Breaking Down Thought Leadership
The whole is made up of smaller parts
When discussing thought leadership, there are smaller pieces that need to be defined or identified so that we can talk about them.
This is in rough order of appearance.
The Work
Thought leadership is based around some experience, either acute or aggregate:
Acute experience is a specific moment, scenario, or project that resulted in some insight
Aggregate experience in a career-long collection of acute experiences and the collected insight that comes from it
I’m prepared to make this a universal point: thought leadership always communicates some experience, whether that be a specific problem that was solved, or an opinion or perspective derived from the wisdom of a body of work.
The Artifact
Thought leadership manifests in an “artifact” of some kind. This is a concrete piece of media or or a specific experience:
I talk a bit more about the specific types here: Artifacts
Obviously, this is content.
Thought leadership simply has to manifest, usually in some persistent, unattended form. It has to focus into some media that can be communicated. There are of people doing a lot of amazing things that never come to a focus like this.
I don’t think thought leadership can be targeted. Meaning, if I do a workshop or a technical brief for a specific customer, that’s not the same thing. That’s just work product.
Thought leadership doesn’t know who will consume it. It’s a thing we put out in the world, usually for public consumption, without knowing exactly who will perceive it or how.
The Attribution
Thought leadership has to “source” from someone or some organization. In practical terms, there always some byline associated with it.
Remember, this is a demonstration of value – it’s a claim that what’s in this particular artifact is representative of acute or aggregate experience, and that experience “belongs” to some source. Usually, it’s an individual person, but some gets published from a “team” or organization as a group.
If there’s no byline, then there’s no… target of that value demonstration. It becomes “just” content (quoted because content is still great, it just doesn’t have the larger purpose of thought leadership).
See The Voice.
The Process
At its largest and most systemic level, thought leadership can become a process or a program. To be sure, a lot of great content is spontaneous and unmanaged – some person gives a single, great conference talk, or just starts blogging somewhere.
It’s rarer that a person or an organization embarks on thought leadership with “intention aforethought” and a systemic plan for maximizing the production of it and benefits to be obtained from it.
The Channel
This is the transmission mechanism – how does the artifact get in front of the consumer?
In more practical terms, where is the artifact posted or published? On a website? In social media? At a conference?
How is it promoted, both from a campaign perspective and point-to-point? How is it framed? How do your sellers and customer success people communicate it to their prospects and customers?
The Consumer
Finally, we have the human who consumes the information. All the stuff we’ve done so far has been with the goal of getting something in front of a person who can (1) benefit from it, and (2) form or improve their opinion of the skill and knowledge of the creator.
A lot of what we do is very subjective. It’s right so some people, wrong for others. But we’re always aiming at a human.
There’s actually a name for what happens when someone consumes content: a “quale,” or “qualia” in the plural.
an instance of subjective, conscious experience
So one person consuming content one time is a quale. However, the marketing industry usually uses a more common word: “experience.”
And this is what the entire goal of this exercise is: the experience of consuming content. Let’s walk it forward from the beginning:
- You do the work
- That gets recorded as content
- That content results in multiple artifacts
- Humans consuming those artifacts becomes a series of experiences
That’s it – that’s the breakdown. The entire process of thought leadership is your work becoming an experience by another human.