How to show Thought Leadership in your Industry ?

image source: http://b2b-marketingblog.activeconversion.com/
It’s interesting to be a thought leader and show thought leadership.
But how do you get organized, from a marketing and company perspective?
Michael Porter or Treacy and Wiersema have learned us about product leadership, operational excellence or customer intimacy, and the relevancy to the strategy of companies.
(Michael Porter, Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors – 1998), later revised by Treacy and Wiersema with their Value Disciplines model (The Discipline of Market Leaders – 1997), now taught in nearly all business school programs, and which crops up at least once at every business conference.)
When B2B buyers seek out to buy a certain solution, I believe that in many cases they are not buying a product, but they are buying the vision of the company, and the people behind that vision.
That’s why any company, no matter which “Porter” strategy you have, must have a clear vision about the new solutions of the future. Solutions that give your buyers the competitive edge they need to survive in todays economy, while believing that your company will remain to provide you with future products that will keep giving him that competitive edge.
The objective of thought leadership ? If you get your thought leadership strategy right, customers will see you as a go-to source of expertise, your new products or incremental improvements will find easier acceptance, you’ll stand a good chance of bolstering product price (which is critical in many industries where commoditization is at work), and you’ll attract talent more easily.
The real definition of Thought Leadership
What should happen if you remove Marketing from Social?

Source : Flickr @robpatrick
What would happen if your marketing department stopped being active on Social Media? Or what should happen?
When companies develop their presence on social media, it is usually the marketing department taking the lead by creating accounts on social media networks, a social media policy, a digital marketing strategy…
Then they become active on these networks by answering their questions, inspiring them with great content, and listening to their needs.
Smaller companies have only 1 or 2 people developing these social relations, larger companies have whole teams of “conversation managers”.
Limited presence
Although I understand the approach, and support the approach, these teams can only be present at a limited amount of networks, or “circles” as I call them.
- They just cannot be present in all the social places where your customers, partners, suppliers, investors, or competitors are present.
- They just cannot be aware of all the different domains of expertise that are required to have a holistic approach to social networking.
- They just cannot be authentic about every topic they are involved with on these networks.
I probably can think of a number of others reasons, but you probably get what I mean.
Now think of a small company, let’s say 10 people. What’s the impact of one, usually part-time, marketing person, on all of this? You guessed it. Not a lot. He/she just doesn’t have the time to do a descent job with social media.
And now imagine a bigger company, 1000 people. Here you’ll have a team of, I don’t know, 20-50 people working in marketing and being part-time or some full-time occupied with social media. Again, the impact is minimal.
Taking away the marketing department
My point is, I don’t think social media is the sole responsibility of the marketing department. Oh yes, they play a guiding role in aligning the efforts with the company strategy, and making sure all the mechanics like a policy, processes, training, tooling, etc… are available.
But in essence, everyone in the marketing department should be aligned with a number of objectives which could look like this : Read more
The power of Twitter for B2B marketers – and what it must mean to you personally
If you are like many businesses around the world, and not working for a marketing department ;-), the idea of being active on Twitter is crazy.
Let’s face it: why on earth would you want to invest time in a “communication platform” that can only handle 140 characters, and has an average life time of 1 to 3 hours per message? Yep, indeed, crazy. What on earth would you make decide as B2B marketers to start using Twitter for B2B in for your marketing?
Let me tell you my story on how I started understanding Twitter, how I started using it, and what it means for every B2B company out there.
The initial spark
Like many B2B marketers out there, I knew about Twitter. But as I didn’t really see the value of the platform for my job, and for my company, I only shortly looked at it and dismissed it quite quickly. It wasn’t until I read “The Conversation Manager”, a book from Steven Van Belleghem, after which I started realizing that this social stuff is something I needed to investigate (yes, painful to admit it is).
Somehow, I can’t remember exactly how anymore, I ended up reading “The New Rules of Marketing & PR” of David Scott Meerman (@dmscott). This book literally blew me out of my comfy marketing chair ! It gave me insight into how to do modern digital and social media marketing. It is still one of the best books I ever read, and I can highly recommend it to anyone.
It was time to leave my comfort zone.