Re-Thinking Thought Leadership; Part II — State-of-the-Art ‘ThoughtSpeak’ and The Scoop on Social Sharing
Ten Simple Steps to Light your Thought Leadership on Fire!
Organizing to innovate is important, but once you have set-up a capability to create Thought Leadership, it’s essential that you give conscious consideration to how you are received by the reader, before you put pen to paper. Millenials on down to the up and coming Gen Z, have very specific ways in which they like to be engaged. Obviously it will take a seamless digital delivery to entice an attention-challenged audience, but more than that, people today don’t want to be lectured — or sold to — they want to be in peer-to-peer, collaborative conversations. If your thought leadership isn’t providing that type of experience, you may well miss the mark.
4) INVESTIGATE: As organizations consider re-designing their Thought Leadership approaches, it will be essential to listen to the voice of the customer. Don’t make any decisions until you have investigated what type of collateral clients expect, and where they want to receive their information. Consider developing demographics and new customer demands.
Just the Facts; Listening to Client
After organizing your enterprise to support the creation of thought leadership — it’s time to get to work. There are two distinct actions necessary for the formation of an exemplary Thought Leadership program — Content Creation and Content Distribution. To learn how to create POVs that would resonate with clients, we turned to the market for information. We wanted to see what clients wanted to consume — and how they wanted to consume it.
In a recent Thought Leadership study by The Economist, it was found that when business professionals peruse the internet for business content, 75% of the time they are researching a business idea. They are looking for collaborative solution's, they are looking for knowledge and they are looking for fresh ideas. And yet large product and service providers often miss their mark. 93% of business marketers say they directly connect their content to a product or service — exactly what clients are telling us they don’t want.
71% of executives said they don’t like it when content sounds more like a sales pitch than useful information. And yet encouragingly, 67% of C-Suite executives say that when they receive timely or unique information from a company, it has a meaningful impact on the perception of the brand. That’s powerful.
5) EXPRESS: The way customers, and people, expect to be related to has changed. Consumers today want peer-to-peer collaboration and a conversational tone. Express expert opinions and insights but keep from mixing Thought Leadership with Sales messaging. Be certain your POVs are consumable on mobile devices and include lots of Visuals and Statistics to encourage viewers to read on!
Finding our Voice
Not only is it important to move away from sales in your Thought Leadership, it may also be necessary to change your tone to allow your Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) to deliver the frank insights clients crave today. A key difference is that modern Thought Leadership allows people to get into real conversations — with other real people. If delivered well, valuable information, shared eloquently and honestly, can sell an organization better than a sales pitch ever could.
The POVs we help SMEs produce are always delivered in a conversational, peer-to-peer tone of collaboration. They are empathetic and use quotes from our contributors, or are written in the first person, to illustrate our people’s expertise, in their own voices. Our pieces show rather than tell — they are never sales oriented and they do not preach — or pretend to have all the answers. Instead they ask important and intelligent questions, and lay out the future landscape and valuable next steps, recognizing each client is different.
The articles use great Visuals and lots of Statistics — and they show up beautifully on your mobile device and make your LinkedIn page pop. Although there may be a place for long verse, technical papers and/or detailed white papers, most of the time clients are hoping to digest something quickly and easily.
The Thought Leadership we create with SMEs are just the right read time (1200 words, 5–6 minutes) — perfect for a morning commute. You always laugh and you always learn something new. They are written by industry professionals for industry professionals. They are human, they are fun — and they are incredibly well received.
6) PUBLICIZE: Where and how Thought Leadership is shared is equally important as how its created. You can’t concentrate on one and not the other. Studies show that corporate-sponsored sites and paid media linked to product and services discourage readership. Find new modern channels for sharing. Choose a way to publicize quickly and easily with the ability to re-act real-time to market shifts, and optimize client reach. Take a grass roots approach and meet customers where they are rather than one way messaging from a corporate site. Carefully crafted Thought Leadership will bring professionals together with other professionals. Person to person, vs person to brand.
A New ‘Medium’
After organizing an enterprise to create Thought Leadership, and deciding on voice and design, it’s time to get serious about finding a way to dynamically get into conversation with clients. We knew how we wanted to reach out to clients, but where would our Thought Leadership live?
We thought carefully about how to share with our audience and decided we would rather reach out from a Thought Leadership site, than a corporate one that may contain sales messaging. We also wanted to bring readers’ attention to our Thought Leadership site, where they could see all of the exciting things we were writing about across industries and geographical regions. By inviting clients back to our site, we are able to illustrate the full breadth of SMEs market expertise and show, rather than tell, why the firm should be considered to be a partner of choice.
Our group followed other progressive IBM internal start-ups to a great new Thought Leadership site, Medium. Medium is a platform for Thought Leaders to share their writing, which allows us to post dynamically, design beautifully and reach our clients in a sleek and modern way. It allows us to be in community with other Thought Leaders and gives us instant and easy access to our audience.
Additionally, Medium supplies us with excellent metrics that help us understand our growing readership down to each paper, letting us know what performs best with our audience. And so, a beautiful, modern Thought Leadership site for IBM SMEs was born. Welcome to Into theFuture.
We have had an incredibly positive experience sharing on Into the Future. In only the first two weeks of publication we earned a “Top Tech Writer Award” and “Top AI Award” from the Medium platform, which visitors to the site now see. There are other Thought Leadership sites to choose from as well, just ensure the channel you select is user friendly and delivers interesting and informative stats.
Thoughtful Thought Leadership
The long and short of Thought Leadership today, and moving forward, is quite simply — everything has changed. If your Thought Leadership and Marketing teams are functioning the same way they were in the past — Houston, you have a problem.
Here are the steps;
Everything about how you communicate to your customers should be looked at through a new lens. The consumers of your content have radically transformed, and its time for you to as well. At hand, a future of Thoughtful Thought leadership — welcome to the party!
