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How thought leadership can turbo charge your brand

Guest post by: Craig Badings

Article Overview: Thought leadership is an extremely powerful leadership tool for a company or one's own personal branding. But what does it require to become a thought leader?

How thought leadership can turbo charge your brand

Used judiciously with the right amount of commitment and strategic input, true thought leadership has the capacity to be an extremely powerful tool in a company’s communications arsenal.

But it is often easier for individuals to be thought leaders while companies battle to fulfill this space.

Why?

There are a number of reasons. First, the best thought leaders share information with an abundance mentality. Most companies aren't into sharing information, alternatively if they do share it is usually information that has been sanitised and filtered to a bland paste through committees, sub-committees, legal compliance, brand managers, etc.

Second, the best thought leaders engage with and listen to their audiences in order to understand their needs. They're in tune with their audience and are constantly seeking feedback and adapting what they deliver based on this feedback. They are interested in adding value to their customers’ lives beyond merely selling them a product or a service.

Unfortunately most companies are still stuck in the old media mentality of choosing the medium and then delivering a well massaged message to the audience through that medium. That's the way it's always been done and it's worked.

So why should we change? Why should companies engage with its audience rather than continue delivering messages to them? After all we conduct research, that's listening, that's engaging isn't it?

Yes and no. Research is a very effective way of listening to an audience but is it two way engagement? Not really.

And herein lies the rub. Social media and Web 2.0 has changed the way not only how companies communicate with their customers but more importantly the way customers want to and expect to communicate with the company, how they find out about a company's brand and what the social media community out there are saying about that brand.

It is no longer good enough to merely sell products or services. A growing percentage of customers want more from the companies from which they buy. Questions are being asked about what the company does in the community, how it recycles, how it sources and processes it raw materials, its labour practices and what impact it has on the environment.

It is the companies who engage with their customers, suppliers and the communities within which they operate, who get to the bottom of the issues that are important to these audiences. It is here where the rich vein of thought leadership opportunity lies.

It's at this point that they are able to align the delivery of a thought leadership platform relevant to the issues that are important to the very people the company is trying to influence.

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Article Tags: abundance mentality, arsenal, audience, audiences, best thought, brand managers, committees, leaders share, legal compliance, s communications, service span, share information, span style, style font, thought leaders, thought leadership



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