“What a Coincidence, I’m a Thought Leader Too”

Rob Cottingham ran a funny cartoon (as opposed to a cartoon that’s not funny) over at ReadWriteWeb about thought leaders. I get his point. When in doubt, it seems that everyone uses the term “thought leader” to describe the end game of what social media is going to do for them. While I try not to get too bent about this, at the end of the day, it’s making the ‘business of thought leadership marketing‘ a bit more interesting as you have to cut through the buzzword clutter, and then get down to the actual discipline of thought leadership, which is often a bit of a departur from what folks have heard through the social media circles.

The first time I heard the term “thought leader”, I thought, “Now there’s a cool concept: someone who is able to assert influence and change outcomes through the sheer force and power of her ideas.”

The last time I heard the term “thought leader”, I thought, “There ought to be a little anniversary present to mark the three millionth time you hear a buzzword.”

That may be my biggest complaint about buzzwords and jargon: not that they’re often impenetrable to outsiders, and not that they often mask a lack of clarity on the speaker’s part, but because they take perfectly good phrases – phrases with power, phrases with innovation and meaning – and suck the life out of them through overuse., Cartoon: Thought Leaders

What I really need to do is start a thought leader synonym campaign where we look for words to substitute…

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• The Value of Thought Leadership for Your Business (kylelacy.com)
• Dana VanDen Heuvel: Thought Leadership Alone Is Not Enough (mpdailyfix.com)
• Dana VanDen Heuvel: Do You Have the ‘Four As’ To Be a Thought Leader? (mpdailyfix.com)