What is Thought Leadership?

Great but dense infographic on what contributes to your personal brand. But a bit overwhelming too... So where can you start and what should you focus on? 

Hint: look at the letter C...

Eric Wittlake makes a simple but great point on how to measure thought leadership, a concept that's easy to understand but can remain fuzzy to demonstrate for marketers. 

Are you mentioned by others?

If developing thought leadership is a goal of your content marketing efforts, you should see people mentioning you more and more. 

A great way to do that is:

1. Build your website or blog as a content hub, a resource filled with relevant created or curated content that others can easily point to.

2. Track mentions on social media, blogs and media as we do: a Scoop.it page combined with our suggestion engine tracking your brand as a keyword is a great, simple way to do that. 

To build on that observation, Altimeter's Rebecca Lieb and Jessica Groopman provide an interesting framework for organizations to think about their content culture. 

As we've commented before, one of the main challenges that companies face is to involve more people in what they call the creativity phase: busy professionals don't have time to blog let alone create stunning visual content. Yet, they probably sit on a content gold mine that they underestimate and that is lost to the organization. Collaborative content curation provides interesting and practical answers to facilitate that second phase and spread a culture of content: it not only makes it easy for employees to contribute the interesting articles they read to the corporate content effort but it also makes it rewarding them by helping them show thought leadership in the process. 

Colleen Eakins makes a great point: whether you like it or not, you have a personal brand and, in particular, an online reputation. As we say at Scoop.it, "you are the content you publish".

So you should do something about this as she points out and goes on to give some interesting tips. While most of these tips are practical, one which is much harder than it seems is "start blogging". Blogging is something than I've seen a lot more people start than succeed at. Why? Because it takes a lot of time and talent to be successful with blogging. If you're not sure to have both, your blog is likely to end up empty or outdated which is going to hurt... your personal brand. 

Back to square one.

The solution? While creating original content every week is tough when you have a full time job already, you're already sitting on a content goldmine. By curating what you found valuable to read, you'll help your network not only understand what your expertise is but you'll bring them valuable insights and chances are they'll be grateful for that. 

"Thought Leadership doesn't directly aim to sell, but educate, advise and in some case entertain", says Molli Bucini. However, for professionals and businesses, this is a marketing action.

There is no KPI yet directly measuring influence, reputation or Thought Leadership - no magic button on Google Analytics either. However, the basic Content Marketing analytics must be tracked:

• repeat visitors
• bounce rate
• mention and share
• and eventually in-site conversion.

All of them, and more, discussed in this post.

Reminds me of the situation of Social Media marketing some years ago: professionals and businesses realized they needed to be active on SM, before they could actually measure their impact (well... most professionals and businesses - this was not obvious for all, actually). Detailed ROI analysis matures as we progress, it's a step by step process. But we should not wait for a mathematical proof before we demonstrate our Thought Leadership through a relevant Content Marketing strategy.

"A majority of marketers (85% out of 400 surveyed) pursue content curation to establish thought leadership".

Main motivations:

1. Relevance

2. Insightfulness

3. Shareability

Curation is not Thought Leadership. But it's an effective way to demonstrate Thought Leadership: know your industry and feed your audience with relevant, industry-related (and not ego-related) content.

No time for blogging is less and less an excuse when you consider these 3 hacks. 

The word blog can be intimidating as to a lot of us, it means crafting beautifully written 1,000-word articles. And a lot of us don't have time or skills for that. 

But it doesn't have to be defined this way. 

What most professionals need is a way to express their thoughts and show their expertise in an easy but meaningful way. These tips are a good demonstration that in this age of short attention span, there is no direct correlation between:

- the time to publish content

- the length of that content

- the attention it will get

So it's time to save time and publish. Because you are what you publish.

@Ron Sela put together a great post on thought leadership giving 5 views on thought leadership that are different but that nicely complete one another. 

As he summarizes, becoming a thought leader as a professional or as a company deals with communication and content: "thought leadership takes a unique perspective, a layered approach to disseminating the information, and the ability to provide accurate, relevant, and valuable information."

More than many other factors, it's their content that makes thought leaders what they are: trusted and followed.

Brian Fanzo shares his secrets: the influencer known for talking fast and tweeting even faster has an impressive list of tools for creating, curating, distributing and showcasing content that reflects his personal brand and - more importantly - his voice. As he puts it, a fundamental step before building your personal brand is defining your voice and your story.

What I note in this article is the above extract which almost sounds like a confession. If you've ever met Brian, you know he's full of energy and passion and... he's not afraid to talk. Yet, even he admits that creating content can be overwhelming before making a strong case for content curation as a way to build your personal brand.

When content curation started as a trend, some were opposing it to creation and overlooked its impact on helping experts of all kinds show thought leadership. One of the common myths is even that thought leaders only rely on original content.

In this post, Ron Sela, named one of the Top 50 influencers in B2B Marketing by Onalytica, articulates very clearly how we in fact content curation helps thought leaders become trusted resources within their industries.

To build on that I would argue that content is actually a continuum. You very rarely create 100% original content anyway even when you create a blog post: you build on ideas of others, you quote them, you link to them. The best content is not created in a vacuum but in a human conversation where we build on ideas of others. When you add insights to other people's content - the essence of value-adding content curation - you're creating a new object out of an existing one. 

Another important points he makes in the link between curated content and landing pages  so that your curated content generates conversions. If you're looking to do that and are wondering how, here's a guide that will give you some details on why and how to articulate content hubs, content distribution and landing pages. 

10 is a lot. And this list might sound overwhelming...

So here's my take on it:

1. The drawing above is a good one: you won't build any brand without passion - let alone a personal one. 

2. There is a tight connexion between 3 things that you should align: your content, your interests and your network. 

3. Creating content (what Jeff Bullas calls here Tip #5) is just one of the alternative: expressing your opinions or analysis through curated content is also a great way to demonstrate thought leadership.

A very useful post: everybody understands the value of Thought Leadership from a branding perspective, but businesses also need an ROI approach. Measuring the value of Thought Leadership not only as Marketing but as Sales.

Ned Ward reminds us that Thought Leadership is not directly measurable, but suggests to benchmark the Company performances on Reputation, Reach, Relationships and Demand. Thought Leadership contributes to all of them.

"Sharing insight on a topic you're well versed in"... This is so fundamental to being a Thought Leader.

Shana Starr lists five steps. I subscribe to all of them.

I'd add content curation to them: finding, acknowledging and sharing great content created by others also contributes to demonstrating your expertise and willingness to share; a legit and effective addition to writing; a necessary skill of Thought Leaders.

1. Clarify your purpose

2. Identify your voice

3. Write

4. Build an active online presence

5. Be a mentor.

Great post, wise advices.