The Bloom Group "All Things Thought Leadership" Blog

I hate to dampen any firm’s enthusiasm about investing in thought leadership. We believe B2B firms that bring superior expertise to solving their customers’ problems (not just superior products and services) will be the ones that thrive.

Yet it’s easy for B2B companies (and particularly their CMOs) to become giddy about thought leadership and then watch the rug get pulled out from under them. A downturn forces them to gut the thought leadership budget. Salespeople pay little attention to thought leadership marketing campaigns that generate leads. And (worst of all), the professionals who deliver the firm’s expertise (consultants, accountants, lawyers, architects, bankers, VCs, and so on) behave as if there’s little to learn from new research or a codification of some innovative firm practices.

Without strong pull from the top – a deep understanding by the people who run the firm on what thought leadership is and how it can propel the firm – thought leadership investments will not go very far. And I’m aware of few B2B chief executives other than those running consulting firms (and just some of these) or research companies who view thought leadership as vital to success.

As I mentioned in my previous post, one of seven elements of a sound thought leadership strategy is “strategy alignment.” An ugly and nebulous term, indeed. So what do we mean? It begins with people at the top recognizing investments to make their firm the premier expert in its domains as essential to executing the business strategy.

In many companies, this connection is tenuous. But I’ve seen other companies that do this well. Here’s what they do:

• They use metrics that resonate at the top: e.g., number of prospect inquiries, leads and revenue. One of our clients showed senior management the result of a thought leadership marketing campaign using the following indicators: attendees at a symposium (about 160), number of requests for their white paper (more than 350) and names of the requestors (many Fortune 500 companies), and number of discussions asked for by prospective clients (14). Our client also used indirect metrics of market interest (indirect in that these numbers don’t directly indicate buyers are at hand): news coverage and website visitors, to name two. Nice, but not as interesting as the metrics closer to money.
• They talk CEO-speak, not marketing-speak. All of us in marketing easily forget how the shorthand we’ve adopted goes over the heads of the people who run companies. The CMO says, “Our last thought leadership campaign generated 1,000 unique viewers, 100 downloads, and 150 retweets.” “Huh?” says your CEO. OK, let me phrase that again. “Our last thought leadership campaign brought 1,000 people to our website on a day when we typically get 100. The people who downloaded our research report – 100 in all – were CFOs, CMOs and chief R&D officers at companies with average revenue of $12 billion. We know that because we went to the Fortune 500 list and other sources and did the calculations. Of those 100 who downloaded the report, 18 asked to talk to the authors of the research. And of these 18, four have already asked for a proposal, the average value of which is $250,000. And 150 people who use the social media tool Twitter liked our study enough to recommend it to the 52,000 people who follow them on Twitter. And we found that 10 of those 150 who recommended our study on Twitter were stock analysts and reporters from the Times and the Journal.” See the difference in those messages? Communicating effectively about thought leadership requires explaining everything, not taking for granted the terms we all are familiar with. 
• They explain clearly how thought leadership can help the firm accomplish much more than just getting the market to recognize it as an expert on some issue (although that, of course, is a sizable benefit). They lay out how thought leadership could help the company a) sell more services and products, b) increase profitability, c) attract talent and d) create new services. Here’s how I would explain those four potential benefits: a) thought leadership can help your firm sell more services and products because an increasing number of potential customers believe you know the most about how to solve their problem; b) thought leadership enables you to raise prices because your expertise is viewed as superior and well worth the premium (every consulting firm with a hot concept should hike its rates), c) thought leadership can become a magnet to college graduates and established professionals who are looking to get on board a company with a hot concept (many consulting firms can attest to this too); and d) thought leadership provides a company with greater ability to scale expertise that it previously had not codified. In other words, you take the best practices you identified in your research, have people who love creating methodology turn them into methods and training and development curricula, and then put your people through extensive training and development so they can learn how to do it too.

I see these three elements as essential to making thought leadership truly matter at the top of your company. You need metrics that matter, language your CEO knows well, and clear explanations about how investing in thought leadership will help deliver what he wants to achieve.

How have you pitched thought leadership to the people who run your firm? Is it working? Why or why not?

Mostly Yes, and a little bit No. Let me tell you a story.

About a month ago I got a call from “one of the country’s biggest search engine optimization firms,” based in California. Since the sales guy was appealingly non-pushy, I agreed to talk with an ‘SEO technician’ next. He turned out to be the man with the sales patter and claimed to be able to do lots of impressive things — including so-called ‘offsite optimization’ — without telling me how he’d do it. So I ducked the follow-on conversation (by not answering any calls from a certain area code for three weeks).

Lots of companies actually.

Especially those that:

• Primarily sell expertise: I.e., professional services firms, especially management consultancies and IT services companies
• Sell complex products with associated services: E.g., call center telephony systems, business intelligence software
• Sell complex products with advantages the market needs to be educated about: E.g., targeted marketing data, intellectual property, ergonomic office furniture, industrial bearings

It wasn’t always this way.

Anyone who invests in thought leadership wants a good return on their investment, whether in leads generated, engagements closed or reputation enhanced. But there are many ways companies can make sure they don’t get a good payback. Here are the 10 worst ones we commonly see, from strategic misjudgments about portfolios to tactical ones such as how to write copy.

The grand experiments that Harvard Business Review, Forbes, McKinsey Quarterly and other business publications have been staging with their online editions if anything are proving one point: Readers don’t want to be just readers anymore. They want to engage in online discussions about the articles they’ve read – discussions not only with the authors but with other readers as well.

You’ve no doubt read on other websites about the need to bring a publishing model to thought leadership marketing. We actually think the opposite is true: If you’re following a publisher’s mindset with your online journal, you'll miss a big opportunity to sell more productively. Let me explain.

Good writing is important in business as everyone knows. And it’s especially important for professional services firms publishing articles, research studies and white papers. These things show off a firm’s expertise and so are actual samples of the firm’s product. A sales brochure for a printer, for instance, is not.

And yet a lot of professional firms’ materials are not well written.

Why? 

I think there are at least two key reasons.

The point of thought leadership marketing of course is to attract prospective customers with interesting and relevant points of view. Also to position your firm or yourself as an expert on a topic, build reputation and credibility, and thereby make it easier to sell your services when the time arises.

But for firms that don’t have a well-established reputation already, there is an irony. If you don’t push the material out, how will anyone know about it? And if you do push it out to people, is that legitimate permission marketing anymore? Or is it its evil antithesis, interruption marketing?

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.

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.

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.

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).

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, 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!”

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.

Companies with savvy marketers spend lots of time determining how to market a piece of compelling “thought leadership” content, especially one based on deep primary research. What blog posts can we create, and what bloggers should we contact? What about a webinar series? What opinion articles can we craft, and which publications should we target?  Is there a worthy Harvard Business Review or Sloan Management Review submission here? Perhaps even the basis for a book?

But I rarely see companies spending a similar amount of time determining how to use that content in their services. 

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.

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. 

Thought leadership programs serve one master in most B2B firms: Marketing.  Marketing generates content (commissioning studies, writing white papers, and so on).  Marketing packages and distributes that content (producing academic-looking publications, seminars and webinars, educational PR campaigns, email newsletters, etc.).  Marketing then turns over the resulting client inquiries to account executives. Thought leadership is a Marketing activity.

But that robs thought leadership programs of their greater potential value – as sources of service innovation, not just marketing content. 

In my last post I said that developing fewer but more substantive points of view (sometimes even just one) is much more likely to make the phone ring than letting a hundred points of light shine in your firm. That’s for sure. 

But when you place your bets on fewer but deeper points of view, you will soon need someone who’s responsible for the end-to-end process of developing and selling a big idea.

Last month I explained the second of five factors behind companies that excel at thought leadership marketing: patience for the time it takes to develop a compelling point of view and attract an audience to it. (The first factor was a huge desire to distinguish one’s offering on the basis of possessing unique expertise.)

I find the third success factor rarer than the first two: focus.  By this I mean a company’s ability to invest its content development and marketing resources in fewer points of view rather than more.  Many fewer, in fact.

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.

I was at MIT the other day listening to the CEO of a small technology company discussing his company's security product when a member of the audience asked him about "cloud governance" and I saw the CEO's head explode.

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.

In my last post, I cited five factors that determine how proficient a company will be at thought leadership marketing – whether it becomes the recognized expert on some issue or not (and then enjoys the accolodes, leads and revenue).

Let’s look at the first factor: a big appetite for the type of differentation that a market-recognized thought leader possesses.

Once upon a time I had a boss who would always end his memos announcing some new Draconian policy with the phrase: "Thank you for your mandatory cooperation."

Of course, this became an oft-repeated office joke. Clearly, if something is "mandatory," then "cooperation" loses its meaning as, indeed, does "Thank you." His pet phrase made him look ridiculous and, in the immortal words of Jack Woltz, the movie mogul in The Godfather, "A man in my position can't afford to be made to look ridiculous." (And look what happened to Woltz. He ended up with a horse's severed head in his bed. I don't think my old boss got that treatment, but his tenure was relatively brief.)

It is a truth universally acknowledged that corporate writing--from white papers to one-sheets and everything in between--stinks. Say "white paper" to 99 out of 100 executives and first you'll hear a snicker, and then something along the lines of "I never read that [insert expletive]."

Why is this the case?

After all, most of this writing is done by professionals. Most of these professionals are pretty good. And the people who employ these professional writers are not, for the most part, stupid. From time to time the ideas in these articles are interesting, even novel and useful. So why is the end product so reliably lousy?

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?

I was delighted to hear last week that Harvard Business School selected long-time HBS Professor Nitin Nohria as their next dean.  (Here's the news on that from Harvard Magazine.)

I caught of glimpse of Nitin’s intellect and working style 15 years ago in my days at the Cambridge, Mass., consulting firm CSC Index.  In his non-teaching time, Nitin helped Index’s utility industry practice develop new thinking on strategy in a fast-deregulating industry.  That effort led to a prescient Sloan Management Review article.  

I keep hearing people say that developing great content for thought leadership marketing campaigns requires instituting a publishing process, populated with reporters willing to become “corporate journalists.”  

I say that’s partly right and mostly wrong.

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.

It’s amazing just how ingrained old techniques and old ways of thinking can be.  Especially mine (as my kids often remind me).  But the reason old habits are ingrained is that they work – at least for a long time. Then they begin working less well.  And at some point they don’t work. 

Here’s what I’m getting at: I believe we are on the cusp of seeing the longstanding way in which a subject expert or team of experts and their marketing colleagues produce and market a compelling piece of content become obsolete.  

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.

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.

For more than 20 years, I’ve seen consultants and other advice-sellers use an array of techniques to try to come up with a big new idea to take to market.  Some of these ideas were total failures.  A few were big successes.  Most were in between, generating some market interest.  And some of these spawned enough business leads to more than warrant the investment in time and money. I’ll list these methods, from least to most successful.

Anyone looking for a "thought leadership marketing" or "thought leadership R&D" job needs to say the right things on his or her LinkedIn profile.  Why?  Because that's where the recruiters are looking, according to an article in the latest issue of Fortune magazine.

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?

 Several newspaper and magazine columnists have been chiding President Obama for lacking a “narrative.”  New York Times op-ed pundit Frank Rich vented this on Sunday in his column, which you can read here. (It's insightful reading no matter what your political persuasion.)  

It’s easy to get caught up in the social media hysteria and believe everything you learned about marketing is obsolete.  We heard a similar line a decade ago, when e-commerce and e-everything were going to Amazon every bricks-and-mortar business out of business.  I think Wal-Mart is still in business, last time I checked.  And Barnes & Noble.  And CBS, Disney and HBO. And many other old-school "dinosaurs" that "just don't get it."

While we believe the practice of marketing is fundamentally changing because of the Internet, we know some practices will never change because they are at the core of what motivates a buyer to buy.  And one of them is the need for a compelling reason, clearly communicated.

Fiona Czerniawska is one of the best authorities on the consulting business.  She has been both a critic of consulting firm practice and a force for positive change.  From the London perch of two companies (first Arkimeda, now Source for Consulting), Fiona has written several books on the industry.

She generated a lot of buzz three years ago after releasing a study on the content that nearly 40 major consulting firms posted on their websites.  Called “White Space 2007,” she and her colleages reviewed more than 3,500 articles to understand what they were writing about, who was producing the most content, and who had the best content. (The winner on both quantity and quality was McKinsey, which is no surprise.)

Now her firm is selling the latest incarnation of the study, which evaluates 13,000 articles of 30 consulting firms. 

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.

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.