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.

Selling needs content as digital bait

“Content is digital bait” – what a wonderfully evocative phrase. I wish I could claim it.  Instead it appears in a summary of “The Future of Selling” white paper produced by OgilvyOne Worldwide (NY) and Ogilvy & Mather (NY).

The summary which appears in the WPP’s Atticus volume 17, a journal of original thinking in communication services, provides a telling insight into how the world of selling has changed.

And these are some of my key take outs:

• “Buyers have as much control over the flow of information as salespeople do.”
• “Buying, …has become a conversation between equals,…”
• “…consumers now create their own multi-faceted journeys towards purchase.  Salespeople are no longer in control and
  their role is to identify where the customer is in that journey, and to help them.”
• “The new skillset required by salespeople involves creating content as digital bait, deploying social media and partnering with marketing.”
• “Your customers and prospects are throwing off billions of digital buying indications every day.  They signal their intentions
  through the search key words they use, the blogs they read, the white papers they download and the shopping baskets they fill.”
• “…every time we aim to shape another person’s point of view, we are selling.”
• “…successful selling will always remain centred on the customer, but the successful salesperson will anticipate the customers’ changing behavior.”
• “Great selling is analyzing the customers’ needs and finding a way to solve their problems.”

Today the digital bait is content – preferably thought leading content

The game has changed irreversibly.  The sheer weight of information available to buyers these days means the buyer is in control. They are less reliant on sales people and they build trust in the brand long before they come into physical contact
with it.

How?  Through the content they consume about the issues important to them.  In a previous post I labeled them ‘contsumers’ - these are people who are hungry for information, information that helps them come to a decision or helps them solve a problem.

The brand that best understands its customer, their issues, their challenges and then provides them with useful, insightful content where they consume it and that helps them in their decision making, are the ones that will become the brands of choice.

Useful content vs thought leading content

I would like to make a distinction between useful content and thought leading content.  Hints and tips about wellbeing, insurance, savings and retirement, the pitfalls of cross border mergers and acquisitions, etc, falls into the useful content bucket.

Thought leading content is content that offers new or fresh thinking on a topic.  It’s not merely peddling an opinion or curating other people’s content – it is a new, fresh perspective often based on empirical evidence.

Thought leadership and sales

Sales needs to be working with the marketing and communication team as well as their customers.

The better understanding the marketing team has of the day-to-day challenges the sales team faces and more importantly the questions their customers are asking them, the better the thought leadership piece will be in the long run.

As the Ogilvy Paper says: “Selling may have once been an individual event, but now it is a team sport.”

Selling has changed irrevocably

“The future of selling” entailed Ogilvy researching over 1,000 selling professionals in the UK, US, Brazil and China.  One of the key findings was that 73% of those surveyed said that selling will be radically different in the next five years.  The key is information asymmetry – in other words the balance or imbalance of information and channels allowing one brand to get a head-start on another.

Brands not examining their content or not entertaining and exploring a thought leadership position will come second.

Craig Badings is a director at Cannings Corporate Communications.  He is the author of “Brand Stand: seven steps to thought leadership” and the blog www.thoughtleadershipstrategy.net/ You can follow him on ttwitter @thoughtstrategy or join him on LinkedIn.

Your content will die if you don’t shift your paradigm

For your content to survive you need a paradigm shift

Content has proven to be extremely valuable brand currency but just like the flagging Euro it is facing strong headwinds and needs a lift and a rethink going into 2012.

Content volume is growing daily.  As such content producers need to become smarter in how, where and when they curate content on their sites as well as how they go about sharing new ideas and delivering new insights in order for the ‘contsumer’ (my new word for consumer of content)  to recognise them as thought leaders in their field.

The six content paradigm shifts

For your content to attract and convert first time visitors and in the process differentiate your company/brand from the competition, there are six paradigm shifts you will need to explore into 2012 and beyond:

1. Your content must provide value to your ‘contsumer’
2. In order to do so, it needs to be more personalized.  To do this you need a deeper understanding of your buyers’ personas so that you understand their issues, their day to day challenges.  It’s about what matters to them not what matters to you or your company
3. It needs to have the shareability factor so that it is spread virally or through word of mouth
4. Your content needs to humanise your brand/organisation in order to build trust.  Get rid of the corporate veneer and put up your human face
5. What you put up needs  to be engaging otherwise people will merely go elsewhere
6. Your consumers should be able to interact with the brand off the back of your content.

It may sound easy but it can’t be because there are not a lot of brands getting it right.  Maybe it’s time for companies to
create a new position – the CCO – chief content officer.

What do you think?

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PR is undergoing a revolution

PR is undergoing a revolution

This is a guest blog I wrote for Craig Pearce’s blog recently.

The PR industry globally is undergoing one of its biggest changes since social media boomed across the web – it’s called content strategy and it’s rocketing through the traditional corridors of marketing and PR.

Why do you think a well-known global PR firm recently appointed an ex BBC journalist as Chief Content Officer?

We all know content’s not new it’s what we’ve been doing for years.  In fact when PR first started in the US, companies employed journalists to write content that looked and sounded the way the company wanted.  So why would I flag something that has been around the PR world forever as one of the biggest changes facing our industry?

Because the rules of the content game have changed dramatically.  First, traditional content development and production required a significant process, budget and distribution but nowadays you can do it from your mobile phone and include sound, image and video if needed.

Second, the gap between the customer and the company has closed.  Not only is the time of content to market almost immediate but clients and customers can interact with the company in real time with real people – except of course for those wretched voice response calls when you call your telecom provider!

Three words come to mind:  strategic, authentic, storytelling.

Companies can no longer interact with their audiences the way they have in the past.  The days of controlling and owning brand messages are gone.

Today brands need to engage and interact with their audiences in different ways.

We no longer live in the world of top-down story telling.  Instead we have entered a world where entertaining, authentic and engaging story-telling is what our customers want.

Our content should connect with an audience so they feel inclined to interact, share, comment and most importantly own and believe it.

The PR person of today and tomorrow needs to be a great story teller.  No more corporate speak, no more messaging cow clods, no more “We’ll tell you what you need to know and don’t ask us questions.”

The way customers search for information these days means we need to deliver a fantastic content experience.  Instead of pitching products and services, our role is to deliver customers knowledge in an entertaining, timely, informative and non-promotional way that helps them make decisions and that enables them to share the content with their consumer friends or B2B colleagues.

First we need to know the customer

But to get this right and in order to deliver great content that hits the right spot we better be sure we clearly define the audience.
We should understand their needs and their issues as well as know where and how they consume content.

Only then can we truly develop a content asset and distribution strategy to reach, educate and inspire them.

Content strategy is long-term

The key is to engage the customer for the long-term.

To do this, as PR practitioners, we will need to measure the impact of our content across various stages of the buying cycle.  Finding and understanding your audience in the first place takes time, effort and resources so why do it if you aren’t in the
content game for the long haul.

Our clients must become publishers

Most companies, whether they are consumer or B2B oriented, will need to become publishers.  If not they are missing not only a huge opportunity to engage with their customers but they will lose ground to their competitors.

When someone like Seth Godin says that content marketing is “all the marketing that is left” as PR practitioners we should sit up and take note.

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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

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CLAIMING CONTENT CURATION IS THOUGHT LEADERSHIP IS LIKE PLAGIARISM

Content curation does not equate to thought leadership

Find me a thought leader through curation alone

Thought leadership = original, creative or innovative content

Does content curation have a place at the thought leadership table?

Can content curation lead to thought leadership?

I don’t think so and I will give you my reasoning.  But first I would like to share with you a comment on a thought leadership definition from Jessie at Hivefire.  Jessie sent this in response to another definition I shared on this blog from Jeff Ernst at Forrester.  

This is what Jessie had to say:

Thanks for sharing! We’ve got one we like to use as well from a content curation perspective,

“Thought Leadership – a primary benefit of content curation. Thought leadership status is gained when your brand is recognized, and cited, as an expert on critical industry issues. Creating a consistent stream of industry-relevant content is a key tactic supporting a thought leadership objective.”

Jessie also gives a site where they share a heap of useful definitions across a wide range of content and marketing related topics: http://www.getcurata.com/glossary

This was my response to Jessie:

Thanks Jessie, I have a particular view on content curation and thought leadership which is well known to some of the guys at Hivefire – I don’t believe the one (content curation) leads to the other (thought leadership).

I think you put your finger on it when you say that creating a stream of industry relevant content “…is a key tactic supporting a thought leadership objective.”

I do think that content curation done properly can be a very powerful tool for a content strategy but by its very nature of taking other people’s thoughts, insights and content and repurposing it, means that the person, brand or company curating the content cannot be a thought leader merely off the back of other people’s ideas. That’s not to say that content creation doesn’t work – it does and it can be a great magnet for reaching an audience. It’s just not thought leadership.

I look forward to reading some of your other definitions and thanks for sharing this with me.

Over to you guys – I’d be interested in any other views on content curation and thought leadership you may want to share…

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Content = thought leadership. Wrong…

Content alone is not thought leadership

There is an interesting article which appeared on the MarketingProfs site yesterday titled: “Brands using content curation to build thought leadership”

The great news is that of the 150 marketing executives surveyed by HiveFire, 78.9% said their main objective for content curation was to establish thought leadership.

But let’s hope these 150 marketing executives are very clear in distinguishing what thought leadership is and what it’s not.  Because there’s content curation and then there’s thought leadership – the two are very different.

Content can include:

·        Opinions and views

·        Marketing collateral

·        Product information

·        White papers

·        Press releases

·        Company announcements

·        Reports

·        Presentations

·        Talks

·        Assimilating other people’s content on a particular topic

·        Etc, etc

  Thought leadership content on the other hand:

·        Is new

·        Typically reflects/provides new insights into the challenge/issues faced by a particular target audience

·        Can frame new debates/discussions around an issue whether that be social, environmental, economic, political, business, etc

·        Is evidence based

·        Does not overtly sell your product or service

Content alone is not thought leadership

Content that doesn’t do this cannot and should not be called thought leadership.  It is merely information.

This is not to say that it’s not useful but it doesn’t make you a thought leader.

In the thread of conversation that this article prompted, one reader, Jeff Molander, had this to say and I think he sums it up beautifully:

“Here’s my point: Different ways of effectively “showing off” what you know is different than showcasing something USEFUL for end users.

“Showing end users something you’re seeing, that they are not, and that reveals risk or opportunity — now that’s how I measure “thought leader.” Giving people a reason to think about something in a new light — and then take action on it. That’s valuable.”

You can read more at: http://www.marketingprofs.com/charts/2011/4730/brands-using-content-curation-to-build-thought-leadership#ixzz1IDxKIW7U