of the entire organization, embedded within the culture, and not just another marketing, communications or public relations “add-on”.

There are, however, two critical pieces missing:

1. Emphasis on a proven ability to drive an overarching thought leadership strategy, and
2. The ability to oversee the kind of research that provides clients and customers with evidence that the thought leadership approach is credible and viable.

Without research, this company runs the risk of becoming just another organization that’s offering opinions. Whether they’re successful at “walking the talk”, however, is a different story.

A point of clarity for thought leadership job ads

Just because your company regularly publishes white papers, editorials, opinion pieces, research projects, conference papers and the like doesn’t mean you’re a thought leader.

Thought leadership is about differentiating yourself in the minds of your target audience by providing them with fresh insights that solve an issue or challenge that impacts their lives—insights they would not have seen or thought of themselves.  In other words, thought leadership serves to illuminate and solve a client or customer’s unmet needs.

The concept is far from faddish.  It’s been around for over 15 years and is a growing discipline recognised by many organisations as the way to truly elevate their brands above the considerable noise currently confusing the marketplace.

The number of positions in this field and affiliated support roles will grow.  It will be in the best interests of everyone responsible for creating these thought leadership positions to get their job descriptions right.  If not, they run the risk of attracting the wrong people and contributing to the erosion of a concept that, when done well, engenders trust, engagement and loyalty in an era when all three are becoming harder to elicit from increasingly sceptical clients and customers.

Craig Badings is a director at Sydney-based, Cannings Corporate Communications.  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 on thought leadership in 2009: “Brand Stand: seven steps to thought leadership”Join him on twitter @thoughtstrategy and on LinkedIn.

Darwin effect to separate thought leadership content on LinkedIn

LinkedIn is making a serious play to be at the epicentre for business content and why not?

The logical step for any social media platform is to monetize and LinkedIn has seen the sponsored content dollar signs.   They already have a captive professional audience as well as industry and sector specific content that bodes well for related advertising spend – it could be a big money-spinner.

They have been successful with their LinkedIn Today initiative which enables users to follow industry related articles. Time will tell but we may see LinkedIn becoming the new hub of online B2B content.

Where does LinkedIn’s new ‘play’ leave thought leaders and content marketers?

LinkedIn can deliver content in an incredibly targeted manner and as a result content marketers should be forewarned – as LinkedIn’s audience becomes more discerning about their content choice it will only be the ‘fittest’ thought leadership-type content that will survive. Darwin’s theory will prevail in the content marketing wars.

Already there are tensions in the debate around the differences between thought leadership and content.  It’s nothing new.

Business people are turning their back on volume and more and more they are seeking quality, thought leading content.  It is the type of content that drives to the heart of their issues and challenges, offering new insights, shifting paradigms or cracking existing schemas.

The term thought leadership has been misappropriated by content marketers

How many times have you seen content erroneously labeled as thought leadership?  I see it every day on my thought leadership twitter feed and Google Alerts.  Often this self-labeled, self-serving thought leadership material is at best a collection of useful hints and tips at worst opinions of so called company experts.

But there’s nothing wrong with content. US-based Content Marketing Institute describes it as having the ability to:  “…attract, acquire, and engage a clearly defined and understood target audience with the objective of driving profitable customer action.” All well and good but I appeal to corporates and those in charge of their content production not to label it thought leading content when it isn’t.

My co-author, Dr Liz Alexander and I define thought leadership as follows in our latest book: #Thought Leadership Tweet: 140 Prompts for Designing and Executing an Effective Thought Leadership Campaign: “Thought leaders advance the marketplace of ideas by positing actionable, commercially relevant, research-backed, new points of view. They engage in “blue ocean strategy” thinking on behalf of themselves and their clients, as opposed to simply churning out product-focused, brand-centric white papers or curated content that shares or mimics others’ ideas.”

Fiona Czerniawska from Sourceforconsulting put it brilliantly when she recently remarked that a lot of what passes as thought leadership these days is mostly thought followership!

Craig Badings is a director at Sydney-based, Cannings Corporate Communications.  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 on thought leadership in 2009: “Brand Stand: seven steps to thought leadership”Join him on twitter @thoughtstrategy and on LinkedIn.

#Thought Leadership Tweet – what’s your communication strategy?

The way you take your thought leadership to market is critical.

Taking your thought leadership campaign to market is the final chapter in the book #Thought Leadership Tweet 140 Prompts for Designing and Executing an Effective Thought Leadership Campaign.  You may have the best thought leadership campaign in the world but if you don’t communicate it effectively to your desired audiences you’re going to waste a lot of valuable resources and your campaign will fail.

To overcome this, research is critical.  I refer to Tweet no 107: “Have you researched what your clients read and where they source their information so you can tailor your thought leadership accordingly.

Building a thought leadership platform is a long-term program. As such you need to be sure that you are packaging and reaching your audience where they are consuming their content.  Someone who heads up the thought leadership program for a multi-national once told me:  “We’ve researched our audience and they tell us they don’t want long reports, they want pithy, executive summaries and time with senior partners to talk through their issues.”

The tweet outline in this chapter will guide you to coming up with the best possible communication strategy for your campaign.

Internal and external thought leadership communication drivers

One of the aspects so often overlooked in a thought leadership communication strategy is how you work with your employees to ensure they become your best advocates for the campaign.  As tweet no 111 says: “To what extent is your sales team adequately equipped to use this thought leadership material in conversations with prospects.”

When it comes to external communication we use the term leverage.  It is a cardinal thought leadership sin not to leverage your content in as many ways possible and across all your client or prospects touch points.

Customise your thought leadership

Finally customise your thought leadership as far as possible for each prospect and client.  Every senior person likes to think that your insights are written exclusively for them.  Ensure you modify your content for the different stages of the buying cycle – what you give a new prospect when you first meet them compared to when you have established a relationship with them should be very different.

A thought leadership methodology

#Thought Leadership Tweet concludes with a special addendum – a practical chapter with a step by step methodology on how to successfully plan, develop, communicate, evaluate and recalibrate your thought leadership campaign from start to finish.

We set out to write this book to make it easy for those new to the concept to understand what thought leadership is and how it works.  However it is also a valuable guide for sophisticated thought leaders to help them ensure they are covering all the bases and that their campaign is track.

If you have any questions on this or once you’ve read the book please feel free to contact either myself or my co-author Dr Liz Alexander.  We are more than happy to answer your questions.

#Thought Leadership Tweet covers the seven essential elements of a thought leadership campaign.  This post is the last in a series that covered:

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 past post.
7. What’s your communication strategy? Covered in this post.

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.

#Thought Leadership Tweet – what impact to you want to achieve?

Tweet number 41 in #Thought Leadership Tweet probably best captures the essence of what you should be trying to achieve with your thought leadership: “Do you clearly understand your client’s issues and what keeps them awake at night?  Will your thought leadership address some or all of them?”

While most companies think about themselves when it comes to thought leadership they should be turning it around and focusing on what’s in it for their clients.  As the late Dr Stephen Covey said: “Begin with the end in mind.” And that end should be what matters to your clients.

Being a thought leader is not something you claim, it is something bestowed upon you by an audience.  To achieve this you need to be sure that you have done your homework, followed a rigorous process and ensured that the point of view you are developing has relevance to your most important market.

A great starting point for a thought leader is START IP

I first covered START IP in my book Brand Stand: seven steps to thought leadership published in 2009.

Essentially there are seven steps which will help you in your journey to creating maximum impact for your campaign.  They are:

1. Scan the online environment and the market in which your clients operate to help identify their issues and challenges. Scan the competitors to ascertain what their thought leadership or content position is.  Remember it is far more difficult to compete in an already crowded space.
2. Track your competitors to ascertain their thought leadership and content positions.  Remember it is far more difficult to compete in an already crowded space.
3. Analyse your ‘true north’ i.e. your vision and values and let them help guide your choice of a thought leadership position.
4. Research new points of view or review your intellectual property and see whether you can drive a thought leadership position around this or whether you can repackage and reinvigorate this IP to deliver great thought leadership content to your market.
5. Trends – understand the trends impacting your clients or target market and drive your thought leadership position around addressing these and thereby adding value to your market that goes beyond your product or service.
6. Identify a thought leadership champion.  You need someone to own and take your point of view to market but ensure they are involved from the beginning, that they are coached in how to deliver the story.  The second part of this is to include other members of the team across all disciplines so they can become word of mouth advocates and ambassadors for the thought leadership point of view.  This done well can have a remarkable impact on the morale of the business and pride of employees in their brand.
7. Panel – identify an independent panel outside of the organisation who  can add that much needed third party, objective advice and act as a sounding board for your campaign.

#Thought Leadership Tweet covers the seven essential elements of a thought leadership campaign.  Over the course of the next few weeks I will go into each one 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 this post.
4. How will you know you’ve succeeded? Still to come…
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 know you’ve succeeded with your thought leadership campaign.

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 does it take to become a thought leader?

The best way to introduce this topic which is covered in section one of #Thought Leadership Tweet: 140 Prompts for Designing and Executing an Effective Thought Leadership Campaign, is to quote Eric Wittlake, senior director of media at Babcock & Jenkins: “Everyone wants to be a thought leader today, but can they?”

Those under the illusion that thought leadership is a white paper, a bit of random content there or some curated content over here need to think again.  This random approach to content will never cut it and in the process time, money and valuable resources are wasted for little effect.

Becoming a thought leader requires a planned and disciplined approach.  To start there some preliminary questions anyone person or organisation embarking on this journey should ask.  In #Thought Leadership Tweet we make it easy by posing these questions for you.  For example #Thought Leadership Tweet no 2 asks: “Have you defined clearly what thought leadership means to your organization and what you want to achieve from it?”

This is a key question as it:

1. Helps you deliver a strategic framework from which to work
2. Aligns the campaign with your business objectives
3. Gives you a benchmark from which you can measure and evaluate your campaign

A successful thought leadership approach needs three things

When you are ready to embark on your first steps towards a thought leadership approach there are three areas on which to focus your discussions:

1. What type of environment do you need in order to foster a culture of thought leadership?
2. How does this campaign align with your overall vision and mission?
3. Do you have the right people involved at the most senior level and across disciplines?

#Thought Leadership Tweet no 21 illustrates just one of these questions: “Which members of your team will challenge your organization’s assumptions in order to engage in truly breakthrough thinking?”

I leave you with this thought: If you find people courageous enough to take your organization and clients into previously unexplored territory, trust them and back them with the right resources.

#Thought Leadership Tweet covers the seven essential elements of a thought leadership campaign.  Over the course of the next few weeks I will go into each one 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 this post.
3. What impact do you want to achieve? Still to come…
4. How will you know you’ve succeeded? Still to come…
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 what impact you want to achieve.

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 – book delivers fresh insights for thought leaders

On reading ‘#Thought Leadership Tweet: 140 Prompts for Designing and Executing an Effective Thought Leadership Campaign’, Dale Bryce, Group Manager Marketing , Sinclair Knight Merz had this to say: “If Confucius was a marketer, he would be tweeting proverbs like Alexander & Badings do on thought leadership.”

Thanks Dale very kind words indeed.

Co-author Dr Liz Alexander and I wrote this book because we wanted to deliver to companies and individuals a question-led methodology on how to identify, plan, market and measure an effective thought leadership campaign.  That’s probably what prompted Matt Church the founder of Thought Leaders Global to say: “This book is thought haiku. It asks penetrating questions about the how, why and what of leveraging the biggest B2B marketing idea around.”

Whether you are an existing thought leader or an aspiring thought leader, an individual, a large multinational or company, #Thought Leadership Tweet will empower you to act on and achieve a thought leadership platform that will truly differentiate yourself and your brand from your competitors.

Eric Wittlake, senior director of media at Babcock and Jenkins got it spot on when he said: “#Thought Leadership Tweet delivers a concise overview of what it really takes.”

What does thought leadership really take?

To answer this question, our approach is very different to normal books on the topic.  First, it is a quick, easy read – 50-90 minutes. Second, there are 140 tweets designed to lead to a thought leadership position and beyond.  The tweets will have you going back to them time and again as your thought leadership campaign unfolds. They are there to keep your campaign ‘honest’ and on track.

Here’s an example of one tweet: Tweet no 9: “Does your organisation have a culture of listening and what mechanisms have you put in place to truly listen to your market’s needs?”

The relevance of this tweet is that the most effective thought leadership campaigns are the ones that focus on and deliver insights to the heart of the issues facing your market or prospects.  If the premise of your thought leadership point of view is not underpinned by this approach your campaign will fail or at best limp along.

The essential elements of a thought leadership campaign

The other thing #Thought Leadership Tweet delivers is a practical, step-by-step approach across seven distinct sections enabling you to truly plan your campaign from start to finish.

Thought leadership is a discipline.  As such the good campaigns require careful planning, research, application, resources, a marketing strategy, evaluation and recalibration.

Below is a brief mention of each of the seven essential elements of a thought leadership campaign.  Over the course of the next few weeks I will go into each one in more detail.

1. What is thought leadership?
2. What does it take to become a thought leader?
3. What impact do you want to achieve?
4. How will you know you’ve succeeded?
5. What space has already been claimed?
6. What will be your unique point of view?
7. What’s your communication strategy?

The following quote sums up the reason anyone vaguely interested in this topic should read this book.  It is from the Forrester Research Report authored by principal analyst Jeff Ernst and titled:  Thought Leadership: The Next Wave of Differentiation InB2B Marketing: “Companies that lack a process or framework find themselves practicing random acts of thought leadership.  They react to industry and customer issues in an ad hoc manner rather than proactively planning a cohesive thought leadership platform.”

I’ll end off with our final tweet – tweet number 140:

# Thought Leadership Tweet no 140: “Thought leaders are brave; explore areas others don’t, raise questions others won’t, and provide insights others can’t.”

Look out in the next few days for the next blog piece in this series covering #Thought Leadership Tweet which will touch on your guide to winning the content war.

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.

B2B goes mad on content…but

B2B goes mad on content…but

If the research findings by B2B Content Marketing Trends is anything to go by then content marketing has moved from buzz word to an absolute must have for B2B companies…  But there is a worrying trend emerging of using marketing automation to deliver content.

Based on the discussions and interviews I’ve had with companies who have been practicing thought leadership for a long time, their clients want more customized content – the direct opposite of automated content.

I’m not dismissing content automation.  I think it has a place with the right audience but be very careful you don’t devalue your content through your method of distribution.

Content marketing goals

The three key content marketing goals that were flagged by the 740 B2B Technology Marketers who responded to the survey were:

1. Content marketing = lead generation (68%)
2. Content marketing = thought leadership and education (50%)
3. Content marketing = brand awareness (39%)

These make a lot of sense and I was particularly pleased to see that thought leadership had the highest jump from last year – from 37% to 50%.

Content and thought leading content

In addition, 94% said they created their own content from scratch.

Brilliant! But the questions begging to be asked are:

• Did this content specifically address a client issue or challenge?
• Did it say anything new?
• Was any research was done to measure the impact of the content on the market at which it was aimed?

I believe these are three most critical questions to explore when engaging in any form of content marketing.

The discipline of doing this will not only help you deliver content that truly makes a difference to your market, it may even be construed as thought leading content by your market.  Then you’re talking true differentiation.

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 author of “Brand Stand: seven steps to thought leadership” and the forthcoming co-authored book#THOUGHT LEADERSHIP Tweet: 140 Prompts for Designing and Executing an Effective Thought Leadership Campaign.

Join him on twitter @thoughtstrategy and on LinkedIn.

The top thought leadership tips for communicators

If you are a communicator, work in public relations, marketing or communications you are bound to have heard of or are deeply involved in thought leadership marketing.

Some people groan at the mention of the word probably because every opinion is labelled thought leadership.  But if used strategically, it is one of the most powerful communication tools available to marketers.  Like any marketing discipline, however, there are some things that work and others that don’t.

Through years of exploring, writing, speaking and consulting about thought leadership, this is what I have gleaned from thought leaders themselves or individuals who are responsible for multi-faceted local and global thought leadership campaigns.

I have distilled these learnings into six points.

Client centric - Experienced thought leaders will tell you to make sure your content is first and foremost client centric and that it delivers new and relevant insights.  Product-speak and brand centricity is the death knell of thought leadership.

Short content is good - People no longer want long reports.  They want executive summaries highlighting the key points pertinent to them.  Infograms are a great way to present information – it’s easy to digest and delivers your point of view in a visual story board.

Re-use and re-purpose content - A lot of work, resource, time and effort go into producing your material.  Make sure you are leveraging it every way possible i.e. if it is research or a report, ask if it can it be segmented into mini-sector reports or key topic areas and release it over time.

Also think about if and how you can news-jack.  This involves looking for opportunities in the daily media into which you can inject your point of view.  Relevance is obviously key.

Start small, think big, think new, adapt quickly - Don’t start off with a massive production,  you are probably biting off more than you can chew.  Find something on which you can act nimbly, something relevant to the challenges facing your target audience and then deliver some new insights on these challenges.

Ideally it should be a long-term play.  The best thought leadership I have seen has run for five years or longer and has been adapted to change with the times.

Make it part of the business culture - If it is not owned from the CEO through to marketing and sales it is not going to gain the traction you want.  True thought leadership is about empowering the business and all of those in it.

It is the sharpest tool in building eminence - Those who are using it well all agree that is the best tool for building eminence for their brand and it is the best brand differentiator they have.  Critically it enables you to have conversations and to engage with your audience in a way your competitors cannot.

In the process you build that all important characteristic – trust.

Craig Badings is a director at Sydney-based, Cannings Corporate Communications.  He is the author of “Brand Stand:
seven steps to thought leadership” You can follow him on twitter @thoughtstrategy or join him on LinkedIn.