What Most Thought Leadership Gets Wrong.

Thought leadership has been a business concept in B2B for decades, which means it's always been wrapped in a business wrapper.

That means it's been looked at through typical lenses of corporate success. KPIs like leads generated, or clicks to digital assets, or website visits, or even follower or audience metrics like "engagement".

The trouble with this is that it's not at all the lens through which the audience of thought leadership views success.

If you ask people what they value from thought leadership—and at LinkedIn, we have—they'll tell you it helps them understand the expertise of the brand or person, or evaluate a decision. But I'll even say here that I think there's bias in these answers because of the framing of the questions in a purely business context.

When you strip that out and ask yourself what people (like individual humans with hearts, minds and souls) gravitate toward, you can learn a lot more by looking outside business and into the world of fandom.

If you're not familiar, "fandom" is just a word that means belonging to a group of fans of something or someone. But dig into culture a bit and it really becomes more than that. It's about belonging, but it's also about community. Identity. Passion. Enjoyment. Entertainment. Inspiration. Connection. And above all, enthusiasm for something that brings you joy.

Maybe that's a favorite book or book series, a show, a comic book, a game, a team, a musical. Often, we fall in love with these things because we identify with or come to be invested in the story, the characters, the journey they're on and the universe they dwell within. We want to immerse ourselves in that, be a part of it, experience it through our own eyes. The lucrative dollar franchises of Marvel or Dungeons and Dragons or UFC or author Sarah J. Maas really bring it to life.

They really embody the very human need to attach ourselves to something that reflects who we aspire to be, who we believe ourselves to be already, or a group of like-minded people with whom we can unabashedly share affinity or "inside" secrets, lexicon, and experiences.

But why, oh why, do we totally abandon the power of such a thing when we cross over to the business world?

Stripping out the soul of humans in the name of dry, papery metrics and processes designed to serve pipeline and profitability before people means that we end up with "thought leadership" that reads, watches, or sounds as brittle as the metrics we measure it by. We find about seventy million ways to retread the same six tropes about leadership or 10 steps to whatever, we applaud ourselves for the number of email addresses we capture, and we completely lose the essence of connection, passion and excitement that comes from belonging to something fun and interesting and rooted in emotional interests as much as rational ones.

There's a lot we can learn about creating non-sucky thought leadership from fandom. So I'll leave you with a few questions:

• When you're trying to convey what you know or can do, are you doing it in a way that prioritizes making people feel seen and like they belong to something big or cool or fun?
• Are you willing to drop some of the suit-and-tie pretense to remember that your audience—either known or new to you—is a human being with thoughts and feelings and passions even as they go about their professional lives?
• Do you first think about how you're investing in the people you want to connect with based on their needs and interests instead of leading with whatever sales or marketing goal you have for your business, trusting that the long term investment is worth it?
• Are you creating a community of fans, readers, listeners, or viewers that can find common ground with each other without you present? And would they want to come back again and again do that, to build on your ideas, and make them their own?
• When you seek to lead in thought, are you making space for people to be active participants in the conversation and journey vs. simply observers and recipients of your ideas? Do you inspire them to take action, create something, try something, or even just think differently about a concept they've long held?

I realize these are somewhat antithetical to the way we've gone about thought leadership production since, well, ever. But I maintain that the people out there doing it well are creating their own sort of fandom universe. Creating ideas and letting people belong to those ideas instead of simply consuming them. Designing for community and connection so that people want to come back for the next conversation. Infusing fun or creativity or insight or even just a bit of personality that reminds audiences there are also humans behind the logos or the whitepapers or the podcasts.

Fandom doesn't just belong to books and sports. It's a cornerstone concept that really has a place in the B2B business world, we're just late to the party.

And the people who figure that out are the ones who are going to create lasting, resilient communities that grow and thrive (and yep, drive those almighty success metrics) more than any fleeting ebook download list could ever do.

Next week, we'll take a closer look at a couple of people and companies who are doing just that. We'll see you then.