Thought leadership on a marketing blog? It may not sound relevant for your corporate blog but really, it’s more than what you can imagine. Thought leadership, as define by Wikipedia:

is a company or a person who person who is recognized among their peers and mentors for innovative ideas and demonstrates the confidence to promote or share those ideas as actionable distilled insights.““person who is recognized among their peers and mentors for innovative ideas and demonstrates the confidence to promote or share those ideas as actionable distilled insights.

The truth is, thought leadership is an art of being the “go to” person (business) for a particular area of interest.Though thought leadership has been identified as an effective tool for large businesses and service professionals (notably B2B), it’s also a significant factor in successes online for smaller businesses. With the rising trend of social media, it’s importance will only grow moving forward.

Why is thought leadership so important?

Thought leadership is the true driver for most business success, especially online. Businesses or people who just follow the crowd like a herd of sheep will never impact their audience like those who pave the way. In today’s market, regardless of whether you are marketing directly to business or consumers, your best bet to stand out is to lead, not to follow. To truly grow your influence and have real impact, you will have to be  recognize as a thought leader.

Yes, you can use branding to differentiate, you can use social technologies to reach your audience, you can repackage your content all day long but the true impact can only come from being recognize as a leader in the area of your expertise.  Without it, you are just another business offering yet another service or product.

At every point in the relationship you build with your audience, consistently demonstrate the thought leadership concept can contribute significantly to your overall marketing strategies. What results from thought leadership will literally contribute to every role you play in branding, building loyalty, building trust and so on.

What are the characteristics of a thought leader?

Thought leadership is about novel insights – Thought leaders normally go beyond the simple concept and theories. They always try to prove insights that others seem to miss. They are the creators of novel, timely information that are important to their specific target audience.

Thought leadership is all about solution - Thought leaders have the ability to identify real problems and come up with a practical solution. They tend to spot opportunities and charge at challenges head on.

Though leaders are always rigorous and never anecdotal – When a thought leader identify a problem leading to the solution, they do not just provide anecdotal evidence of success. They are able to quantify success with evidence of their involvement. Thought leaders don’t publish for the sake of publishing nor do they sell solutions they have no real experience with.

My question to you is this, are you a thought leader or are you just another online identity trying to saturate the internet with more of the same old stuff?

This is an important question because tough time always have a way to shift the wheat from the chaff. It is no longer effective to mass publish content and throw it out there, especially if the content is also publish by everyone else.

Something to think about!

Related posts:

1. Six steps to boosting the online profile of your brand
2. PR Books You Should Read For The Next Quarter
3. The Art of Using Interns In Your Social Marketing Program
4. After the subprime mortgage bubble comes The Brand Bubble
5. Communicating Bad News Effectively – 5Cs to note