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That was the question I was recently asked by my friend Vivienne Neale. I wasn’t sure how to reply. After all, we all have our “thought leaders” whom we follow. Me, I always wanted to be part of a community where doing meaningful things made belonging matter. Honestly, I don’t consider myself a thought leader. I simply shared my ideas and work because I felt alone in my mission to change the future of business. I’ve always believed I couldn’t do it alone. I, we, needed one another to learn, unlearn, grow and change.
I once said that becoming a thought leader is about YOU being inspired to do something that helps someone else....
I found this genuine love for the craft of marketing to be a common thread among marketing experts while I was researching and creating the new list of 103 Genuine Marketing Thought Leaders. I noticed every person on the list had a passion for marketing driving them to explore, push the bounds, and do what marketers do best: be creative. For these marketers, “being creative” means everything from using comics to sell enterprise software (Tom Fishburne, #2) and blowing up the idea of branding (Cindy Gallop #9) to understanding the connection between doorknobs and white papers (Donald Norman #8). Ideas from these passionate marketers are changing the face of marketing and how it is executed....
...When it comes to organic search, Google and other search engines place a premium on backlinks. They interpret backlinks as “votes” for the content.Of course, to generate backlinks, you must create content that prompts other digital properties to share your content with their audiences.
For the type of content that grades out as shareable, it’s typically not product information or a personnel announcement or an industry award — information we characterize as company-centric. Instead, it’s the type of business storytelling that’s useful or informative and ultimately helps people in their jobs.In short, thought leadership plays at the industry level, not the company level, ideally offering takes that can’t be found elsewhere.
Such dot-connecting points to blogging as one of the best platforms for thought leadership....
Social media thought leadership requires both direct and indirect tactics. Using your own social media channels is your direct reach. It is limited by the quality and size of your audiences on each of the social networks you use and how attentive your audiences are to your posts. You can improve attentiveness by being interesting, engaging and useful, but there are limits to what you can do with direct outreach here.
It is via indirect channels that you truly become a thought leader. When people share your posts with their networks, when they seek you out for answers to their questions and when they start talking about your ideas without even mentioning you, that is what thought leadership has become.
When the press retweet you; when experts and policymakers follow you and incorporate your ideas into their work; when these things happen to you, you are a thought leader....
...On the Web, people trade attention for good, useful content. So you need to have a plan that will help you develop, publish, and catalog content to make you more effective in attracting search and keeping people coming back to your source. There are still companies that struggle with the idea of becoming content producers, and thus have not yet formulated a content strategy. It makes sense to have one because it helps you define why content is useful and usable, good for the bottom line and for instilling a sense of purpose -- for customers and business alike. Some organizations are affected by the sprawling issue when it comes to content. Separate groups that develop their own and don't necessarily map to the business' overall direction is one example. Others have the opposite problem -- too few resources means not enough content to start generating the search and participation volumes they need....
You can be the leading "media company" in your industry. Make the choice, and bolster your content marketing efforts with these 7 moves that will give you the advantage over your media competitors. ...Seven ways to take the media world by storm None of this is rocket science, but combined together, the following seven tips will create a powerful concoction that will be hard for any company, including media companies and your direct competitors, to compete with....
...Organizations such as Intel are beginning to look and operate more like media companies. They’re evaluating topics and trends in real-time and creating a brand narrative across multiple networks, a transition that doesn’t happen overnight. It takes a lot of content to fuel that many channels–and a dedicated team to manage the ideation, creation, and analysis of that content. More importantly, it takes a lot of quality content to generate engagement with audiences across continents and timezones, and for Intel engagement is a key metric. In fact, Intel conducted a study benchmarking the Facebook engagement rates of other brands similar to Intel in size and standing. They found–much to their delight–that Intel came out on top with higher levels of engagement than any of the other brands. Intel also discovered that organic engagement (vs. paid) had steadily increased over time, confirming the right content is hitting the right audience. But how does Intel come up with the “right” content, then find the “right” audience? What are they doing differently than those other brands?...
...I agree that content curation is often misunderstood and, therefore, misused as a shortcut to thought leadership. And I have no quarrel with the point that you need to create your own content that articulates your vision in order to establish thought leadership.
However, I would say it differently.
Thought leadership is about demonstrating clarity of vision and in order to establish it you need to create content that expresses that vision. But you also need to show that you can recognize that vision in others. To my mind, thought leaders both articulate their own vision and identify it and tease it out of other people’s work. It’s not an either/or proposition....
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With everyone claiming to be an expert should you listen to? This list of 103 marketing thought leaders is made to help answer that question. It's also incorporated into Twitter lists so you can easily follow everyone with a single click.
It may seem tempting to seek out people in your industry who have millions of followers on social media, but don’t get ahead of yourself. While there’s nothing wrong with including them in your strategy, pay attention to the little guys too. Many people in your industry are well-known among a niche crowd, and they may be much more accessible than a CEO with 10 million Twitter followers.
So how do you go about finding these influencers? Here are five different tools you can use.
Perhaps we don’t have that much in common. Ah, but we do. Personal brands are we. Our agendas may differ—better job, more clients, book sales, or (your goal here)—but we seek the same things: recognition, respect, influence and success.
You, my friend, are a brand.
A photographer. Life coach. Presentation expert. Alternative energy entrepreneur. Website developer. Skin care clinician. These are six simplified profiles of clients who have hired me recently to help them create more effective online marketing by developing their personal brand....
What is thought leadership? It’s a question that I recently asked myself after reading about Michigan’s Lake Superior State University’s annual list of overused words and phrases that students deem worthy of banishment from the English language. Among the offenders in 2011 were some tried-and-true favorites (ginormous and man cave to name a couple), as well as relative newcomers to our daily vernacular like occupy (as in Zuccotti Park) and the new normal, a darling of Wall Street since the financial crisis.
All in all it’s not a bad list, but it seems to me that our friends at LSSU missed an obvious target. I’m talking about 17 letters that can be combined to form what has become a ubiquitous and, frankly, increasingly cliché term: thought leadership...
Two important but too-unsung women in media — performer Amanda Palmer and Google ad exec Susan Wojcicki — met at an idea this week: that media and advertising are becoming voluntary. They also touch on ideas I’ve been trying to write about: that media should be in the relationship business, not just the content business. In other words, media’s value isn’t necessarily intrinsic in content — as in, “you should pay for this product because the work to create it has value” — but can be realized in the relationships that form around content....
... “So WHAT IS thought leadership? It’s an inside baseball term. Can you define it?” Good question But it’s also one that we marketers also need to ask ourselves. Even among marketers there seems to be some confusion about what thought leadership is. I often hear people use thought leadership as a synonym for content marketing – another big buzzword du jour. But they are not one and the same thing. Not at all. Thought leadership, to summarize Forrester Research analyst Jeff Ernst, is the strategic process of coming up with and sharing big ideas, insights and new perspectives on the critical issues that buyers face....
Thought leadership is content on steroids. It stands out from the crowd because it is different; it offers something new and the good campaigns deliver information or insights that address a client’s challenges or issues. In some cases really brilliant thought leadership shifts paradigms of an entire industry. Thought leadership is no ordinary content but rather content that sets one brand apart from the competition and, in the process, leverages a phenomenal platform for trust and engagement. Good thought leadership content is sophisticated and intelligent and should be packaging and delivered appropriately to a defined audience. And herein lies the key....
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Brian Solis shares a short and to-the-point definition of thought leadership.