You can see the slide deck from the presentation below.

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3. Marketing in Tough Times Presentation & Panel – SVAMA in Santa Clara

In 2007, we wrote the “MarkeTech guide to marketing technology as an American Marketing Association members-only e-book to guide marketers through the most practical, useful and marketing-friendly technology tools like blogs, e-mail, widgets and video. It was one of the most popular e-books we’ve ever created with several thousand downloads over the past 18 months.

Much has changed since then and we’ve updated the guide for 2009-2010 with a few new chapters, an expanded list of resources and the most comprehensive social media and marketing technology glossary that you’ll find in any e-book of it’s kind! New stats, new examples and new ideas that you can use today!

The best part of all is that it’s all yours to read and share!

Some of the topics covered in this year’s 80 page updated guide:

• Autoresponder email
• Blogging
• Social media optimization
• Photo, slideshow and document sharing environments
• Honorable mentions in marketing technology and lot more!

It’s a FREE DOWNLOAD – NO REGISTRATION! – MarkeTech Guide: Tools and Trends in Marketing Technology" e-Book! [7 MB PDF]

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2. Failure #1: Not establishing a sense of urgency around social media (marketing)
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3. Insurgent Marketing Favors the Thought Leader, Part 1 of 2

That’s about all I want to share for now. We’ll be launching the e-book in conjunction with the “Be a Social Media Rockstar” event in Green Bay on August 12th!

Here’s a sneak-peak at one of the mind maps that shows up in the e-book.

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1. A high level view of the typical thought leadership marketing campaign
2. Thought leadership – more than just intellectual ping pong
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Laurie Dillon-Schalk has a great post recapping a recent meeting she attended discussion thought leadership. I take issue with a statement she made when she said:

…it gave two hours to dissect an overused term whose deliverable (thought leadership) is critical to business and everyday life.

In fact, I believe that thought leadership is still very under-used. We’ve yet to penetrate the marketing circles with the message about the benefits and realities of leveraging thought leadership and thought leadership marketing. Just look at these Google results.

“Thought Leadership” — 1,090,000 results
“Thought Leadership Marketing” — 344,000 results

compared to…

“Social Media” — 90,400,000
“Social Media Marketing” — 3,290,000

The hype or “overuse” of social media is well beyond that of thought leadership. We’ve got a long way to go. Nevertheless, Laurie’s commentary about the thought leadership definition discussion is a telling one.

As it turns out, the group collectively agreed that being original or first to market with an idea does not necessarily constitute thought leadership. That thought leadership needs to also result in impact. That the leadership of the thought includes relevancy, application, resources, action and impact. There was also talk that thought leadership is a special thing and a special person who synthesizes in a special way. I added that thought leadership can be unintentional – an idea or meme that catches like wild fire., Defining thought leadership and what makes it so. « Social Wisdom

Thought leaders are not always the first or the most original. In fact, in our view where we merge thought leadership, insurgent marketing and social media into a go-to-market approach, often the underdogs or insurgents are the preeminent thought leaders and not the first-to-markets or the big dogs in the industry. Laurie’s group hit thought leadership on the head when they declared that it must include components of “relevancy, application, resources, action and impact.” In fact, I’ve added those components to the thought leadership framework map under Laurie’s name. Those fit nicely with how others have defined the discipline.

More to the point, Laurie mentioned the group’s perspective to see thought leadership as something that “is a special thing and a special person who synthesizes in a special way.” Once again, we see the reference to thought leadership and its linkage to an actual person, which was recently featured as a key shortcoming in the Bliss PR thought leadership and social media benchmarking study,  in much of the thought leadership exhibited in the thought leadership of professional service firms. Thought leaders and thought leadership are, in more ways that not, inextricably linked.

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3. A high level view of the typical thought leadership marketing campaign

Thought Leadership Marketing Frameworks

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1. Thought Leadership Marketing Failures?
2. The five second prescription for thought leadership marketing
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Image by Hamed Saber via Flickr

Bryony Thomas at Clear Thought Consulting has a great post on his perspective of what a typical thought leadership marketing campaign entails.

Thought leadership is about being front of mind in regard of a certain subject or market. A thought leader will always make it onto a ‘long list’ when people are making buying decisions – and often become the benchmark against which others are measured.

She’s right on. Thought leadership is not a short term thing. Ever. In fact, she goes on to state a few more points that I think really resonate with fellow thought leadership marketers. If you’re in the market for thought leadership marketing, consider these factors as you’re working through the process.

• Thought leadership programmes are not a quick fix, you cannot expect immediate results.
• A thought leadership marketing programme is only effective in the medium term, and then only when it forms part of a funneled sales approach. That is, a planned process that uses specific tools and techniques to move people from one stage to the next through the buying decision. The thought leadership programme typically acts as a top and tail to this process.
• In the longer term, thought leadership programmes also serve to create a bank of ‘good will’ in more junior members of the target audience, which translates into awareness and leads when they move into more senior positions later in their careers.

A typical thought leadership campaign « Bryony Thomas | Clear Thought

Related articles

• Thought Leadership Ain’t What It Used to Be (thecustomercollective.com)
• Your Website is Your Social Media Hub (kylelacy.com)
• Dana VanDen Heuvel: Do You Have the ‘Four As’ To Be a Thought Leader? (mpdailyfix.com)

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1. The Thought Leadership Marketing Equation
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3. “Thought Tweetership”: Blogging and Micro-Blogging for Thought Leadership Marketers

via Sam Lawrence

I came across an interesting article this weekend from Management-Issues Ltd on women and leadership that made me wonder how gender roles play out in thought leadership marketing. It’s never enough to have just one leader at the top of an organization in the role of thought leadership, but rather to build the culture of the entire team to be thought leaders. That said, there were a few interesting quotes based on some recent research from the UK division of Hudson Global Resources.

An analysis of assessments and psychometric testing of more than 65,000 people by management consultancy Hudson has concluded that the innate ability of many women to be altruistic, people-oriented, co-operative and open lends themselves much better to leading modern-day organisations.

Wow! Sounds to me like some of the key personal criteria that make up the modern thought leader Transparency, ability to cooperate, openness and of course, my favorite and most sought after trait – altruism!

There were a couple of additional zingers that got me thinking about women vs. men as thought leaders.  Namely, the long term vs. short term view of things.  In the short term, companies go with what they know, often with compete disregard for what could be a better long term option.  Thought leadership is a long-term strategy, but it’s hard to see the path for a long term strategy when we’re so mired in the short-term issues of the day.  

Karen Scott, managing director of Hudson UK, said: “We are concerned that companies might adopt a short-term view that reinforces the hierarchy of men over women in their efforts to succeed during a recession.

Exactly.  Even if women are the better thought leaders, their male counterparts may likely get the nod in the belt-tightening economy where we’re all scrambling for short-term answers and forgoing the long-term growth & sustainability of the enterprise.  Say nothing for ethics, altruism and the other durable factors that make up the greatest companies.

However, I see hope, and it’s in the next generation of thought leaders.  In fact, I’ve always maintained that thought leadership marketing is never an ‘at the top’ thing but a ‘complete culture’ thing.  You need to have the entire organization involved at some level, or the leading thoughts, point of view and uniqueness leave when the execs shut the door on the way out.  It’s encouraging then to see that from the aforementioned study, that younger women are focused, albeit unknowingly (maybe, or maybe not?) on the building blocks of thought leadership while more experienced female employees have graduated to leveraging their openness and thought leadership.

Younger female leaders appeared to focus much more on altruism, people orientation and cooperation, while more experienced female leaders tended to concentrate on openness and thought leadership.

All that said, this is some very encouraging news.  In fact, I came across a great post on some of the most revered thought leaders in the social media space from Sam Lawrence that might interest you.

What’s your take?  Where do women fit in the landscape of thougth leadership marketing?

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