Thought Leadership e book – 12 Experts on the Thought Leadership Challenges of 2012

Two free ebooks on thought leadership

Hi, I’ve got two great, free thought leadership e books for you.  I don’t even want your name - just go ahead and download them.  All I ask is that if you like them or feel they can add value to others please tweet about them or send your contacts a link to this page.  Thanks, I really appreciate it.

1.  The first is an ebook with answers to four critical thought leadership questions for 2012 from 12 experts in this field.  The experts include:  Bob Buday, Erica Klein, David Meerman Scott, Jeff Ernst, Rob Leavitt, Britton Manasco, Dana van den Heuvel, Matt Church, Fiona Czerniawska, Dale Bryce, Elizabeth Sosnow, Marte Semb Aasmundsen and me.  Click on this title to get your pdf copy  Challenges facing thought leadership in 2012 – the views from 12 experts
2. The second is a seven step methodology for arriving at a thought leadership positon.  It is taken from two chapters of my book: “Brand Stand: seven steps to thought leadership” which you can order by clicking on the Brand Stand book icon at the  top right of this page.  In the meantime, to download a pdf of the seven steps, click on this title  Seven steps to thought leadership – START IP eBook_

Happy reading - I’d be delighted if you have any comments/thoughts for you to share them with me on twitter @thoughtstrategy, on this blog, via a mail cbadings@cannings.net.au or via Linked In.

Yours in thought leadership.

Craig Badings

Thought leadership blueprint and tips for 2011

Don’t you love the start of a new year?  Hopefully you’ve had time to reflect on your personal and business goals.  The question is whether you are doing anything differently for your business?  The way you sell?  The way you market including your advertising, PR, direct, online, etc?

If you are one of those fortunate businesses that has done exceptionally well year on year don’t read any further – if it ain’t broke don’t fix it. 

However, if you are wondering whether you could be doing things differently, particularly with your customers or potential customers, read on.

The path to thought leadership – questions companies should ask

Companies wanting to market themselves differently or those wanting to make a difference should start by asking the following questions:

1.       Are we happy with the sales and marketing culture of this organisation?

2.       What are the values of our organisation and can these, in any way, guide our marketing philosophy/approach?

3.       What are we good at and for what do we want to be known?

4.       What are the key issues affecting our customer’/consumer’s lives and do any of these align with what we want to be known for?

5.       Can we provide insights or content that helps our consumers/customers with these issues?

6.       What brand perception do we want to leave with our consumers/customers when it comes to these issues?   

Start formulating a thought leadership position

Once you have answered these you can start formulating a thought leadership position.  A good starting point would be to apply the START IP methodology to add some real rigour to your process.  This is covered in more detail in this blog but briefly it includes:

• Scanning the media and social media sites for issues impacting your brand or sector.
• Tracking your competitors’ share of voice to make sure the thought leadership approach you want to take is not already ‘owned’ by a competitor.
• Analysing and understanding the ‘true north’ of your company i.e. its values, in order to define better the thought leadership areas you should enter.
• Reviewing your current intellectual property (IP) – you may very well already have the makings of a thought leadership campaign within your existing IP.
• Trend spotting to identify the forces that could potentially shape your audiences lives now and in the future and aligning your thought leadership with this.
• Identifying a thought leadership champion to lead your campaign.
• Panel.  Consider appointing a panel of outsiders who could bring fresh perspectives and a more robust sounding board to your ideas and your campaign.

Making thought leadership a culture

Now for the tough part, we’ve all heard of a sales culture, a culture of innovation, a culture of safety, a client service culture etc.  Companies with strong cultures very often tend to do well.  Thought leadership should be no different.  In order for it to truly succeed and to take seed it should become part of the culture of the organisation.

Take a look at the management consultancies.  For years many of them have had an intense focus on thought leadership.  It is what has driven their client engagement and underpinned their sales process – it became part of the culture of many of what are now highly successful organisations.

Thought leadership is not for the faint hearted.  It needs time, budget, measurement as well as management participation and support. 

Critically too, it should not be the sole domain of the marketing or PR teams otherwise it may very well live and die there.  Instead it needs to become part of the DNA of the organisation and ingrained as part of the culture of the organisation.

You cannot be a thought leader without communication

Finally the big test is getting your thought leadership content to market – I’ve yet to meet a thought leader that doesn’t share their thoughts/ideas/content.

The question is how and which channels to use.  The answer I believe lies in your target audience.  How well do you know them?  Do you know what they read and where they get their information?   Do you need to use channels such as daily print, electronic and social media or is your audience a lot smaller in which case a one-on-one or small group engagement strategy may work better.

Please share your thoughts.  What’s worked for you in the past?  What do you intend doing with your thought leadership this year?

Thought leadership interview on RainToday.com

This appeared on the RainToday.com site and is an interview with me on my favourite topic – thought leadership.  You can click here to listen  and this is what they had to say as an intro:

Effective thought leadership—the kind that attracts prospects that eventually become clients—requires a strong platform that your entire company adopts, not “random acts of content,” says Craig Badings, author of Brand Stand: Seven Steps to Thought Leadership.

It’s about delivering new ideas and content to your target audience based on insight into the issues and challenges they face, he says. It’s also about differentiating you from competitors, establishing you as the go-to expert, and positioning you as a trusted advisor. And to make that happen, firms must have an organized and concerted effort that involves everyone in the organization.

“To truly take hold, [thought leadership] has to become part of the culture of the organization. In fact, I’d be as bold as to say that companies that have a sales culture should really be trying very hard to replace it with a thought leadership culture because in my view the sales pitches we know are really dead. It’s no longer good enough for companies to flog their products or services,” Badings says. “If thought leadership is not a part of corporate culture, then that thought leadership campaign is going to limp along and will never really achieve any great height.”

Listen as Badings, who also blogs at Thought Leadership, discusses:

• The four things that make a successful thought leadership campaign
• Firms that are excelling with their thought leadership campaigns
• How sales teams can incorporate a firm’s thought leadership platform to win more deals
• His methodology—START IP—for developing and implementing a thought leadership platform

Podcast on 7 steps to thought leadership

I was fortunate enough to be interviewed by Phil Dobbie last week and he has posted the podcast of this interview on his site BTalk Australia .  Phil has a wealth of radio and business experience. He started his career in commercial radio in the UK and has been in Australia since 1991.  BNET provides lively and insightful views on business issues.

Listen to the podcast here.

Seven steps to thought leadership

Much has been said and written about how to get your thought leadership actions and thoughts to market. However, after reading on the topic for over 3 years I’ve yet to find a methodology which goes back one step and outlines how to go about discovering and prooftesting your thought leadership position.

That’s why I came up with START IP, a seven steps process to help you or your company arrive at a thought leadership concept which will ultimately deliver the consumer/target audience awareness you desire for your brand.

To me, START IP is the beginning of the thought leadership journey. While I cover this in far more detail in my book Brand Stand: seven steps to thought leadership, what follows is a quick overview:

• Scan the media and social media sites for issues impacting your brand, your sector or your specific area of expertise.
• Track your competitors’ share of voice to make sure you or your company is not competing in an already crowded space.
• Analyse and understand the ‘true north’ of the company in order to define better the thought leadership areas it can enter.
• Review your current intellectual property to see if it could spark a thought leadership campaign and review the alignment of your campaign with your company’s values.
• Trend spot and identify the forces which are likely to shape your audiences lives now and in the future.
• Identify a thought leadership champion to lead your campaign or maybe that’s you.
• Panel means appointing a panel of other thought leaders from different walks of live. They bring in fresh perspectives from outside the organization who will question your point of view and help make what you take to market a little bit more robust.

Putting this thought leadership process into action involves a real commitment by you, key leaders in your company and your team. Once you’ve identified what it is you want to be a thought leader in, the challenge is how to roll out your thought leadership campaign and, in the process, how to engage with your audiences authentically.

And here I need to stress ‘engage with’.

True thought leadership is not about sending messages to an audience, rather it is about sharing information and, in turn, listening to your audience. It is a conversation, not a broadcast.

Listening is something many companies have struggled with in the past, largely driven by the way traditional mass media worked. Your company placed an advertisement, sent out a press release and hoped that the demographic it wanted to reach would consume it.

Traditional media have been a wonderful top down communications vehicle and will continue to work for many brands or services.

However, the internet, and particularly Web 2.0 and the advent of social media is changing all of this rapidly – as businesses such as United Airlines, Dell, Wal-Mart, BP and other smaller brands, such as Kryptonite, have discovered.

So do your homework, run through the START IP process and then think strategically about how you are going to go about building your thought leadership position. If done properly, you’ll find the START IP process as well as the action of building your thought leadership position in the market as a truly meaningful, authentic way to engate with your stakeholders.

Good luck and let me know how you go.

By the way if you have anything to add to the START IP steps let me know, I’d love to hear what’s worked for you.