3 Things You Should Know About Thought Leadership

June 08, 2016

Jonathan Salem Baskin

Thought leadership is all the rage these days among communicators.

It’s popular because it’s pretty much impossible to buy your way in front of audiences anymore. The generation that consumed slack-jawed the ads that interrupted episodes of Gilligan's Island on TV are now listening to customized Spotify playlists, and letting strangers curate their information on Pinterest. 

Younger consumers are consuming snippets of news that flash across Twitter, and swapping information that is purposefully configured to disappear almost instantly. 

There’s no “there” where communicators can repeat their claims and promises, and such announcements wouldn't be believable if there were. The burning prod of branding has been replaced by a hazy process of incessant invitation. Ideas are the new currency for buying attention.

No wonder so many communicators want to get themselves some of that thought leadership.

It hard to do, though, because it requires challenging, if not wholly rejecting, much of the traditional approach to corporate messaging. Here are three things you could consider when you next talk about thought leadership:

First, and foremost, you have to actually lead with thoughts. That might seem obvious, but it’s not, because I’d suggest that the vast majority of thought leadership coming from companies is anything but.

Leading thoughts challenge preconceived notions and accepted truths. They rattle comfortable assumptions, and invent new conversations. Thought leadership is not your CEO’s nuanced opinion on some well-worn topic or, worse, your marketing department’s efforts to brand it as somehow your own.

Your version of the IoT, or open innovation, or any other topic du jour doesn’t really count unless it reveals something that is objectively novel and useful. It’s just more coach travel content marketing trying to finagle an upgrade to first class.

Second, thought leadership is platform agnostic, so no amount of thoughtful or beautiful presentation will make it any better. This is why the world is awash in infographics; there's no flood of newly discovered leading ideas today as much as a rush of people who've embraced a workaround.

A dedicated section on your website lets you exploit all of the presentational tools available to you. Ditto for bylined articles placed via one of many online publications that feature such sponsored content. Unfortunately, these approaches let you avoid the scrutiny of an editor who could tell you that your content is just content. Thought leadership is not supposed to be so easy to do.

In fact, that whole content thing gets even more complicated when you consider social media platforms, since there’s a growing list of services that equate thought leadership with 1) the online entities that command the largest followings with references to the topic(s) in which you’re interested, and 2) the velocity and frequency of liking and sharing their posts. Some even help you buy that exposure, though such a mercenary term for it is rarely used.

What you say is not really as important as who and how it’s said. Thought leadership is a technical tactic — requiring nothing more than some deft manipulation of the system, along with expenditure of marketing dollars — and doing so can yield beautiful reports on your success. 

A good rule of thumb is that anyone purporting to sell you such easy answers really doesn’t understand the question.

That’s because the third thing you should know about thought leadership is that it asks more than it tells.

It’s public expression of challenging not just what others think of your business, but reveals how your senior leaders question it, too. It’s not a description of corporate policy, or messaging about some new, terribly worthwhile initiative, but rather the act of asking what the ideas might mean, what they could entail, and where and why they should matter. Or not.

Thought leadership requires your top execs to risk being wrong.

It needs to be a transparent narrative of what they’re thinking about, and how they put their knowledge and experience to the test of novel challenges and opportunities. Being “on message” means delivering messages that encourage your stakeholders to ask questions with you (it’s how you earn credibility, and it’s the true mechanism of conversation).

It’s a narrative of thinking that you parse and configure to work across the media at your disposal. The “leadership” part comes later, after stakeholders have internalized, vetted, and valued it.

Anything else is just a canned TV sitcom.