Your biggest thought leadership mistake

The San (Bushmen) of the Kalahari, the Aboriginal tribes in Australia, the North American Indians and the first movie makers all knew something modern corporations seem to have lost sight of – that the power of story-telling is multiplied a hundredfold through pictures.

The capacity of the human brain to be entertained as well as absorb and retain information through visuals is well researched and documented.  So why do most companies still insist on smothering their audiences with an avalanche of words as they churn out reams and reams of content?!

Thought leaders and content marketers are missing a trick

The exponential growth of visual online platforms such as Instagram, Pinterest, Vimeo, Vine, Snapchat, Infographics, You Tube and Facebook is a blessing in disguise.  Why? Because it’s forcing brands to re-evaluate how they present their content and making them recognize that their audiences are crying out for visual representation of data and information.

I never forget speaking to the head of knowledge management at one of the leading global management consulting firms a few years ago and he said to me: “Craig we have researched our clients and they are telling us they don’t want the big, thumping reports, they want the two page executive summary – they just don’t have the time.”

With that in mind, it’s great to read in Sourceforconsulting’s latest online newsletter that the proportion of thought leadership videos has risen from 2% five years ago to 4% in 2012 and that overall the proportion of thought leadership in traditional article/report format has fallen from 92% to 79% over the same period.

Spice up your content with visuals

So the message about going visual is sinking in but ever so slowly.

I was in Perth, Western Australia a little while ago and visited the offices of Deloitte.  I walked out with a one page A3 page entitled ‘Western Australia’s Mining Boom Dig a little further’ (seen pictured above).  It’s not thought leadership but it is a great piece of content captured in a series of graphs, statistics and diagrams all visually displayed.  Within a minute or two I got it and didn’t have to plough through a weighty report to get there.

Other examples of brands that have been using the visual medium really with their campaigns include Dove’s Real Beauty sketches and BMW’s Activate the Future – if you have any more examples please let me know, I’d love to hear about them.

Creating content that converts

Ultimately you are producing content or thought leadership material for a reason.  You want to engage with an audience and position yourselves as the expert, the brand with the relevant insights and then eventually convert them into a client or a customer.  The brands who can differentiate themselves through great content and turn it into compelling, interesting visual content are the ones who are going to stand head and shoulders above their competition.

Make no mistake they will still have to be able to use words to articulate their story but the more visually you can interpret these words the more impactful and memorable your story is going to be.

What are you going to present your information more visually?

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.

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.

Does thought leadership need social media?

I wrote this as a guest post for Jeff Bullas blog.  Jeff is without doubt one of the global thought leaders on social media but particularly the strategy of how you integrate it into your marketing and your business as a whole – keep an eye open for an interview with Jeff on this blog shortly.

The natural reaction of most business people and certainly anyone in marketing, communications or social media these days is to label those companies and individuals not using social media as dinosaurs.  But are they?

Thought leadership is content on steroids.  It stands out from the crowd because it is different; it offers something new and the good campaigns deliver information or insights that address a client’s challenges or issues.  In some cases really brilliant thought leadership shifts paradigms of an entire industry.  Thought leadership is no ordinary content but rather content that sets one brand apart from the competition and, in the process, leverages a phenomenal platform for trust and engagement.

Good thought leadership content is sophisticated and intelligent and should be packaging and delivered appropriately to a defined audience.  And herein lies the key.

Do you know where and how your audience consumes content?

In our recent book on the topic #Thought Leadership Tweet 140 Prompts for Designing and Executing an Effective Thought Leadership Campaign, co-author Dr Liz Alexander and I  ask in tweet #32: “Have you clearly defined who you want to reach with this thought leadership campaign and why?”

If for example your market is a small universe of 30-50 senior decision makers at listed companies in a certain sector and they are not using LinkedIn, twitter, Pinterest, Facebook, YouTube, blogs and the like, why on earth would you need to be on social media?

Great thought leadership goes to the very heart of your markets’ issues – think Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty, IBM’s Smarter Planet, GE’s Ecomagination,  Phillip’s Health and Wellbeing campaign and Booz&Co’s Global Innovation 1000. The planning for these campaigns had a very clear why, as Simon Sinek says in our tweet# 26: “It doesn’t matter what you do.  It matters why you do it.” Why are you embarking on a thought leadership campaign?

I have been in the public relations game for 23 years.  There was an industry expression back then – “Spray and pray” – it meant sending a press release to as many media contacts as possible hoping to generate coverage.  Of course the results were always poor because three critical questions were not clarified up front: Why are we doing this? Who are we trying to reach? What do they read?

Content planning today is no different we merely have a host of other channels to use social media being one of them.

Using social media effectively for your thought leadership content

Let’s skip ahead.  You’ve done your research and you know that a lot of your market is consuming social media.  At this point it’s probably worth considering SKM’s Dale Bryce’s question in tweet# 120: “Are you ensuring your thought leadership facilitates a dialog?  Think of it as a conversation.”

One of the most critical aspects of any content is whether it facilitates customer engagement and acquisition.   I am singularly and cynically commercial in my view of thought leadership and content – if it is not driving engagement or acquisition why do it.

If you are using social media platforms to share your thought leadership content you may want to consider the following to measure its success:

1. Identify your prospect’s buying cycle – have you identified the various stages of the engagement and customer buying cycle and are you modifying your content for each stage and using the appropriate channels at each stage? For example what formats do your customers/prospects want – are you offering more than one option e.g. a powerpoint, a pdf, audio, video, etc
2. Leverage your content – do you have a process to make sure you’re sharing your content and leveraging it appropriately across all the relevant social media channels and are you optimising your content.  Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) has changed and now it is all about targeted content using the key words people search for when looking for information on your topic and, more importantly, gaining links from authoritative influencers.
3. Go visual – all trends indicate that the visual mediums of YouTube, Slidshare, Pinterest, Instagram and using things like Infographics is the way people are trending in their consumption of content.  Are you graphically interpreting your content to take advantage of this trend?
4. Gear your content for earned media – are you paying enough attention to making your content shareable.  One of the greatest powers of social media is the ability for people to share your content.  Are you designing your content to be shareable and to make it easy for people to link to it?
5. Quantify the revenue impact – there is tons of content on this topic but one stands out – businesses will only allocate big money to your social media campaign if they understand which of your social media channels is truly working.  This means you have to find ways to gather feedback and data that better informs your understanding of your prospects at the various stages of the buying cycle and then critically what impact your content is having on them.

Your metrics may show how many back links you have, how many eyeballs you attracted, how many retweets you received, how many downloads you had, your click-through rate but the bottom line is whether your content enables you to capture these visitors, convert them into leads and ultimately nurture them into customers?

I leave you with this thought.  Research in a report by KPMG in 2011 “Going Social: How businesses are making the most of social media” found that regardless of industry group or ownership structure, business adoption rates for social media now average around the 70% mark around the world.  Perhaps even more tellingly, the report found that a high proportion of consumers now use social media to inform their purchasing decisions.

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 in 2009: “Brand Stand: seven steps to thought leadership”

Join him on twitter @thoughtstrategy and on LinkedIn.

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’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 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.

#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.