Reputation to Revenue

Strengthening thought leadership marketing: Five steps to excellence

I've just had the privilege of helping judge ITSMA's Marketing Excellence Awards, and was impressed in particular with the submissions in the Thought Leadership Marketing category. 

As recently as five years ago, thought leadership marketing was mainly the province of the top consulting firms. Few other B2B firms took it seriously. Boy, has that changed! The submissions in this year's awards program reflect a substantial increase not only in spending but, more important, in the programmatic discipline that is necessary to make a serious impact with customers and market influencers.

I can't name names yet because ITSMA is still selecting finalists and then the ultimate winners. It's clear from the submissions, however, along with working with many of these companies over the years, that there are five important ways in which the best of the best stand apart from the crowd:

1. Focus and depth: Lots of companies practice "random acts of content," dashing off periodic white papers, articles, videos, blog posts, and the like with little focus or depth. But when you're dealing with high level customers facing serious business challenges), the scattershot approach provides little value. Indeed, according to a major study of business technology buyers last year by ITSMA and Pierre Audoin Consulting, only 16% of these buyers believe that their solution providers are very helpful in showing them the possibilities to solve their business challenges. If you're going to join the ranks of the "very helpful," you need to pick one or a few issues, stick with it, and go deep.
2. Do the research: A lot of so-called thought leadership is really just opinion, perhaps based on a project or two. Our customers want evidence, and evidence usually requires research. The best thought leadership programs are built around serious research, including analysis of existing literature, new customer surveys, and in-depth case studies. One of the main reasons that the industry analyst firms remain so influential with buyers is that they are constantly cranking out new research. (Yes, marketers sometimes question the quality of that research, but it is generally miles ahead of the "thought leadership" content that vendors themselves produce.) To help make "thought leadership" worthy of the term, start from the beginning and don't skimp on the research.
3. Engage and empower internally. Too often, marketers publish thought leadership content but forget to tell anyone else in the organization. At best, this can mean losing the opportunity to have more colleagues representing that good thinking in the marketplace. At worst, customers start asking your people questions on an issue about which they have no idea. Especially as you begin to integrate social media across the business, you want more people engaging directly with customers, prospects, and other stakeholders. Engaging and empowering your customer-facing employees with thought leadership gives them something valuable to talk about, and can quickly become an essential multiplier for overall program impact.
4. Leverage your best content. Market engagement today is about pervasive presence and ongoing conversation, not just traditional publishing and speaking. Customers want to chew over and debate your ideas, often without you in the [virtual] room. To help make this happen, you need to leverage your best thought leadership content by publishing compelling bits and bytes in appropriate formats across the networks and channels where your customers congregate. If you're working on a white paper, for example, you want to think: Is there a short video we can produce? Where can we blog about this? What articles can we publish? Where are there opportunities to brief our best customers on our new thinking? Is there a debate I can set up?
5. Invest in expertise. Ultimately, great thought leadership programs are built around experts -- experts in the subjects at hand, of course, but also experts in research, analysis, publication, social media, and collaboration. The most successful programs invest in their people in at least three ways: Funding full time staff positions, recruiting for necessary skills and helping existing staff develop the right skills, and investing in partnerships for complementary capabilities (including brand recognition, as with prestigious academics, universities, and/or outside media and research organizations).

Building a successful thought leadership marketing program is a long-term process. The companies that are best, such as McKinsey, Accenture, IBM, Deloitte, and others, have spent years doing the research, building market presence, and refining what works. They pick key customer issues and stick with them. They go deep. And they invest in their people and programs. 

What's missing from my list? What works best for you?

The four engines of B2B marketing success

A friend recently had the good fortune not only to take over marketing for a successful B2B firm, but to do so with a mandate to build a new strategy that ensures a much greater impact on the business.

He's a bit like a kid in a candy store: he's got budget to spend, executive support for a more ambitious marketing program, and a relatively clean slate upon which to draw the new strategy. 

The existing program has been pretty traditional, focusing mostly on collateral, events, advertising, and direct support for the sales team. He knows that's not enough, and is definitely interested in doing more with thought leadership and social media, but how best to reshape the overall strategy is not entirely clear.

Asked for some advice, I agreed with a stronger emphasis on thought leadership and social media (which I think are appropriate for all B2B  firms), and I questioned the value of putting so much energy into advertising and collateral. 

More generally, though, I suggested that the strategy focus on the four marketing engines that I think all B2B firms need to have running smoothly to ensure business success.

Four Engines for B2B Marketing Success 

Content Engine:

As the need for more and better content continues to grow, marketing leaders have realized that they need an integrated "content engine" that consistently produces compelling content for every stage of the buying cycle. This includes thought leadership content to help build reputation and interest, educational content to support lead generation and nurturing, solutions and customer success content to support sales conversations, and, of course, social media content to support ongoing connections with customers and others.

Relationship Engine:

B2B marketing rises and falls on the strength of the company's relationships with customers, prospects, partners, and market influencers. For many marketing organizations, though, the objective of building, strengthening, and sustaining key relationships has no clear owner or strategy. A "relationship engine" may sound awkward but the idea is to ensure a comprehensive, consistent, and focused approach to strengthening critical stakeholder connections to increase sales, loyalty, and market insight. This should work across such areas as events, customer councils, account management, references, and social media.

Lead Development Engine:

The increasingly long and convoluted purchase processes that B2B marketers face puts a premium on well organized systems for lead nurturing and management. No longer can we focus on just the early stages of generating leads and then throw them over the wall to sales. More and more, we need to stay in the game with longer term programs to develop and sustain opportunities in close coordination with sales. Content and relationship programs contribute substantially to this effort but someone also needs to own the overall system for lead development, including qualification, scoring, nurturing, and assessment.

Solutions Development Engine:

Like many B2B companies, my friend's firm has a long history of successful products, satisfied customers, and productive partners. At the same time, also like many B2B companies, his firm is feeling the heat from increasing competition, margin squeeze on products, and buying decisions moving higher up in their customers' organizations. The result is a need for higher value solutions that respond more specifically to individual customer needs. Doing this efficiently and effectively means moving past the one-off approach based solely in the field. Instead, marketing needs to guide and support the field in determining top priorities for new offer development, crafting the right value propositions, and routinizing the process with the right stage gates and metrics.

The four engines don't cover every last aspect of B2B marketing, but they come pretty close and they provide a clear framework for building a comprehensive strategy that balances short- and longer-term success. Get each of the engines humming smoothly and results are sure to follow.

What do you think? Am I missing something important? Are all of your engines in good working order?

Photo credit: Imnop88a

Two cheers for Eloqua's Content Grid

Actually, I think Eloqua's new Content Grid is fabulous: it crams a complex story and a lot of information into an easy to understand infographic on a critical topic for B2B and solutions marketing. Nice job, folks!

My small beef is with the definition of "content marketing" that underlies the grid. Don't get me wrong: I'm a huge proponent of companies and marketing organizations getting much more serious about creating and executing integrated content strategies to support marketing and sales. Indeed, I make a decent part of my living these days helping companies make this happen.

What I don't agree with, though, is the equation of content marketing with inbound marketing. Perhaps I'm nitpicking at a casual line in Eloqua's blog post introducing the Content Grid, which explains the grid as "a simple framework for content -- or 'inbound' -- marketing." But the grid itself reinforces that equation with its presentation of relevant content types. It's all the fun thought leadership and social media stuff. What's missing are the nitty gritty product and service and solution descriptions and related (horror of horrors!) "promotional" material that, at the end of the day, are still necessary to help make the sale regardless of how effective your inbound marketing is.

Yes, inbound marketing is critical, content marketing is critical, and we all need to keep shifting budgets away from the old push promotion stuff that doesn't work toward educational pull materials and conversations with which our customers and prospects might actually engage. It's just that few of us can yet do away with collateral and promotion entirely -- especially when we're selling complex B2B solutions that require extensive purchase consideration, due diligence, and committee decision making.

I'm not sure Eloqua is even arguing that we should eliminate that stuff entirely, but I think it's a mistake to leave that still-important content out of the grid and the definition. If new directors of content marketing (another trend I support enthusiastically) just manage all the inbound stuff, we're likely to fall short in revamping and refreshing the basic product promotion material that still helps to seal our deal. The last thing we want to create is a great system of thought leadership-driven inbound marketing that collapses in the final phase when prospective buyers see disconnected and inconsistent product and service material.

So, two cheers for the Content Grid and the great intent behind it. Now if we can just broaden its scope a bit more.

What do you think? Do you have a content director? If yes, what's the scope of responsibility?

Editorial strategy: Why do B2B customers need your information?

 

A new report from the always excellent Project for Excellence in Journalism got me thinking a bit differently about thought leadership and content marketing and marketing as media.

We all know that social media is increasingly central to how we get our news and information. The main finding in this new report is that Americans use different media for different types of information.

Analyzing a year of data on the top news stories discussed, linked to, and viewed on blogs, Twitter, YouTube, and other social media, the Project found that, "the stories and issues that gain traction in social media differ substantially from those that lead in the mainstream press. But they also differ greatly from each other."

Topically, for example, there is much greater focus on technology-related news with social media. Further, Twitter has emerged as a key source for breaking news. YouTube is more about serendipitous surfing for randomly interesting content. Blogs tend toward more emotional stories and stronger partisan orientations (on all sides).

So what's the B2B marketing connection?

Several months ago, I wrote about Marketing as media: Are you in the top five? My suggestion then was that given the incredible time constraints under which our customers and prospects operate, we need to think about being a "top five" information source. They don't have time to pay attention to much more than that. So you're really competing for attention with sources like The Wall Street Journal and BusinessWeek along with leading trade publications, blogs, and social networks, regardless of what particular market niche we're in.

I still think this is true, but today's research makes me think more about how you carve out the right position in the broader business media landscape. 

Of course you need to focus on the issues where you have expertise and the markets you serve. Of course you need to provide useful and interesting information. Those are table stakes. But beyond that, where do you fit more specifically for your customers? What do they expect from you? Most important, why do they need your information?

This is not a question about using different media channels for different types of information, although that's indeed important. And it's not about which format is best (white papers vs. videos vs. blog posts, etc.). It's really a question of editorial strategy.

• Are you a source for breaking news? Possibly, but you better be really good at it! 
• Are you a "fun" source for diversionary moments, like YouTube? Doubtful, but certainly possible if you think it's worthwhile.
• Are you the emotion-laden source for partisans on one side of some big industry debate? Maybe, especially if you're in a relatively new or fast-changing market, but you need to accept that you're turning off all the partisans on the other side.
• Are you an aggregator of everyone else's best content? That's a great service, but does your own thinking and expertise get lost in the process?

I'm not suggesting that it's all or nothing, that you have to pick one thing. But trying to be all things to all customers is not likely a good route to success. Thinking more about the "why us?" question can only help in developing a more effective editorial strategy. 

What do you think? What's your editorial strategy?

Photo credit: stevenharris

The lure of cheap content in B2B marketing

 An article in MediaWeek on content mills like Demand Media and Seed.com got me thinking about the dangerous lure of cheap content in B2B marketing. The goal of the content mills is to crank out a huge volume of search-oriented content for the web as cheaply as possible and sell advertising against it. Large consumer brands including AT&T, Proctor and Gamble, and General Motors have taken the bait and the model seems to be working. Critics bemoan the implications on multiple levels, including the crowding out of quality editorial and the low wages paid to the freelancers who fill the mills. 

The mills themselves are mainly a B2C issue (at least for now!). But the underlying idea of maximizing content with minimum investment is all too common in B2B as well, especially as business marketers scramble to keep up with the accelerating demands of content creation for lead nurturing and social media.

With B2B, the problem is actually two-fold: insufficient investment of time as well as money in the creation of quality content. The money issues are pretty straightforward:

• Hiring junior marcom staff to produce content when more seasoned experts are really needed
• Outsourcing content production to the cheapest possible resources knowing that quality will suffer
• Making do with general-issue collateral when customization for different audiences would be far more effective
• Short-changing design and rich media when standard-issue text and stock photography scream low-budget to audiences expected to pay top dollar for your products, services, and solutions

The time issues may be even more pernicious:

• Skimping on research that would back up your arguments
• Forgoing competitive review despite the need to differentiate
• Minimizing group review in the rush to meet deadlines
• Racing through internal communication that could ensure alignment and support

The irony of cheap content, of course, is the high cost in damaged reputation and lost opportunities: "Thought leadership" content that is neither thoughtful nor leading; jargon-filled collateral that fails to connect; customer case studies that read like warmed-over brochures. Or, perhaps most common of all, marketing content that is simply ignored by sales before it even has a chance to reach customers and prospects.

Resisting the lure of cheap content is not easy when budgets are tight and time is even tighter. It means taking more time up front to understand customer needs, map out editorial strategy, and think through the true value in each piece of content. It means saying No when colleagues push for sign-off on poorly written and designed drafts. And it may mean sacrificing quantity for quality -- although investing the time to build more compelling Points of View now will actually make it easier to produce both more and better content down the road. 

We all know that competition keeps growing, buyer patience keeps shrinking, and the margin for error is almost zero. In this context, can we really afford cheap content?

Photo credit: FDR Presidential Library

Can corporate journalism work?

Read an interesting post by Ike Pigott today (thanks Amber) suggesting that as mainstream journalism continues to shrink, struggling journalists should consider jumping to the dark side and plying their trade as corporate journalists. 

Ike distinguishes his notion of the corporate "embedded journalist" from the age-old tradition of reporters simply leaving the newsroom to go work in corporate communications. What's new, he says, is that the decline of mainstream journalism means that companies increasingly are going to forgo pitching stories in hopes of coverage and just start publishing themselves.

To some extent, this isn't that new. Even before social media, smart companies have worked to bring  their message directly to customers and others through thought leadership and other publications without the filter of earned media. And for journalists, it may simply be a matter of survival. A job is a job, after all. As traditional journalism jobs and news outlets decline, companies will step in even more to tell their own stories and take up the slack.

Can this really work on a large scale?

Well, maybe. I have little doubt that some companies will make the effort -- and I think it's important to try. I agree with Ike that if companies do indeed hire real journalists and (this is crucial) give them the support and leeway to tell real stories instead of marketing puffery, then people will respond positively. 

Even more, I believe that companies, customers, and other stakeholders could all benefit if companies shifted substantial marketing resources away from their minimally effective promotion efforts toward more thoughtful and independent coverage of the industries and issues their customers really care about.

But will they? I assume Ike chose the term "embedded journalist" deliberately in reference to the Pentagon's similarly named and quite controversial program to "embed" journalists with military units during the Iraq War. That program did lead to some interesting inside reporting but whether the program overall actually served the public interest in terms of independent coverage is far from clear. 

For now, B2B companies are mostly still struggling with how much to allow their own employees to go beyond strictures of message control and engage freely in social media and networks. If they can't even do this, it's hard to believe they'll turn trained professional journalists loose in an even more ambitious effort to provide "accurate and fair" reporting with all the risks this may entail to their own reputation.

For companies willing to try, and I hope there are many, here are a few suggestions:

• Good journalism is, first and foremost, about reporting, not making product pitches or solutions delivery examples sound better. Focus on the issues your customers, partners, and employees care about and then go do some digging to cover and analyze what's really happening. Talk to the experts, interview customers and your own employees, crunch some data...be a real resource for news you can use.
• Good journalism has (or should have) real standards for accuracy, quality, and fairness. Notwithstanding the endless blather that fills so much of both corporate marketing and social media, most people can still tell the difference. Take standards seriously and don't skimp on quality.
• Good journalism takes time and is ongoing. If you're going to do it, have patience and keep at it. Like social media, positive results will not come overnight. But becoming a trusted source for customers and others will pay dividends for years to come.

B2B marketers know that the demand for content is growing every day, and that thinking like a publisher is increasingly central to making marketing work. Corporate journalism can make a huge contribution as we move in this direction. And if we can save the jobs of some worthy journalists along the way, so much the better.

What's your take? Can corporate journalism work?

Photo credit: Valeriana Solaris

Marketing lessons from the Grateful Dead

Crazy week last week, but it was hard to resist the HubSpot webinar, Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead -- at least for me and 800+ other Dead-loving marketers.

Along with loving the music and concerts, I've always thought the Dead's freewheeling, performance-oriented approach represented a great example of American entrepreneurship.

Indeed, long after the vast majority of hit-focused, corporate rock bands had faded from view, the Dead kept on trucking to become one of the top grossing bands of all time despite a distinct lack of mass appeal. No less than the Atlantic magazine recently published an ode to the Dead's business acumen, Management Secrets of the Grateful Dead.

For marketers, the HubSpot webinar, led by certified Deadheads Brian Halligan of HubSpot (100+ shows) and social media writer David Meerman Scott (42 shows), was filled with great examples of how the Dead's success foreshadowed so much of what we're just now taking seriously with the shift to social media. 

For me, here are four key takeaways (leavened by my own experience at 20+ shows over the years):

1. Build an authentic experience, and never mind the critics. The Dead always went their own way with hours-long shows, little attention to rock band or radio format convention, and minimal effort to create hits. Lots of people never liked them, and that was fine. The lesson here is do what feels right, focus on your fans, and forget about trying to be all things to all people. 
2. Give away great content and make it easy to share. The Dead were notorious for actually encouraging their fans to tape their concerts and spread the music around. Far from obsessing over intellectual property, the Dead understood that the more their music spread, the more they could build a fan base and sell tickets to their shows. Once the Web arrived in the mid-90s, they jumped on board to post and broadcast as many shows as possible. The lesson here, of course, is to open up the organization, encourage your experts to connect freely with customers and others, and tear down the registration walls that require detailed business information in exchange for simply downloading a white paper or subscribing to a newsletter. 
3. Embrace new technologies and experiment aggressively. The Dead were also famous for pouring a huge amount of their early money into an enormous, state-of-the-art Wall of Sound that they trucked around the country rather than relying, as did most bands, on whatever sound system was in the venues they played. They constantly tested new sounds, new musical styles, and new media. The lesson here, as social media pundits opine constantly, is push the envelope, accept the inevitability of experiments that fail, and move on to the next.
4. Put your best customers first. Early on, the Dead realized the value of giving extra attention to their top fans with early and special access to tour information, tickets, and recordings. Rather than offer special deals to new prospects, the lesson here is to provide preferential treatment to your best existing customers. Keep them happy with customer councils and forums, executive access, and early warning of new products and services, and they're much more likely to remain loyal, provide useful insight, and spread the word on your behalf. 

Last year, I saw the Dead play in Worcester, MA (my hometown), 14 years after the death of spiritual leader Jerry Garcia. The experience was invigorating, the music was great, and the ethos remained true more than four decades from creation. Inspiring, to say the least.

Master narratives and framing the debate with B2B marketing

Years ago, when I was a lowly graduate student at MIT, I learned an essential lesson about communications while taking a course on "framing" the news. The lesson, as my professor Bill Gamson so ably taught, was that he who frames the terms of the discussion is halfway home with a public debate before it even begins. 

Politicians understand this the best. They (and their marketing consultants) spend lots of time crafting simple narratives with the goal of framing the debate. Back when I was in graduate school, the most obvious example was Ronald Reagan, who dominated the politics of the 1980s with the simple idea that government was "the problem." Most recently, it was the health care debate with dueling narratives about "government takeovers" and "universal coverage."

It's critical with B2B marketing, too. While trying to promote the value of our products, services, and solutions, we need to focus as well on the master narratives that frame the relevant market conversation. For example, technology and consulting companies pushing Green IT need to worry about the larger debate about the value of going green. Regardless of the merits of their offers, if the dominant narrative frame is skeptical, they'll have a much tougher job winning new business.  

Ideally, you're leading that discussion or changing the terms of the debate. IBM did this recently with its Smarter Planet initiative. The company defined a new way of thinking about the role of technology in a whole host of social and economic issues. Others are now jumping on board, but if you buy into the frame, you're probably going to favor IBM.

Thought leadership marketing is supposed to create a master narrative for B2B organizations. It's the intellectual substance behind the basic brand promise. 

Accenture does this with "High Performance. Delivered." The brand promise is helping clients become high performing companies; Accenture's thought leadership research and publications flesh out the story with data and case studies of how this actually happens.

HubSpot does this extremely well, too. The fast-growing provider of "inbound marketing" tools promotes the concept relentlessly with a daily dose of useful content for marketers on how to build awareness and generate leads through search engine marketing and social media. For small business marketers and consultants focused on social media and search, HubSpot's master narrative about the why and how of inbound marketing is beginning to frame the whole conversation.

The problem with so many B2B marketing programs, however, is that the master narrative is lacking. Even when companies invest in thought leadership, it's often with a fragmented collection of disconnected articles, white papers, videos, blogs, etc. There is no connecting tissue, or at least none that stands out from the competition and helps frame the larger industry conversation. 

Topical consistency is the first challenge, but that is just a start. It's better to have a consistent flow of thought leadership content on the same basic subject than not, but if there is not a compelling and differentiated point of view to drive a sustained and integrated program, you stand little chance of framing the debate.

Here are two simple questions you might ask yourself to gauge progress with your master narrative:

• To what extent is there a "big idea" that animates your thought leadership marketing?
• To what extent does that idea currently drive the larger industry dialogue around a key customer concern?

If your answers are "not much," it may be time to step back from the crush of daily deadlines and ponder the possibilities.

Make sense?

Photo credit: jonny goldstein

Aligning marketing and sales...with what?

Marketing folks in B2B are obsessed with aligning marketing and sales. It's a longstanding pain point, and it always comes to the fore in a down economy. The problem, at least from my humble perspective, is that the discussion tends to rotate around the idea that marketing needs to align more fully with sales.

Four years ago, I wrote this:

The typical approach to marketing-sales alignment emphasizes getting marketing closer to sales through initiatives such as tighter alignment of marketing activities with the sales cycle, better coordination around demand generation and lead management, and allowing sales to have more input into marketing programs and materials. These types of initiatives certainly can be useful, but they risk reinforcing the standard industry view that marketing is ultimately the junior partner of sales and that the alignment problem is mainly one of marketers straying too far from the daily and quarterly demands of the sales force.

Has the discussion really changed? 

Beyond the junior partner idea, another common, unspoken assumption is that sales is just fine where it is. But we know that B2B sales is undergoing changes at least as dramatic as marketing. Globalization, transparency, ecosystem collaboration, the demand for custom solutions, and more are wreaking havoc with the traditional sales process just as they are with marketing. I didn't cover social media and communities in that 2006 article, but clearly they have an enormous impact on sales, too. Witness the seemingly endless number of "sales 2.0" conferences, consultants, and tools flying.

The real challenge is transformation, not just alignment. Of course marketing and sales need to work more closely together, but most of all they need to figure out how to collaborate in serving and attracting customers when their customers are: 

• Overwhelmed with information and choice
• Skeptical of any marketing or sales pitches
• Fully capable of researching solutions on their own
• Actively tapping social networks for insight and reviews far beyond what you can provide

I'm all for more agreement between marketing and sales on which leads matter, how to map marketing to the sales cycle, and where marketing can help most with key accounts. And I'm "traditional" enough to believe that face-to-face marketing and selling continue to be essential even as social media and online communities take center stage for both sales and marketing.

But if we don't look for a larger transformation in how both marketing and sales work -- and work together -- we run the risk of building alignment around a process that no longer fits the real world environment.  

What do you think?

Photo credit: Bill Ward's Brickpile

Social media and thought leadership: The virtuous circle for B2B marketing

As B2B marketers invest more money and time in both thought leadership and social media, they risk missing a great deal of potential benefit they can achieve by bringing the two together in a holistic way.

All too often, at least in my experience in the tech sector, marketers investing in thought leadership view social media primarily as a channel for disseminating content. 

They get the idea that social media is important, and that relying on traditional media channels (including email and websites) to promote their ideas is no longer enough. 

As such, they're beginning to slice and dice thought leadership content into blog posts, tweets, videos, and the like -- and use Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, SlideShare and other platforms to promote that content as widely as possible in the social sphere.

This all seems fine, but I think it's far too limited a view.

In fact, isn't this just a more refined version of the same old one-way broadcast mentality? Ponder big thoughts, maybe do some research, put together a presentation or white paper, and then release it to the world and wait for the acclaim and customer inquiries to come rolling in. 

"Going social" with content gives it a better chance of being seen, but a more collaborative approach to understanding customer issues and creating new Points of View before even creating any content greatly raises the chances that customers will actually care.

Socializing every aspect of the thought leadership process requires a more fundamental shift than just reformatting content and creating a longer checklist of places to publish. 

It means letting go of the notion that you have all the good thinking locked inside your organization, that you shouldn't publish anything until it provides all the answers, and that thought leadership is about you talking and customers listening. 

It means taking the zeitgeist of social media seriously, that it's not a "channel" at all, but a way of thinking and doing business based most of all on listening, sharing, and collaborating.

The reality is that lots of great thinking and experience lie outside your organization (to say the least), customers and partners want to collaborate in developing new approaches and solutions, and the best way to demonstrate expertise is to ask the right questions and facilitate ongoing conversation.

The virtuous circle of social media and thought leadership includes five main elements, discussed below:

 

1. Customer and market insight: Tapping social media and networks to dig deeper (and often faster) into the issues your customers and prospects really care about. This can begin as simply as using Google Reader and Google Alerts to follow important online conversations. It can be as sophisticated as using high-end monitoring and analytics services like Radian6 or Nielsen BuzzMetrics, organizing "Innovation Jams" like IBM, or building your own customer communities to ensure a steady flow of deep customer insight.
2. Collaborative Points of View: Rather than rely on a single expert or a purely internal team, why not work with customers and other stakeholders to craft a more relevant and compelling Point of View to undergird thought leadership content? Executive interviews, client roundtables, external working groups, academic and think tank partnerships can all be part of the thinking process, not simply vehicles to disseminate finished products. Social tools make these collaborations far easier and more affordable to manage.
3. Relevant routes to market: This is the area of marketers are already digging into, and with good reason. If you're NOT taking advantage of social tools and networks to disseminate your thought leadership content, you're missing an enormous opportunity to reach key stakeholders where they are increasingly spending their time searching for new ideas. The recent Forbes study, The Rise of the Digital C-Suite, is only one of a multitude of survey reports documenting that executives now rely on online search, video, and social networks as a core information source.  
4. Viral leverage: Your customers and prospects trust independent experts far more than company spokespeople, as Edelman's Trust Barometer shows every year, and gaining their support is far more likely to trigger social media sharing than anything you do directly. Identifying and reaching out constructively to the new influencers in your markets (bloggers, analysts, community managers, etc.) is now essential to thought leadership success.
5. Conversation and community: The old broadcast mode of thought leadership assumed a straight line from polished publication to customer inquiry to sales presentation. In a few rare cases of truly blockbuster ideas, this may even have worked. In today's vastly more networked world, customers want to chew over and debate your ideas at length -- and often without you even present. Inspiring, facilitating, and participating in the conversation is the right goal for thought leadership marketing, and using social platforms and communities is the best way to make this possible. Not incidentally, it's also the best way to gain deep and ongoing customer and market insight, which keeps the whole circle going.

Make sense? What do you think?