The Bloom Group "All Things Thought Leadership" Blog

As a long-ago graduate of Penn State (1977) who covered Joe Paterno and Jerry Sandusky’s football teams for the school newspaper, I feel the following goes without saying.

Sandusky’s alleged sexual abuse of boys, first and foremost, is an enormous tragedy for his victims. Their emotional health matters far more than does the university’s public image. The latter’s will recover somewhat over time if it conducts a thorough housecleaning and actually sticks to its newly issued code of ethics.

Second, everyone who is proved to be involved in the cover-up be will dogged for the rest of their lives by failing to show a conscience when it mattered, and perhaps big legal problems.

But if Penn State truly wants to demonstrate to the world that it is changing its ways – that its football program is no longer calling the shots for a weak administration – it needs to do more. Much more.

How about directing much of its $50 million-a-year in football profits to an educational program meant to prevent organizations (schools, churches, companies, etc.) from abusing people (sexually, emotionally, financially, etc.)? 

If Penn State really wants to mend its ways, show remorse for its disgraceful actions (or lack thereof), and demonstrate its capabilities as a research university, it should create an institute to shed new light on a problem with which it is now well familiar. There are plenty of organizations in addition to its own to research: the Catholic Church, the late Jim Jones, etc., etc.

Penn State's administration must reshape its long insular and arrogant culture. That's the first step. Concurrently, to repair its tarnished image Penn State should remember why it's in business: to create and impart knowledge. Since the scandal happened on its once-hallowed grounds, no other university than Penn State is in a better position to shed light on the roots of and remedies to institutional abuse.

The term “knowledge management” was big in the mid-1990s when big companies saw the need to share expertise beyond those proximate to it. A decade and a half later, the term “thought leadership marketing” is in vogue, and some see a connection between the two.

What prompted me to bring this up? Over the last year, we have been paying attention to a consulting firm called Knowledge Architecture. Given that KA is only two years old, a small firm, and on the opposite coast (in San Francisco), you might ask why.

In part, it’s because KA’s founder and CEO, Christopher Parsons, reached out to us. In part, it’s because he has a number of intriguing ideas and expertise that relate to our business. But perhaps most of all, it’s because we believe he is onto something in the sector he cares about: architecture, engineering firms and construction firms.

What Chris is passionate about is helping AEC companies compete on a basis that few of them are competing today: bottling knowledge about how to design and build buildings and inculcating it widely across an AEC firm. The ultimate goal, I presume, is to make the newest employee as proficient as the oldest.

Chris recently has noticed a glaring need to connect the disparate disciplines of knowledge management and thought leadership marketing. (I use the term “disciplines” loosely; in sophistication, I see both to be in their infancy.) He sees a connection that we have seen, although we have put it all under the moniker of thought leadership.

No matter. We, like Chris, believe that B2B firms of all types – especially professional firms – that excel at both knowledge management and thought leadership marketing, and (very important) connect the two, will have a distinct advantage. But that’s if they recognize they need it, which at this point is a big if for most.

Knowledge Architecture consults to architecture, engineering and construction firms about how to gather, codify and scale up the knowledge their architects and engineers bring to projects. KA also has a software product that helps with this process.  Chris, a former CIO at a mid-sized California architecture firm, believes these sectors must begin explicitly connecting what they do in knowledge management with what they do in thought leadership marketing. Not that most AEC firms are zealous about either. While Chris may be a bit ahead of his market, if the winds of technology and offshoring blow even harder in the next few years, he will have timed his sector right.

The reason is that Chris sees a rapid commoditization of the architecture and engineering work that flies off the drafting tables and CAD systems of Western AEC firms. With powerful but cheap computers, an even cheaper Internet, and capable workers in other countries enabling engineering drawings to be drafted and transmitted economically from Malaysia to a building site in Atlanta, Chris sees this scenario upending the tranquil world of Western AEC firms.

By “upending,” he means architecture projects shifting to lower-cost places where engineers and architects work (hint, hint -- not North America and Europe). Those that can’t compete on price will have to differentiate their services in other ways -- ways that matter to customers. If you can create superior ways of designing and engineering buildings – and in doing so, make those buildings far more valuable to their owners and occupants – then you have something that’s resistant to services offered at rock-bottom prices.

Chris has a framework that ties KM and TL together. My colleague Tim Parker referred to it in a recent blog post. In Chris’s model, the knowledge management function reviews projects, codifies methods that are used in practices, and conducts R&D on external practices (i.e., outside a firm) because no firm is the font of all knowledge on any topic. As Tim said of Chris’ model, “R&D helps them push the envelope in areas where they want to get ahead of the competition – especially areas where there is an unsatisfied need in the market.”

Thought leadership marketing uses the content that knowledge management collects to give prospective clients a flavor of the firm’s expertise -- a way to “sample the merchandise,” as they used to say in old gangster movies (although I remember it pronounced as “muychindice”).

Chris’ framework spurred me to update an old Bloom Group framework. First, I think most companies have viewed the content they produce for thought leadership marketing programs as serving only marketing purposes (i.e., the purpose of "increasing demand," as illustrated below). I have said for years that this content needs also to fuel the way they deliver their expertise – new approaches to doing their work, or even whole new services (i.e., "scaling up supply," the bottom part of the value chain below). Over the last 25 years, I have rarely seen firms get programmatic about the bottom part of the chain. As a result, they produce a lot of great ideas that few in their firms can actually deliver.

My perception of KM is that it is conducted in most companies by groups other than marketing – by at first an internal library function. KM, my perception goes, has continued to be an inward-looking endeavor – capturing the approaches and expertise of a firm’s professionals. Its use then continues to be internal: helping professionals deliver their expertise rather than let the world know about it.

Thought leadership historically has largely been conducted by marketing. As TLM became more sophisticated, firms have conducted more sophisticated data gathering – research studies featuring external best practices (not just internal) or even whole research programs with clients as annual subscribers.

Both versions are incomplete. Companies today need to gather best approaches/practices both within and outside their firms – particularly outside their firms because the rate of change in the marketplace can make a firm's methods obsolete far faster today. They then need not only to market it but bottle it and have many people in their firm who can master it.

So it’s time to erase the artificial boundary between content gathered through traditional KM (internal practices) and content based on external practices (TLM) and to look at all this as knowledge that firms need to gather, analyze, and turn into formal methods that reflect unique expertise.  Call this plain R&D – research of external and internal practices. The “D” is how you develop the content a) you use in your marketing programs, and b) that fuels new methods and services.

What do you think? Is it time to connect thought leadership marketing and knowledge management? If so, how would you do it?
 

In just the last two years, we’ve been asked the same question by six very large B2B firms (two consulting, two IT services, one financial services and one software company): how build a thought leadership content machine.

By this, I mean creating a department of people who produce compelling content that demonstrates their firm’s expertise. No easy task, not even for the biggest consulting firms, the sector in which thought leadership marketing has been practiced the longest.

We presume we’ve been asked this question because there are few models to follow. While management consulting firms like McKinsey, Booz, and Bain regularly produce new, supported and engaging insights on an array of topics (although they can miss the mark too), they are exceptions.  The content published by most B2B firms – even most consulting firms – isn’t exceptional. And it’s not just our judgment. We’ve heard this in “voice of the customer” research we’ve conducted. We’ve also heard it in our surveys of professional services marketers over the last five years.

So why do few B2B firms have a thought leadership content machine that repeatedly issues strong content? In many cases, it’s not for lack of budget or expertise in the domains in which firms want to be seen as experts.  Rather, we believe it’s because they lack five elements:

• The right ambition for thought leadership – not just to develop, capture and market expertise that increases demand but also increases supply (new offerings and new approaches to delivering current offerings)
• Codified and therefore repeatable methods for producing intriguing ideas – a few big ones and many intriguing small ones.
• People with the still-too-rare skills of conducting research that unearths new, important insights on complex matters; drawing out the tacit or not fully formed knowledge of firm subject experts; and explaining that knowledge clearly to the great unwashed.
• Mechanisms for turning these ideas into effective marketing campaigns (to create both internal and external demand) and new or improved services (supply creation)
• Having these activities exist at the right place on the organization chart (i.e., not reporting to a function that will warp the purpose of the firm's thought leadership engine).

In five subsequent blog posts, we’ll provide more detail and examples of these five elements. In the meantime, feel free to comment on these posts about what aspects of creating a thought leadership engine you’d like to know about. We’ll make sure we address them.
 

Historically, writers and editors have been comic figures, ye olde ink-stained wretches, necessary evils, people so lacking in life skills that they're reduced to trying to earn a living by putting words together, something anyone, even a child (and certain birds) can do. Is it any wonder that they've always been poorly regarded and treated contemptuously? So why should consultancies and businesses value writers and editors and treat them well?

It will sound like circular logic, but it still needs to be said: Great thoughts are the foundation of highly successful thought leadership marketing campaigns. Yes, you need skillful and concerted marketing to distribute those great thoughts widely. But you can invest a lot in marketing some idea and come up empty if your point of view is shallow, has been heard before, and lacks substantiation.

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.

I know lots of people who, with varying degrees of success, are trying to get their boss behind thought leadership marketing and raise their organization’s investment in it. I can assure you the more successful ones get attention by being crystal clear about the “why”: "We should do this to generate leads and revenue." When they see soft benefits thrown at them, CEOs, CFOs and even some CMOs tune them out like they do their mother-in-law.  Want to make their eyes close? Use words such as “enhanced reputation,” “cachet,” “speaking engagements,” or “market buzz.”

In a previous post, I laid out four stages that professional services and other B2B firms go through in becoming thought leaders (Stone Age, Medieval, Industrial and Post-Industrial). Each stage reflects varying levels of sophistication in the way a firm develops and markets its expertise. Because thought leadership marketing is a relatively new marketing discipline, it's no surprise to me that many firms are in the Stone Age and Medieval eras.

Google’s announcement yesterday that Eric Schmidt would relinquish his CEO title set off a flurry of derisive Twitter chatter about one term he used for his new role: “technology thought leadership.” Here’s what he said (but don’t expect elaboration on what he meant by the phrase).