Thought Leadership ain't what it used to be

Thought leadership is not what it was. Especially now the world of thought is completely online.

Thought provoking white papers you could actually highlight or annotate have been replaced with shallow PDFs ... sorry, carousels... cobbled together from questionable online sources. (AI as thought leadership? Really?)

Real-world research projects have been replaced with so-so customer success videos and LinkedIn polls.

And the idea of value is what firms shoehorn into what they call ‘value-driven’ webinars.

In short, thought leadership has morphed into high pressure ‘push’ marketing tactics with a shiny internet veneer.

We’ve all experienced thought leadership as push marketing, haven’t we?

It’s that cocktail of persuasive sales copy and a few generic objections swept away (or under the carpet), with a dash of urgency for good measure.

All this does is to turn thought leadership into a FOMO drug with a ‘buy now’ aftertaste.

Does it work?

It can.

Because it mainlines straight into the twin arteries of fear and desire.

But it is getting harder to return real results by talking AT people instead of with them, and especially online.

Because our audience... sorry ‘prospects’... are increasingly sophisticated.

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There is a better way.

A way that treats ‘prospects’ as real people who real thought leadership can help.

And this better way is available to you the moment you decide to embrace it.

Reinventing Authority in the new world

Instead of pushing 'prospects' through a sales funnel here’s a radical suggestion.

We can attract or ‘pull’ people forwards with the power of deep insights, compelling data, and empathy-led stories. True thought leadership for this latest incarnation of the online world.

The fundamental difference between push versus pull, then, is the approach to take when you design your primary system of communicating with people.

By creating this new communication system you are also reinventing your own authority.

And you’re doing that by looking at your communications from the perspective of what the people we most care about want and need from us.

Soon, setting out from the starting line as author, you become the unassailable authority your community most wants to connect with.

Through this lens of author-authority you can make your thought leadership meaningful and valuable before (or even without) asking for anything in return.

Importantly, when we do that, something magical happens.

Our audiences become our communities and they feel an invisible pull towards experiencing more with us.

They want to go deeper down the rabbit hole we’re creating for them.

So how do you reinvent your authority?

The question I usually start with is: how can you make your thought leadership so valuable to your audience that they can’t help but be pulled forward and want to experience more?

Pay attention to this, because it’s an important starter for 10. A huge insight.

Because giving value is not the same thing as giving ‘helpful information’.

And helpful information is not thought leadership.

First of all, information on its own is just a Google search away and offers little real value.

Also, please don’t cite trite cliches as thought leadership. (If I see ‘two ears and one mouth’ again this week I’ll throw up.)

And don’t get me started on Chat GPT, or whatever the AI firehose du jour happens to be.

But value that’s truly meaningful? That takes an entirely different form.

True value is a powerful insight. Something that makes the reader or viewer see the world in a wholly new light. It’s a surprise. A revelation. A heresy.

I've written about this before, but dig out Murray Davis's rather brilliant paper 'That's Interesting!' It really is worth your time. Print it out. Scribble on it. Highlight it. You won't regret it.

Anyhow, what I promise to anyone reading our new newsletter – coming soon – is to present you with a series of insights and revelations to find for yourself.

And when you do, everything you see will be different. Everything.

At least, these are the high hopes I begin with.?

Enjoy!

From here on, your attention is the only currency I require. There’s nothing to buy at the end of this article.?

But the next step IS for you to take.

If this short manifesto makes any kind of sense for you as a thought leader, hit reply and tell me what you're grappling with. What's the big challenge for you?

If that's too big to put here, message me.

This will help me give you exactly (and only) what you want to hear.

Do it now, while you remember.