Content, Community, and Commerce

Transcript

Hi there, it’s Peter Winick and I’m the founder and CEO at Thought Leadership Leverage. Here’s the idea that I’d like to share with you today and that’s this: there are three sort of C’s, three buckets if you will, that are really important to authors, thought leaders, academics, consultants, etc. And that’s this: there’s content, there’s community, and there’s commerce.

So, the content is what you create, right? That is the essence of your work—your ideas, your models, your methods, your frameworks, and such. Lots and lots of thought leaders spend lots and lots of time developing that; that’s what they do. The next sort of level, if you will, is community. Because if you’re not getting it out there and it’s not resonating with people and there’s not a community of folks that are engaged with your work, that enjoy your work, that appreciate your work, that are really seeing the benefits and the outcomes of doing something a little bit differently based on your ideas, your models, and your framework, then you’ve got to support and serve your community.

And then the last is commerce. And commerce is how are you making a living with your work? How are you making money? How are you commercializing the intellectual property, the thought leadership that you have? So, if you spend a lot of time in content and not enough time nurturing and developing the community, quite often you’ll never get to the successful side on the commercial side.

So I would suggest that you think about sort of how you’re spending your time and your energy and seeing where you can reallocate a little bit to make sure that you’re spending enough time on the content side, an adequate time on the community side, and an adequate amount of time, whatever that means to you, on the commercial side. What do you think?