Re-Thinking Thought Leadership, Part III; Eco-System Marketing* and the Metrics of Measuring!
See also… Re-Thinking Thought Leadership; 10 Simple Steps to Light your Thought Leadership on Fire!, PART I: Organizing for Innovation
and…Re-Thinking Thought Leadership, PART II:State-of-the-Art ‘ThoughtSpeak’ and The Scoop on Social Sharing
Social Media Sharing Strategy
Not only do communication professionals need to change the way we create content — we also need to change the way we disseminate it. As discussed in Part II, at IBM we are utilizing new hire, on-boarders to help us do social listening. Not only are they learning about everything we do across the practice, but they are communicating, and building relationships with, influencers throughout the industry.
Its smart to actively compile a formidable database of Industry Sites, LinkedIn Communities, Twitter Handles and Influencers — fellow professionals active in conversations about your business. As you continue your conversation with the market, optimize your reach by connecting with a whole universe of folks already identified as interested in aspects of your business. With a growing database, your distribution becomes better, easier — and more personalized. Best of all — this helps professionals establish new relationships within the industry — and your followers grow daily!
7) DISSEMINATE: The explosion of Social Media Sharing opportunities has never been more accessible than it is right now. Industry Sites, LinkedIn Communities, Twitter Handles and Influencer Blogs are all avenues for Thought Leaders to get into direct conversation with intended audiences. Create and incessantly expand data bases of interested, involved market participants to make sharing faster, easier — and more customized. Be certain to employ ‘Eco-System’ marketing to exponentially improve readership and reach
Eco-System Marketing
We have found a lot of success implementing something call “Eco-System Marketing”. After creating each piece of content, we meet with contributors, and ask them where they would like to see their work shared — their Thought Leadership ‘wishlist’ if you please. We honor their input and we head off in the direction of where the team feels their clients go for information. With this approach, we are simply sharing our Thought Leadership with influencers and, if they like what they read, we ask them to share with their professional networks. We in turn, do the same!
Here’s Eco-System Marketing in action. A partner wrote an article about Blockchain Implementation. When discussing with him what his ‘Social Media Wish list’ was he noted he would love to have his piece show up on a new Blockchain TL site, Bravenewcoin.com
By reaching out to that site and getting to know the editors, Brave New Coin picked us up and syndicated our article to their 270K viewers/month — but that’s not all. From Bravenewcoin.com we were then asked if we would like to be picked up and syndicated by the TABBForum. The TABBForum, “Where Capital Markets Speak,” which is a highly-respected site, ran our Blockchain piece on their front page — allowing us to enjoy their 40,000/day, or 14.5 million views/year readership.
Additionally, we are building relationships in which others trust us to bring them insightful, intelligent Thought Leadership, and we’ve been encouraged to share again. This ‘Eco-system Marketing’ approach is allowing a small team of 2 to scale up quickly, and reach impressive results at low costs. Most recently we’ve been republished on Cloud Tweaks and AITrends, two industry specific publications where market influencers read extensive stories on the future of their industry.
8) INFORM: Inform your business about the POVs you are creating and sharing. The involvement of an organization is key to making a Thought Leadership initiative a success. Optimize any chance you get to educate your teams about the subject matters being covered, and ask them to share published content with their own personal, profession network. Encourage individuals to introduce clients to your organizations thought leadership, and nurture opportunities for cross-selling.
Forget Engaging the Practice — How About Igniting It!
Once a Thought Leadership Capability had been built, Practitioners couldn’t be prouder of what they have achieved. Every week we call out to the Practice in a “Hey Fam” newsletter, informing them of the work their colleagues have published. We ask them to share our TL with their personal professional network — and they’re having a ball! Our Partners watch in joy as their papers earn 1000’s of views in just a few days on LinkedIn — with similar success from other practitioners who share their colleagues’ stories on their LinkedIn pages as well. The practitioners are reporting that they are getting more attention than ever before!
Because of the excitement over our success, folks are signing up for twitter and slowly but surely adopting — and awakening — a culture of storytelling within the practice. Our authors/contributors have been amazed at the success they’ve found writing in their own voice about the challenges in their industry — and the initiative is catching on fire! Our business’s other sectors started hearing about what we had going on in Financial Services— and they want in. We now include 15 thousand practitioners, and we’re growing stronger everyday with their help!
Business Values
9) ASSESS: Look to Metrics, both Quantitative and Qualitative, to determine whether your approach is working. Evaluate the performance of individual POVs to understand better what is resonating with customers. Look at the results of your program holistically and be patient as you build your database. Rome, as they say, was not built in a day — nor will your market share or audience reach.
Our new Practitioner generated POV site, Into the Future soon took off. Because we are taking the time to write unique, interesting pieces about real life challenges from the voice of our consultants — our writing is really resonating with our audience. Our Social Media Marketing Strategy, together with our Eco-System Marketing approach could not be working better. Although traditional measures like ROI are difficult to extract, following are both the quantitative and qualitative result we have experienced.
Quantitative Results
In the 8 months, we have been in existence we have generated more than 65 pieces of Thought Leadership, publishing on behalf of over 85 practitioners and Forums.
But that’s not the best. Due to our commitment to our Eco-System Marketing approach and widening relationships with influencers and their followers — we are expanding our reach to a potential audience of approximately 2,500,000 viewers every time we publish our POVs. And that number grows by approx. 200,000/day as we connect with more and more market influencers with large followings! This initiative only started October 1st and has already beat our wildest expectations — and all this practically cost free!
Qualitative Results
In the 8 months since inception, the practice has also been accumulating qualitative success. Both clients and employees are reeking the benefits, as the thought leadership continues to branch out across the industry.
10) ENCOURAGE: Encourage your team to use the implementation of a new Thought Leadership approach to engage in still more innovative initiatives. The relationships and knowledge unearthed by the process described above will most certainly infect your business with a new buzz and a new energy smart managers will plug into. Invigorate your team and enjoy the spectacular results a new view will allow.
Other Complimentary Collaborations
Tech Talks
Our StoryTelling Team soon became the Hub for innovative initiatives throughout the practice, which was our plan all along. For instance, we just created a new tech meet — up program called ‘Tech Talks.’ In it we bring new tech start-ups to talk to us about their journeys. Learning from and with these sharp new entrants keeps us informed and lets us build relationships in the Tech community — furthering our readership even more!
Tilt — Thought Leaders of Tomorrow
We have also just launched another program called “Tilt — TLT — Thought Leaders of Tomorrow”. We recognize the value that both Academics, and Students, can add to discussions around technological transformation. As such, we are asking if professors will read our Thought Leadership, and if they find it interesting, share it with their students. We aim to establish reciprocal relationships with Academic Thought Leaders — even offering them to guest write for our site “Into the Future”. We are sure this program will forge relationships, readership and recruitment. One Professor has already gladly shared our Thought Leadership with his network of over 200,000 followers!
SpotLight Series
We have also launched a new SpotLight Series, which calls out the cutting edge work our people are doing. Last week we featured a super bright group who turned POCs into working demos — and oh, shot pitch videos on their iPhones 7s — all within three days! Here we are illustrating how new employees are embracing the speed we need to deliver to clients, in a market where time waits for no man.
Conclusion
Building Support for Innovation
Now that practitioners are learning that they have help to tell their stories, The TL capability we’ve built receives new story ideas daily from the practice, additionally we have become the go-to team for help in launching all types of other engagement activities. It’s amazing the creativity you can ignite by just giving brilliant people the time and space to innovate. In a time when technology is re-creating industries every day, companies can’t afford not to keep Thought Leadership current and connected to client. Don’t dare to doubt that disruption is leaving no stone unturned. Except change, welcome challenge — And Re-think your Thought Leadership.
