The Goals of Thought Leadership
This is what we want to happen
When we intentionally embark on thought leadership, what are we hoping will happen? We’re clearly hoping for something, but we don’t really talk about it much – the value of thought leadership is unspoken. We all just assume that there’s value.
Let’s talk about the professional value, in concrete terms. What are we hoping will actually happen?
Here are some scenarios, in descending order of obvious value.
Direct Sales Opportunities
Clearly, this is the dream scenario – someone sees something you did and thinks, “They might be able to do that for me too!” and they get in touch.
This isn’t a pipe dream – this actually happened to me at Blend on multiple occasions. And this was… acute. Someone would read one specific thing, and write to me. We could trace hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue to this.
Brand Perception
If you can’t have the above, then it’s nice to start to building the perception as someone who does smart things and thinks deeply about a particular industry or discipline. This is less acute and more …chronic (I don’t love that word, but I lack a better one).
The idea is that your content becomes this background drum beat in an audience’s head, and, over time, they come to believe you have a lot of knowledge about a particular subject area.
In advertising, they call this “top of mind awareness,” and there’s an entire genre of ad placement around it. These are ads that don’t make a specific offer or call to action, but just serve as a… reminder, that a company exists and offers services in some capacity.
This is what a steady stream of thought leadership content does for the individual or the organization. They start to become “top of mind” around a particular topic.
Professional Networking
The audience for thought leadership might be peers, not customers. In this scenario, other people who work in your same industry come to believe you are a competent member of the that community. This opens up communication and networking opportunities that wouldn’t normally exist. (See below for a concrete example.)
In every group or community, there’s an “inner circle” that often sets the agenda or the zeitgeist. Maybe not proactively – one imagines a hooded cabal working in the shadows – but rather just by virtue of attention command and convening power. People listen to them, and over time, they influence the course of thinking in their particular discipline.
Personal Development
Analyzing and preparing something for publication really forces you to examine it. You have to consider it from an outside perspective – can someone with no inside knowledge understand and make sense of it? In doing this, you come to understand the problem and the solution so much better.
I wrote about this once:
It’s not hard to hold random, unexamined thoughts in your head. They’re not set in stone. It’s easy to keep them, forget them, lie about them, pretend you thought something different, evolve them, etc.
But when you write something down, it’s much more …stark. It’s on a page. It’s a record that other people can read without you there to spin it.
Thought leadership is ideas or opinions, codified. They’re set in a form where they have to defend themselves. The process of “arming” them, or setting up their defenses, is the source of incredible personal growth.
This is absolutely key in developing professional confidence. You know those people who can eloquently present an argument or a theory with utter conviction? I promise you it’s not the first time they’ve said whatever they’re saying. Behind every person who impresses you on a conference stage is someone who wrote and threw away a dozen arguments that didn’t sound right to them.
SEO Fodder
I don’t know where it fits into the priority list. A lot of thought leadership content is a very rich target for people searching the internet for things.
The differentiation from “direct sales opportunities” to general SEO content is one of causality. In a perfect world, someone reads something you write and gets in touch about that specific thing. However, often, someone searching for something finds something you wrote, and then starts investigating a little more, and consuming more traditional marketing content, and converts sometime later.
Same concept, just less direct (and, therefore, much harder to attribute).
It’s pretty clear that #1 is the dream scenario from a direct financial standpoint – write words, get money!
#2 and #3 are longer plays. They’re both indirect. Being seen as a smart person among customers and peers in your industry can and does lead to financial opportunities, but it’s not direct and it can be hard to link it back to what you’re in terms of content creation.
#4 is something most people don’t think about, but there’s enormous value there. The process of developing content is often a “rehearsal” for explaining it later. I’ve spent a career quoting things and telling anecdotes that I worked through earlier during some effort to create content around it.
An Example
Once, at Blend, we went through our top 10 customers and analyzed each one to find out where the initial contact was – what brought us into that deal? And we hopscotched all the way back: if Client X came in through a friendship with Person Y, well, how did we meet Person Y?
We found that something like 9 out of the 10 could be traced back to something I was doing that did not involve billing an hour to a customer.
Here’s how one such example played out –
I wrote a lot of blog posts about CMS. I started doing this in about 2003, and I started a web development company in 2005, so I had a body of published content out there.
I applied to speak at a conference in 2008 and was accepted (my first speaking gig) largely on the strength of what I had created in the past.
At this conference, I met The Guy. He gave a talk about CMS that resonated with me, and I had a conversation with him between sessions.
The Guy and I kept in touch. He followed my blog (RSS was big back then), and we connected on LinkedIn and Twitter. We started a running dialog about CMS.
The Guy did CMS selection consulting, and he thought of me – and, by extension, my company – when he was helping an organization pick a CMS and an implementor. He asked us to come pitch the prospect in 2009.
It was a big opportunity, and I was worried we weren’t big enough or experienced enough to land it. But I “knew” Another Guy as a regular commentor on my blog who worked in a related discipline and who would bring something valuable to the pitch. I asked him to come into this opportunity to help.
We won the project. The only reason I was in the project was because of the content I had created (#1, which led to #2 and #3). And our execution of the pitch was helped immeasurably by the participation of Another Guy, who was also available and willing because of #1.
That is a longer play, and it’s clearly harder to attribute. But it happened, and it wasn’t an isolated incident.That entire sequence of events really depended on the original practice of me writing a lot of content about CMS with no particular concept of what it would lead to.
A Selfish Fantasy
Let’s fantasize for a bit about a “thought leader at the height of their power,” meaning someone who has attained the upper echelons of regard in their industries. These are the people who everyone looks to and ascribes to become.
What advantages do they possess?
They have a continual stream of job offers, both consulting if they’re freelance, or paid positions if they’re employed somewhere. They are in such demand, that they can raises their rates or salary expectations and employers will meet them.
They likely also have opportunities for sinecures – pseudo-ceremonial positions that offer prestige and payment without large amounts of work (think, serving on a board, teaching a course, etc.).
Their employment prospects are so deep that when they require employment, they can pick from a wide variety of options to find the job that brings them the most satisfaction.
If serving in a paid position, they have the authority and autonomy to pursue speculative ideas and programs. In many cases, organizations will simply trust that some wild idea will provide business value in the future, and will give them the latitude to self-organize programs around it.
They are in demand for events. They are pursued to speak at conferences, have their expenses paid, often receive a speaking fee, are promoted as a featured of the event, and their participation drives attendance. They have “convening power.” People will attend a conference to hear them speak or travel somewhere to meet them.
Content they produce is received with some fanfare and shared widely.
They can alter the thinking of their industry. They can develop and promote a framework, a way of thinking, some nomenclature, or a strategic emphasis that gets adopted and becomes a known standard or point of reference among people in that industry.
They can affect the flow of business through their industry. Their adoption of a product or service will drive others to adopt it as well, and can change the financial status of the companies that provide them.
They have…respect. People know them. People listen to what they say. To have their attention is considered valuable.
Again, to be clear – this is a some level of narcissistic fantasy.
But it does help to be clear at what the unspoken goal is. Many people dream of getting to this point – for whatever reasons – so let’s just be open about it. There are absolutely people who have used thought leadership to get to this level.