How can you use surveys to create engaging content for Thought Leadership?

In my experience surveys with FEW, DIRECT and SHORT questions are easier for people to answer yielding more data for analysis and more reliable (statistically) results. Also asking the question that the audience would like the answer to themselves and then revealing the statistics as the survey goes on is very catchy.

MIT Professor Hal Gregersen's concept of "questions are the answer" emphasizes the power of inquiry to unlock new insights and perspectives. In the context of thought leadership, especially when using surveys to generate content, this approach is particularly relevant. By designing your surveys with thought-provoking, catalytic questions, you can uncover deeper, more nuanced insights from your audience. These insights can then be transformed into engaging, thought-provoking content that challenges existing norms and introduces new perspectives in your field. This approach underscores the importance of not just seeking answers, but more importantly, asking the right questions to drive meaningful and impactful thought leadership.

Once upon a time I was a training manager and involved in a project about ' Corporate Culture'. One of the spinoffs was the creations of a '360 degree management survey'. When the survey was taken and the results were presented ... my boss ... the HR Director ... said: "If I fire the 2 team members who gave me a bad score ... my score will go up" ... and he was right ... ?? Bottom line ... surveys don't solve the challenges ... it's something you can do when you don't want to change ... ??????

In my experience, articulation on what you need to accomplish is paramount. Unless you know what you need, how is not possible to figure out. Highly emphasis on below framework: - Define what you are trying to achieve with a survey. - Put a timeline - Identify the right audience - Craft the questions that could have ring fenced answers; easier to build the hypothesis around it. - Try to frame a strategy to have a feedback loop with your audience for both on quality of content and relevance of topic. - Publish/market the outcomes, it instills the sense of belongingness.

Surveys can be very misleading. There are a few rule structures when delivering surveys that can make a difference: 1. Encourage honesty - sending from HR may cause certain employees to hold back their true opinions. 2. Get managers on board - the goal should be improvement through feedback not calling out people who have voiced discontent. 3. Produce actionable data - how questions are worded and the correlation of survey results should feed an action plan to produce business results. - Using surveys to gain a "best place to work" distinction may not be useful. Surveys can also be used as a tool to elicit candid feedback for improving leadership practices. Employees will discard future surveys is their feedback does not birth action.

Despite what this article says, surveys are not a particularly way to guide your thought leadership. Because thought leadership is about the cutting edge, while surveys are mostly going to be lagging indicators.

Using surveys is smart! It can help you generate content ideas that resonate with your audience. I use Tally to gather insights directly from my followers. Personally, I find surveys to be the best to understand what makes my audience tick. They provide a direct line to their thoughts and preferences, allowing me to tailor my content to what they value the most. By asking the right questions, I can align my thought leadership with the topics and issues my audience cares about, making each piece of content more relevant and impactful.

First and foremost, the audience are not thought leaders. Second, I have never come across a situation where surveys and thought leadership meet on a given project. The rest of the questions are painfully beaten track. This question itself is an oxymoron. Surveys are to validate general known common behavior across a platform. Thought leadership on the other hand is visionary, its anything that is heading towards something refreshing and new. Yes it contains best practices but that is to elevate what is already validated. This question is GenAI making up new questions without knowing context. Just re-jumbling keywords doesnt make good content!!!

To use surveys for creating engaging Thought Leadership content, focus on analyzing survey results and developing an action plan to implement insights. Conduct surveys to gather data on industry trends, challenges, or audience preferences. Analyze the results to identify key findings and patterns. Use these insights to create content that addresses the uncovered needs or topics, such as in-depth reports, opinion pieces, or solution-oriented articles. Share your unique perspective on the findings, adding value to the conversation. This approach not only positions you as a thought leader but also ensures your content is directly relevant and useful to your audience.

1. Pick an industry 2. Pick a persona 3. Float your survey 4. Plan to incentivize for good sample size and authentic responses 5. Analyse survey responses 6. Use the survey for original thought leadership content I remember doing a similar exercise with CXO of IT companies. We got responses from 100+ CXO which gave us key insights into the industry and their expected solutions. Once you have an original insights from a survey like this, you must convert this into a well documented research paper. This research content can be repurposed into blogs, PRs, social media posts and other formats to distribute across relevant media platform in your industry.

It's a bit meta (or maybe just obvious), but I'm a big fan of using research tools to analyze my research. There's no reason to sit in spreadsheet jail and manually sort survey responses for key insights. I happen to work for one of the most advanced research companies that's making it easier for everyone in the company to find important themes hidden in the open-ended survey responses. From there, you can dig into the hard human work of making connections across all your data and creating a robust content creation and distribution strategy.

Don't get caught up in just talking about general trends. Bring your data to life by sharing personal stories. Spotlight the unique cases and bring in real human experiences to make your content relatable and powerful.

Let's face it, how many surveys have you taken that drag on and on, or ask for ever more layers of detail. My guess is the results are frankly worthless because folk either give up or make up the answers just to get finished. Therefore, question design is absolutely the most critical part of a survey, and trying to engage your participants along the way makes your results far more valuable, particularly if your intention is to create or validate ideas from a thought leadership perspective. So, three questions that make your audience think, rather than fifty that don't, will likely bring you far better results.

In a world inundated with surveys, let's take a different route. Instead of bombarding your audience with lengthy questionnaires, craft interactive, bite-sized polls that provoke curiosity and spark conversations. By turning surveys into an engaging experience, you not only capture valuable insights but also foster a sense of community. End of the day thoughtful responses lead to impactful thought leadership.

Ideally a report from a survey shouldn't be the end point - but the start of engagement. To create content that brings value, inspires ideas and creates debate, it can then follow to a forum (whether online or in-person) that the audience can be part of to explore the results further and learn more. That can add depth and context beyond pie charts, and generate the "so what next" that really delivers.

The key reason to engage with a survey for content creation or thought leadership revolves around hypothesis one has pertaining to a topic that interests his/her audience. To test the hypothesis, the survey can be useful in bringing out insights if done professionally. Apart from testing the hypothesis, the survey can capture beliefs, social aspects and qualitative information around the topic/question. The survey can be designed to guide implications for practitioners. This allows to not only publish thought provoking insights but encourages how to apply and benefit from the insights. Finally, the survey can facilitate conversations and exchanges when snowballed to get varied perspectives and target appropriate base leading to more value.