Tim Parker's blog

In February this year, Google rolled out an algorithm change called Panda, intended to give lower rankings to content farms. These are sites that host not very original content specifically written to capture search enquiries and generate advertising revenue. If you are wondering why this matters, let me explain how they generate that content.

We have long known that how much good thought leadership you can generate in a professional services firm relies on one or both of two things: the ease of extracting new insights from practicing professionals, and whether or not the firm does dedicated research. This week I saw a model that neatly ties these things together.

I had the pleasure of speaking at KAConnect 2011, a conference mostly about knowledge management in the architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) industries. As usual at these things, I am sure I learned more than I imparted.

There were some great speakers and lots of discussion about how best to manage knowledge in design and engineering firms: images, building information models and so on. At one point my friend Chris Parsons put up a slide (which I suspect he invented the day before) which goes a long way to demonstrating the interconnectedness of the things which enable a firm to project thought leadership.

Chris’s point is that knowledge management, however you do it, is crucial to extracting institutional learning from the projects that professionals do for clients. R&D helps them push the envelope in areas where they want to get ahead of the competition – perhaps areas where there is an unsatisfied need in the market. Together, these can provide an arsenal of thought leadership to go to market with, and to inform future projects.

So there it is: the unified theory of knowledge management and thought leadership. 

A post I read today made me wonder what I would find if I looked for management truths derived from the story of Apple Inc. Scratting, by the way, is the process of grinding apples into cider between huge stones. The blogoshphere would be a better place if there were less of it.

I thought this might be a good time to unveil my inner geek and let you in on my favorite and indispensable content management tools. Most of them are free, some of them are unashamedly technical, and they are all good.

There are of course, lots of blog posts that tell us thought leadership is easy, or easier than we think, and I owe it to a recent one of these on HubSpot’s (otherwise) excellent site for prompting me to write this post. The truth is that developing good thought leadership content is hard. 

Sometimes, Yes. I explained in a post in October that nonetheless, we haven’t found a better term for it. Since then I’ve had time to observe some occasions when it’s legitimately applied and others when it isn’t. And I think there are some useful lessons to be learned.

As I’m sure you’ve noticed, we’ve entered the era of “content marketing.” Content marketing budgets are going up; companies are falling over themselves to hire journalists to write stuff for them; and so on. But while everyone is rushing to produce content, do they know which content matters?

The publication last month of the book Content Rules has again highlighted the growing importance of content marketing. I’m not sure content actually rules just yet—B2B firms on average spend about 25% of their marketing budgets on content marketing (data here). But there are three forces inexorably pushing it that way—at the expense of traditional advertising. Online for instance, we have almost complete control over the content we choose to digest. Also, social media have put word of mouth on steroids —an ad doesn’t have much of a chance if 40 out of 50 people already say the product sucks. Accordingly, since banner ads were first introduced in 1995, click-though rates have fallen from around 5% to about 0.2% today (data here).

At the Bloom Group we are serious about helping people produce quality content, and we have a rigorous set of criteria by which we evaluate both ours and others'. But there is another critical component to creating great content that we rarely ever talk about, and that’s fervor^[i], or passion.

Most B2B blogs aren’t read by decision makers and don’t drive business. This was brought home to me last week when a friend at a law firm told me they don’t do social media marketing because the blogosphere is an ocean of bad content and “even the name blog suggests a fat, unwieldy, ugly thing that demands to be fed—regardless of what it is fed. Think Jabba the Hut!”

OK, there are 12, but bear with me.

I have grown weary of blog post titles with numbers in. There are so many appear now every day that if, for instance, you google 5 Social Media you will find literally hundreds of blog posts with titles that include it, for instance, “5 B2B Social Media Marketing Benefits.” I had hoped this was a fad that would pass. However, since it hasn’t, I decided find out what is going on.

Producing more and better content is now the single biggest issue for professional services firms and many other B2B companies too. Here are just some of the places it has popped up in the last few weeks; it was the number one issue for marketers at a meeting of the Association of Management Consulting Firms in NYC last month; Sourceforconsulting.com showed in a recent report that “finding something distinctive to say” is the top issue for every Tier 1 consulting firm in the UK; and a recent report from Junta 42 found that “for businesses with existing content marketing strategies, the largest challenge is producing the kind of content that engages prospects and customers”. There have been more, but you get the point. 

More and more companies outside of management consulting and IT are undertaking thought leadership marketing. And progressively more of them are building topic microsites. Perhaps Neil Rackham has put his finger on why.

Lots, if it’s much like most of them. Many of them leave me wondering how they help the firms that produce them. Let me take one of the best as an example.

I talked last week with a friend at a consulting firm about the challenges of extracting thought leadership material from a firm’s professionals, and how the process often degenerates into a long series of rewrites. This is actually very common, and I thought it might be helpful to explain how and why it happens.

There are so many survey reports being published at this time on content and thought leadership marketing that I feel slightly less bad we haven't done one for a few months. Between them they show all kinds of insights and raise all kinds of questions. 

Eccolo media has just published their excellent third consecutive annual report on B2B technology collateral – the results of a survey into how B2B tech buyers consume vendors’ content as they go through technology purchasing decisions. The Eccolo folks have drawn a number of conclusions that coincide with trends we too have seen in the market. 

 I sometimes wish that Thought Leadership were called something else. First the phrase smacks of business jargon, and second, I don’t like having to explain it to half the people who ask us what we do. Third, it’s 's easy to poke fun at. But it is useful, and it is valid.

In an article we published in June we explained why we think that topic microsites will supersede white papers for B2B marketing (see here). In my last couple of posts I showed the many different elements that have been incorporated into some emerging topic microsites (here) and explained which characteristics are essential (here). One of those essential characteristics is an in-depth point of view.

In this post, I’ll go into a little more detail and explain why articles alone aren’t enough and why they need to congregate around an overarching point of view.

 In the last post I listed some of the elements that can feature on a topic microsite including blogs, animated graphics and videos. And I showed how some existing microsites vary widely in the components they include. I don’t think any one of those sites has the right combination of components to maximize traffic and engagement, so in this post, I am going to explain which elements are essential.

We expect that in B2B marketing, white papers are going to be replaced by topic microsites. It won’t happen overnight, but there are so many advantages, both to the reader and to the authors, that it will happen eventually.

Among emerging microsites, each comprises a different assemblage of components. Let's take a closer look.

We believe that topic microsites will ultimately eclipse white papers and other downloadable media as the primary channel for point-of-view dissemination. Among the reasons for this are that a web page is a much more powerful medium to convey information with. Things you can do with a web page that you can’t do with a pdf include:

• Enlargeable, animated and interactive graphics
• Hyperlinks to later articles, as well as to earlier ones
• Readers’ comments and responses to them
• Video and podcast excerpts and supplements
• Live feeds of blogs and articles on the topic from other sites
• Reader polls and surveys

(You can read a fuller explanation of topic microsites here.)

Nonetheless, the market is moving only slowly away from distributed white papers towards these more powerful online destinations. Most topic microsites that have emerged so far take advantage of only a fraction of the tools that can make them more engaging for readers and prospective customers.

We recently pondered the hazards of plagiarism after someone took some of our material for their own blog. Now I think I have a much better understanding of why it’s bad for everyone, especially the reader. And I’d like to share my conclusions.

B2B companies are increasingly turning to thought leadership marketing — or content marketing or inbound marketing, if you prefer. But whatever you call it, it’s on the rise. In a world where it’s ever easier for the buyer to screen out advertisements and to find his own solution, sellers are publishing evidence of their expertise where prospects can find it.

We just published a report about a survey on the use of social media marketing by consulting firms (here). We found that the number one barrier to firms doing more social media marketing was not being confident they could generate the content. If consulting firms (whose stock in trade is intellectual capital) are worried about generating content, how is anyone else going to cope?

Most companies doing B2B content marketing are using the internet and digital technology to automate the old process of publishing and distributing white papers (or articles, or newsletters.) As in the old days, the content development and writing is a still one-off process, followed by distribution via a white paper syndication site, posting on the company website and so on. But the technology actually lets you do much, much more than that, and very few companies are yet taking advantage of it.

I have seen several posts and tweets lately on how the term “Thought Leadership” is overused, hollow, and should be abandoned.  Some of them are pretty funny, and I have followed some tweeters because I enjoyed their barbs – despite the fact that they’re lampooning the phrase (and concept) I use to make my living.  Here’s one from @skemptastic on Tuesday: “blogged an arrow-filled diagram accompanied by thought leadership-y picture. soon i will be the CEO of the world.”

Gotta laugh.  But what’s going on?

This post is the sixth and final in a series about the six new rules of thought leadership marketing. Today, Rule #6: Perpetual online communities are displacing intermittent marketing campaigns.

In the preceding five parts of this series I’ve talked about how white papers can be better marketed, leading to the conclusion that it is much better to have the material posted on a site, with an audience that returns for periodic updates, than it is to produce one-off white papers. The logical conclusion of this is that the site should morph into an online community.

This post is the fifth in a series about the six new rules of thought leadership marketing.  Today, Rule #5, sustained  traffic supersedes downloads.

After you generate Internet chatter about your white paper, your next set of marketing tactics must be much different than those many companies are used to. The way we sum it up is to stop the selling before it even begins and to start the online engagement.

This post is the fourth in a series about the six new rules of thought leadership marketing. Today, Rule #4: Online columns have become a potent new channel.

Increasingly, the online editors of the leading business publications are opening up their digital editions’ editorial space to outsiders—for free. As a result, many more top-notch publications that are highly read by your customers will take your content in their online editions. 

This post is the third in a series about the six new rules of thought leadership marketing. Today, Rule #3: influencing the online influencers is critical.

Before the era of blogs and Twitter, thought leaders had few opportunities to get opinion leaders such as CEOs, business gurus, and famous authors to endorse their ideas.

Not today. The explosion in business pundits offering recommendations in their blogs and tweets has considerably increased the supply of key influencers and their need for content to recommend to their viewers.