Tim Parker's blog

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.

This post is the second in a series about the 6 new rules of thought leadership marketing. Today, Rule #2; an author’s admirers now do the promoting.

The most effective way to distribute a thought leadership piece (such as a white paper or article) has always been to have readers recommend and pass it along to colleagues. People are far more likely to read an article endorsed by a peer than one that shows up unannounced in their inbox. However, before the emergence of social networking sites, word of mouth marketing was logistically difficult; managers are not likely to email a link to or a PDF of an article to a large number of people, especially those they don’t know. With today’s social networking tools, this is no longer the case. Word-of-mouth recommendations of a notable paper or article now can reach thousands of prospects in hours.

Bob Buday and I just published an article on the six new rules of thought leadership marketing, about how it has changed, especially with the advent of social media. The article is not about the technology – it’s primarily about how behaviors and expectations have changed – and the changes are substantial.

The new rules are:

1. The customer has become the hunter, the marketer the hunted
2. An author’s admirers now do the promoting
3. Influencers have become critical marketing targets
4. Online columns are a potent new channel
5. Microsites are superseding downloads
6. Communities are displacing campaigns

I am going to serialize the rules in this blog, so here’s the first.

Both we and a number of other marketing people advocate not putting a gate – such as requiring contact details – on content that’s intended to show off a firm’s expertise. If you want people to read your stuff , you should make it easy to access without strings attached.

So does that mean you should make it easy to download a pdf? We don’t think so.

An objection I have heard more than once recently is that social media is so full of trash that it’s not a good place for B2B companies to be. For instance, 91% of Twitter traffic is either babble, conversational, spam or self-promotional, and only the remaining 9% is of any serious interest.  

So does that make social media a bad fit for business?

This is a question posted by Ian Mavorah in the LinkedIn Marketing Executives Group a week ago  which has generated a lively discussion. There are plenty of people who think that social media are making us anti-social.

I don't. Here's why.

Gartner has just announced the publication of a report which defines Thought Leadership Marketing as “The giving—for free or at a nominal charge—of information or advice that a client will value so as to create awareness of the outcome that a company’s product or service can deliver, in order to position and differentiate that offering and stimulate demand for it.” 

If I were John Cleese in a cheese shop I might ask them to “Explain pray, the logic underlying that conclusion,” because I think it’s wrong.

There is a lot of advice on how to write white papers, but it rarely addresses the creation of the core idea, which is generally presumed to exist. But advice like “Break up the gray space with diagrams” isn’t going to help much if the recommendations are unconvincing, or have already been made elsewhere.

We’ve looked a bit more closely this week at thought leadership marketing in the office furniture sector. I already mentioned that Herman Miller publishes lots on its site covering ergonomics and workplace productivity. Well so do its competitors. Several have research sections of their websites with white papers and reports covering similar topics. This is interesting, because there are other B2B sectors—contract manufacturing for instance—where it’s pretty hard to find thought leadership material at all, so outside of professional services it’s not a prerequisite of doing business.

I’m guessing that Herman Miller’s leadership has led its competitors to believe that they must follow. Unfortunately, they don’t compare for quality.