The Formats and Artifacts of Thought Leadership
What concrete forms does it take?
We’ve already discussed the difference between “thought leadership” as a concept and a “thought leadership artifact” as a concrete thing. The grand concept emergences from the continued publication of the artifacts.
We’ve also discussed the types in terms of what tone or style something might take.
In putting this list together, I’m struck by all the facets through which you can look at any particular artifact.
Format: is it words, video, audio, a presentation, etc. (this is what we’re talking about here)
Tone: we talked about this in The Types; is it Investigatory, Theoretical, Experiential, etc.
Channel: where is it published? Your own website, LinkedIn, StackOverlow, some industry publication, etc.
Given that let’s (try to) make a simple list of the actual artifacts someone might create.
A Blog Post, Article, or Social Media Post
This is words. Where it’s posted and what tone it takes are separate issues, but the fact remains that the web is made of mainly of words.
A Conference Session
This is both the actual event, given to the people in the room, and any recording or summary of the content presented there.
A Conference or Social Event
This is a period in time when a group of people is gathered, either in-person or virtually, the interaction that happens there, and the memories created from it.
An Audio or Video Perfomance
This is a recording of you – with or without video – saying something of value.
An Infographic
This is a unit of information displayed as a self-contained graphic.
A Video Demo
This is a screen recording showing the use of some product or some technique.
A Tool or Asset
This is some helpful tool you have offered that is freely given for use by others.
A Survey or Other “Zeitgeist” Compilation
This is some aggregation of perspectives or opinions from the wider community.
An Evaluation Framework or Model
This is some framework of evaluation, often branded and presented with a visual component, such as a graph or ranking quadrant
Here’s one of the real goals: translate a thought – a “unit” of thought leadership – into more than one artifact. This, of course, is not specific to thought leadership. This is more of a general principle of content marketing.
We need to work at separating the content from the artifact. The content is what you want to get across. It’s the idea, tutorial, narrative, or whatever that is providing value to the consumer. The artifact is just the horse that it rides in on.
A key question: how many artifacts can you make from one unit of content?