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Journalistic Thought Leadership | Luke Collins
Using a journalistic approach to creating thought leadership.
An interview with Luke Collins about his work at EY using his background in journalism to create thought leadership that informs leaders about not only what they want to know but what they need to know.
Today’s guest is Luke Collins, the Managing Director, and Global Editor-in-Chief at EY. Luke has had a number of thought leadership roles at high profile companies with a background in journalism before that.
Luke talks with us about thought leadership being at an inflection point where there is tension between the need to push users towards the products you are offering and the need to retain a sense of objectivity that engenders trust.
We discuss how EY managed to reframe their thought leadership early in the year with the outbreak of COVID-19. Also, he explains how they are using a Now, Next, Beyond framework to manage what type of content they publish as the world changes.
Next, Luke shares how he is using his journalistic sensibilities to help build content that is able to grab reader attention in the first 20 seconds and present short-form articles that deliver powerful and useful information. Plus, we discuss how you can use the same content in different formats to reach the end-user where they are and not where you want them to be.
If you want to make content that tells the user what they need to know in a manner they will actually consume it, this is an episode filled with advice for you.
Three Key Takeaways from the Interview:
- Thought leaders need to deliver the information leaders want to know and the information they need to know.
- The format of your thought leadership is critical. Breaking it down into bite-sized chunks is more effective than a 3000-word essay.
- Creating thought leadership like a journalist would deliver a story can capture an audience and connect with them in an impactful way.
Join the Organizational Thought Leadership Newsletter to learn more about expanding thought leadership within your organization! This monthly newsletter is full of practical information, advice, and ideas to help you reach your organization’s thought leadership goals.
And if you need help scaling organizational thought leadership, contact Thought Leadership Leverage!
Transcript
Bill Sherman Hello. You’re listening to Leveraging Thought Leadership. I’m your host, Bill Sherman. Thought leadership often requires a delicate balance. How do you tell leaders not only what they want to know, but also what they need to know? To explore that question with me today. I invited Lou Collins. Luke is the global editor in chief and managing director at E! He’s responsible for global thought leadership and he Y, which is a strategic role that requires a deep understanding of both issues, internal experts within the organization and the global leaders they’re trying to reach through thought leadership. Luke’s been in thought leadership roles for many years prior to joining U. Y. He served as the managing director and director of publishing at Deloitte Insights and the executive editor of McKinsey Publishing. In this episode, I’m eager to ask Luke about the strategy he uses to reach his target audiences. I also want to talk to him about storytelling and leveraging channels and assets wisely. Ready? Let’s begin. So welcome to the show, Luke.
Luke Collins Thanks, man. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.
Bill Sherman Now, many people define thought leadership in different ways. You’ve been responsible for curating content for many years. How do you define thought leadership?
Luke Collins My definition changes every day of the week, or most fundamentally, I still think of it as a way of helping leaders solve their toughest problems. I think that the kind of problems that we address with thought leadership always reminds me of Barack Obama, who used to say that, you know, all the easy problems get solved before they ever get to him. He has to deal with the tough ones. I sort of think of really distinctive thought. Leadership is being offering solutions to the kind of problems that are, for most leaders, kind of intractable. You know, they’re looking for solutions. They’re looking for answers, and they just don’t have them. And then, you know, good thorny issue comes in and provides either a direct answer or a framework for how they should be thinking through how they can solve their problems.
Bill Sherman Right. And you’ve been really speaking to the top of the house at large organizations for a long period of time. And as you said, the problems that are worthy of their time, effort, focus, energy aren’t the easy ones. So you talked about thought leadership being at an inflection point. What do you see as that inflection point?
Luke Collins So, I mean, I this sort of gets to the nature of thought leadership itself. You know, when I started at McKinsey, it sort of sounds weird, but I do feel like a cottage industry. Leadership is kind of like people were doing it. It was a kind of odd term to begin with. For someone who is a trained journalist and came from that world. And there weren’t that many people I felt that were doing it in a systematic sort of methodical way. And then it a lot of the thought leadership also to get to that point around intractable, intractable problems, it really seemed like most of it was geared towards strategy issues. There were lots of sort of nebulous issues that there weren’t easy answers to. You would offer frameworks for how people could think about solving them and that sort of thing. And you know, when people used to ask what I did for a living is always kind of hard to explain, I would say, well, you know, we don’t sell widgets. What we sell is what we know. And so what we are doing with thought leadership is trying to convince people to buy our ideas. You know, thought leadership is how we demonstrate how smart we are, why we can help you solve your toughest problems. And when I think about the inflection point, there’s sort of there’s two things. I think firms kind of began selling widgets, if you know what I mean. We began selling a lot of off the shelf tools and solutions and products, obviously grounded in in in what’s really she’s always been grounded in. But the sort of the nature of thought leadership began to shift. You weren’t just necessarily trying to prove how smart you were, but you are really trying to draw a much straight, much more of a straight line between what you say, what you say and what you sell. So that was sort of one inflection point. And I think the second one in parallel with that was the much deeper involvement of marketing and marketers in the world of thought leadership, which had been traditionally. Kind of like a newsroom media environment. It’s kind of been a lot of ex journalists and business journalists and newspapers and magazines who are seeking to take complex ideas and make them digestible and understandable. But there was a very big divide between sort of the purity of thought leadership and sort of not being seen as a form of marketing. And then when you begin. In terms of the fundamental nature of thought leadership shifting more towards the provision of services and products and tools and solutions, that balance begins to shift as well. So I sort of feel like we’re getting to a point. There’s this tension now between the need to more explicitly push users toward what you’re selling and the need to at the same time retain that real sense of from the user’s perspective, that sense of objectivity that engendered trust with the readers that they feel like you are they are getting impartial advice, they’re getting impartial solutions to their problems, and they’re not necessarily getting the hard sell. And that that balances has shifted a little.
Bill Sherman And I think one of the shifts, too, that I’ve also seen is a democratization of thought leadership, where it used to be reserved to a small pool of people if the top of the house or senior execs and now more people are expected to participate in thought leadership in some way, whether they’re creating it within their expertise, they’re helping deploy it. So I’ve seen more organizations weave the sales team into the distribution of thought leadership and certainly marketing and the rise of content marketing over the past couple of decades. There’s been a persistent question of where does content marketing end and thought leadership begin? Right.
Luke Collins I agree. Yeah, I agree. I mean, because I think traditionally it was kind of that sort of newspaper magazine, you know, we report and then paraphrase Fox News, we report, and then you decide if you want to use this. Right. And it was sort of marketing not by stealth by any stretch, which I think is what knows it sort of fundamentally the form of content marketing. But it was very much there wasn’t a clear line between what you what you wrote and what you attempted to sell or to market. Now it’s definitely shifted and that is also has implications on a lot of fronts. It has implications on what you say. You know, part of the mission of leadership to me is not only telling users what they want to know, which is responding to their demand around solving problems on their behalf. But often I think it’s telling them what they need to know, things they don’t know yet, and things that the big firms are privy to by virtue of the number of people they have in their organization, by virtue of the number of organizations that you work with. You know, we see things that individual practice, individual leaders don’t see. And so often there’s that that need or you feel that compulsion to say, hey, you should know about this. But when you can’t necessarily tie that directly back to something that you’re selling, it becomes in a world that is becoming a where it where thought leadership is becoming a little more content marketing oriented. And it becomes an interesting equation, you know, to try and to try and strike that balance because there needs to be a balance, I think, for sure.
Bill Sherman Well, and that puts tension on the editorial calendar as well. Right. So there are the things which from a journalistic or reporting perspective as you’re noticing, trends or patterns that are visible when you have multiple touchpoints across an industry, but not necessarily if you’re in one organization. That’s one function of thought leadership. Another one is to advance the conversation in a way where there are things that people should be talking about or preparing for, but they’re not tied to this quarter. This year they might be five, ten years out. But yes, the work needs to be done now to prepare for that future. Right.
Luke Collins Absolutely. And I think that the also what could fit into it is the need for the sense of immediacy and urgency that all leadership traditionally. I guess traditional thought leadership, if you want to call it that, has a long shelf life. Member of McKinsey, you would get the stats around visits to particular pieces of content and inevitably pieces that were published several years earlier in the top ten is right there.
Bill Sherman There’s an evergreen if not long shelf life perspective.
Luke Collins Yeah, yeah. And the best leadership should have that because it’s the best thought leadership and it happens very rarely. It’s a seminal framework or a particular way of thinking about solving a really thorny problem, and it gets referred back to again and again and again. Yet the market today is also demanding a much shorter shelf life, you know, and so I think we’re all trying to strike that balance between offering deeply researched, deeply thought out, rigorous thought leadership that adds tremendous value over a long period of time. And in an ideal world, fundamentally shifts how someone thinks about a certain problem. We’re trying to advance in offering that and offering what leaders want tomorrow because something happened overnight in Europe and they wake up with they think point. I wonder what your wife thinks of that because we happen to have 300,000 people around the world dealing with thousands of companies. And we have a perspective on what that would mean for an individual within an organization, in a particular industry or in a particular region. And so we’re all now trying to sort of pedal on to two fronts at the same time. On the one hand, you’re trying to develop this deep research, sort of almost like investigative journalism style content supplemented by your data, your daily news, and accepting that that Daily news may not necessarily be relevant tomorrow.
Bill Sherman So let’s explore that for a moment through the lens of the year that has been 2020. For example, if you’re looking downstream and you’re talking about those things that leaders should be thinking about and then say you’re back in March 2020 as the world is, you know, dealing with the news of Covid, if you’re not responding in some way to the things that are top of mind for them, at that point, you almost you feel tone deaf, right? So I’ve seen a lot of organizations struggle with how do we rebalance our editorial calendar when on one hand there’s the black swan urgency and the other hand you’re trying to stay true to your messaging, your platform, the things that you’re trying to communicate, which have a longer cadence to them. How did you approach that balancing?
Luke Collins I mean, it was really you would have seen every single professional services from everyone engaged in the world of thought leadership dramatically ramp up content in March, April and May. We were no exception. And I think part of that was. Just a scramble. People wanted answers. There were questions that needed answers, but no one really knew what the answer was. No one knew how Covid was developing, how it would necessarily impact organizations. There were dramatic changes underfoot in terms of how people worked, where they worked. So we were all kind of throwing stuff against the wall to see what to see, what stuck. And I think that was a direct response to market demand. There was no way to sit back and not do anything. It would have been the worst possible response. I think part of the balancing act we all then had was when do you pivot? You know. Right. You know, you can’t look externally as though you’re insensitive or is the pandemic suddenly disappeared? Obviously hasn’t. But in big organizations like turning around an ocean liner, you’re not making decisions today that necessarily manifest tomorrow. They can take six months. It takes nine months. It takes a year. So you need your thought leadership to begin reflecting the fact that at some point these organizations are going to need to think about what’s happening in the medium to longer term. So we had we had three lenses. We applied. We had sort of a now next beyond framework, and we sought to flesh out content in the now. Here’s what you need to do today to respond to this very immediate problem that you’re dealing with. The next is when you have the capacity and the mental breathing room, you can think about what you should be doing three, six months down the road. And then beyond sort of once the pandemic has receded, ideally. But we had a long we had a big debate around when do you when do you pivot, when do you begin shifting the balance of content more toward beyond at the expense of now without looking as though you are downplaying or being insensitive to what people are dealing with every single day? And so I think that the way we were sort of mentally we didn’t do this any sort of formal, formal way was sort of thinking about, okay, if at the beginning of the pandemic, we’re thinking 80% of the content is now and 20% is next and beyond. In two months time, we’ll begin to shift it more towards 40% being next with maybe 30% either side now and beyond. I think now we’re almost fully in the beyond phase and we’ve sought to reposition that content and reposition the way we want organizations to think about it as. The opportunity that’s now been presented to reframe your future as an organization as a result of what’s happened. And so that’s the branding we’ve adopted is reframe your future to view what’s happened with Covid as obviously not to diminish that the tragedy and the impact that is still ongoing every single day, but to be here in the United States. But you also view it as from an organizational perspective, a wake up call and an opportunity to shift your organization in a healthier direction, which feeds into also our broader organizational goals around building a better working world and thinking about long term value and thinking about more inclusive capitalism, thinking about your organization’s purpose, etc.. But it was definitely I mean, I had friends obviously back at McKinsey and at Deloitte and other places, and it was it was a real sort of all hands on deck effort for about three months there. And I don’t think it’s the pace is diminished all that much. But I think the. The clarity that has happened that we’ve all gained over time is to be able to look beyond the immediate needs and start thinking more about what organizations should be doing in that sort of longer term horizon. So that’s where we’re all now shifting.
Bill Sherman So I think that now next beyond framework and we’ve been talking about frameworks, but this is sort of a meta framework for thought. Leadership is one that’s very useful because the way that I think about thought leadership is it you go and you peer around the corner into the future. You’re looking for what’s going to be important to know you’re doing sense making, and then you’re bringing those insights back to people today and telling them, Here are the steps that you need to be taking, Right? And so when you’re looking around the corner, if you’re using a noun next beyond the next is immediately around the corner, the beyond is further down. And then you have to bring it back to the next. Otherwise, just because you’ve seen the future. If you can’t help people prepare for it, you haven’t done your role in thought.
Luke Collins Well, I agree. No, no, I agree. And I think it was a really useful framework as a forcing mechanism. I think it allowed us as an organization to, you know, we were a huge, huge, huge firm. But there is thought leadership being developed all over the world in every region and every service line, every sector. Covid gave us visibility that I think we previously had it to just the sheer volume of content that was flowing through that was useful to give in a visibility sense. And then it allowed us to put the framework around it to give it some structure, because if you’re disorganized, no, I guess I’m full of cliches, but I always think you are what you publish or you are what you communicate to the outside world. As an external user, your impression of a firm is outside in is what you know on their website or what you what you see in the marketing material. And in that sort of it’s not helpful as a user to just be confronted by a thousand pieces of content on every conceivable topic. If that’s not advancing your goals as an organization, I think the now next beyond framework and now Reframe Your Future allows us as an organization to much, much more clearly articulate who we are and what we’re about in terms of our thought leadership. I think we’ve had a very strong brand generally and people very have a very firm impression and develop developed impression of who we want used. But I think I thought leadership is now becoming more effective thanks to the efforts of our ton of people across the organization, particularly in brand marketing communications. The thought leadership is now being much more reflective of who we see ourselves as an organization and who and how we want people to perceive us.
Bill Sherman If you are enjoying this episode of Leveraging Thought Leadership, please make sure to subscribe. If you’d like to help spread the word about the podcast, please leave a five-star review and share it with your friends. We are available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and all major platforms as well as at LeveragingThoughtLeadership.com.
Bill Sherman So I want to ask you a question about modalities and shifts possibly, and modalities. So the classic big consulting House thought leadership was the magazine, the White paper, the research report. But now we have a ton of short form modalities, whether it’s a LinkedIn posed, a tweet, etc.. How has Y responded and adapted to the consumption of content? Because reaching audiences are important and people are not reading as much long form anymore. They still do, but not as much.
Luke Collins Yeah, I mean, I think it’s a work in progress for everyone, not just us. I think the general consensus is you want people to read the right content in the right place at the right time, wherever they happen to want it and in whatever form that they want it. So we are pushing hard on format innovation and not for the sake of just being different, but to try and figure out exactly if you are an individual sitting in a particular role and let’s say you’re a CFO and within the marketing funnel, so to speak, you’re at the awareness phase or the consideration phase, where happens to be how are we specifically speaking to you as an individual at that point in your thought, thought process? And are we delivering the content that is necessary to help push you to the next to the next step? And I you know, in some ways, as a journalist, you know, that that is kind of a very kind of technical, almost a little bit sort of harsh isn’t the right word, but it’s a very, you know, rigid way of approaching thought leadership because, you know, we tend to think of all these you more as. People are doing work out in the field. They’ve worked with a number of clients on a particular issue. They come back with really interesting insights around how they managed to help these organizations improve. And there you write the thought leadership and it helps people and it’s a lot less direct and precise than it might be in a in a traditional content marketing world. But that’s where I get to the point about sort of the worlds merging a little bit and finding that balance between delivering content that is still reflective of what the users are demanding, what declined to potential clients. One and ensuring that it balances and matches up with what our needs are as an organization. You know, I struggle sometimes personally with the idea that I don’t like trying to tell users that they should find something interesting and important because we find it interesting and important because ultimately, right, we work for them at the same time. This gets back to the what you need to know and what you want to know their needs in the immediate term or what they want an answer to today we should be responding to, but we also have a perspective around what we think they should know about and be responding to over a medium to longer term or even in the short term. They just haven’t noticed it yet. So it is definitely that balancing act and the format innovation is critical because I, I think for a lot of cases it’s not necessarily about inventing new content or commissioning content or creating new content. In some ways it’s just being more responsive in terms of taking your existing content and passing it, atomizing it, whatever you want to describe it into, into just more bite sized chunks across different formats and different channels.
Bill Sherman And then if someone sees one of those snackable bites and says, that’s interesting, then you can leave breadcrumbs to point them back to the larger form for sure.
Luke Collins And I’m an I’m Seamus, I have and I sort of say I am completely format and platform agnostic. I just want you have to be the content. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I just want people to see it. I want them to get some value out of it, irrespective of how little or how much time they spend with it. I want them to get something from it. If that results in them coming back and saying, I really want to work with you guys and I want to spend a truckload of money, that’s fantastic. If it results in them getting a useful nugget that helps them solve a particular problem or even think about something differently just in the moment, I’ll take that as well, you know. But I think you’re right. We need to be we’re driven by the market. People don’t necessarily want to sit down and read a 20-minute, 4000 word think piece when what they really want is give me three. You know, we all sort of fall into the, you know, glossy magazine approach of give me three, three things I can use to solve this, to think about this particular issue today.
Bill Sherman Well, and there’s a there’s a tension between the listicle of the here’s three quick takeaways you can do versus a think piece. Right. And a lot of people who are deep subject matter experts want to write the long form. But there’s the challenge of how do you take those insights and package it in a way that the reader is actually going to consume? Because it doesn’t matter if it’s the most brilliant research report ever if nobody’s touching it.
Luke Collins Right. I agree. And you face that constant battle, particularly senior, extremely smart, successful senior people who say, I don’t want you dumbing me down. The reason I’m down this is.
Bill Sherman Because it’s there. They perceive it as their brand, Right. And their reputation. Yeah, Yeah.
Luke Collins We’re making your content accessible. We are. I mean, I always say I want to make you look smart when I want you to look brilliant. But as you say, there’s no point being a genius sitting in the basement and no one ever sees your work or read your work or understands what you’re saying. And I think I think that’s where some of the journalistic sensibilities come in as well. I think we’ve moved toward pretty heavily trying to eliminate the more academic style of thought leadership in favor of a more news oriented or inverted pyramid style. Like you might find it in news that, you know.
Bill Sherman Bury very the lead.
Luke Collins Yeah. It might work on the assumption that the three most important elements and I say facetiously spend more time on this than the rest of the article, the title, the deck or the blurb or the text where you want to describe it and the intro. I’m like that they are that that 20s is the most scrutiny. There is nothing more important than those 20s you lose someone at that point, you’re not going to get them back. And so front load it, front load it with, you know, what’s the news point of this? Think about it, how journalists would receive a press release and what am I going to write on this front? Load the insights and then you can you can absolutely go into chapter and verse about the history and client examples and all of the stuff that really brings it to life and adds color and depth and really shows and fully demonstrates your expertise and your and your intelligence. But if you don’t get them at the beginning, you will. All of that’s just irrelevant.
Bill Sherman Thought leadership, especially in the current environment over the last few years, and I think going forward has to be punchy. You can’t write the long. Expository text that goes almost in Socratic method that the big owl has at the end. Nobody’s going to get there.
Luke Collins No, and particularly not going to get there when, you know, let’s be honest, there was so much thought leadership. And it is it is it’s commoditized to the point of almost irrelevance. And so I think we are certainly focusing on, you know, editorial strategy strategies built around quality over quantity. You know, we really want to be more rigorous and ruthless about what we decide to publish on. And that’s not an issue of resources on our side. That’s an issue of sort of consideration for the end user. And that’s, you know, if we are if we have sort of whether it was correct or not, I’m not sure. I think in your piece a while back, talking about the percentage of time in the average executives day when they actually have the capacity to think about thought leadership or to read thought leadership, and it was minuscule. And so you begin thinking, all right, how do you grab someone who has potentially three minutes in a day? How do you grab their attention? How do you how do you cut through the noise and try and become part of the conversation for them or begin having them think differently about what your firm offers as a as a thought partners and thought leader. And yeah, you’re right. I mean, you can’t you can’t have the you know, here’s a thousand words background on this topic and here’s 2000 words with our, you know, explaining the methodology behind how we did this And here’s another thousand words and something else. And finally, at the 5000 word mark, we’ll get to something insightful. You just you can’t do that. And I’m not sure you should ever have done that. But I think you had the you had the ability maybe to do that previously, but you certainly don’t anymore.
Bill Sherman So one of the things that I have heard repeatedly from senior leadership is they wish they had more time to read and consume information, to do the environmental scan either horizontally or go deep on a topic. But pulled from meeting to meeting, conversation, decision to decision and not having that chance. And so you’ve got to meet them with the reality of where they are for content rather than where you wish they would be.
Luke Collins Right. Yeah. Yeah. Which gets to that seeking to as opposed to trying to convince them that what you think is important is important. Accepting that what they think is important is what’s important. And in that respect, I think it’s I mean, I think we can learn a lot from a marketing approach towards thought leadership and sort of the content marketing approach and sort of always the branded content approach. And we can learn a lot from traditional media and traditional news gathering and news reporting. And there’s a balance between the two. So I think that yeah, you’re absolutely right. We need to. Grasp the 10s that we have. And that might be a tweet, That might be an email with an exhibit embedded that tells the whole story without any texts or anything additional. It might be an interesting, counterintuitive data point, but something that provides the entry point into the into your thinking so that you can you can you can grab the reader and make them understand we’ve got something really valuable for you here, something that could provide competitive differentiation or something that just you should know about.
Bill Sherman So how did you fall into the world of thought leadership? I’m assuming, like many, you didn’t go to school for it. And I know you’ve mentioned the journalism background. So how did you get here?
Luke Collins I think falling into it’s probably the right word. Yeah, I don’t think I ever Did anyone go up and think I really want to be a thought leadership practitioner when I’m old, right? Right now, I certainly see that there’s not a such as a fireman or a policeman or something. So I as a journalist, I’m Australian, as a journalist, a newspaper journalist in Australia. I came to the US almost 20 years ago as a foreign correspondent in New York, didn’t want to go back to Australia, and I went to work and got my green card, went to work at Bloomberg and was sort of not that enamored with what I was doing and I thought I would try a career switch. So I ended up joining McKinsey in New York actually as a consultant, and I say as a consultant, I made a really good journalist. I was not a particularly great consultant, so I was at a loose end again after a couple of years of being a consultant at McKinsey, and the opportunity came up to switch across to the what was then the McKinsey Quarterly as an editor, and I ended up working there through various roles and then eventually joining the McKinsey Publishing Group. And then the final four years of McKinsey of is day to day overseeing the content client and mckinsey.com. But you know it was interesting because and this gets a little bit to the shifting nature of the industry as well. Certainly at that point the publishing group at McKinsey was comprised almost exclusively a former business journalist. There was newspaper journalists, magazine journalists. My head of publishing came from a big business magazine, and there was that real journalistic sensibility. Since I left McKinsey, I’ve been at Deloitte where all this awful leadership and now I was the global editor in chief. It is why there’s a lot more people with diverse backgrounds, people from marketing backgrounds as well as people from traditional journalism backgrounds. So it’s definitely the balance is shifting a little bit. But yeah, and I sort of I did very much fell into it. I would never have conceived that I would, you know, especially as a journalist, when you spend your whole life essentially trying to tweak companies and get under their skin to now be on the other side. I was always kind of interesting, but I’ve been doing this now for a long time.
Bill Sherman And as you said, you’re global editor in chief at E! Y. That means you’ve got teams underneath you that are looking for stories, editing, writing, you’re working with individuals. How are you helping them get their mindset into a thought leadership framework rather than either a journalistic framework or that content marketing and sales. So what are you doing? Coaching, Leading Setting vision.
Luke Collins So, you know, it’s not it’s not quite as structured as that. I mean, I work across the organization with the service line sectors, with particular with the brand marketing communications team. I sit within the global markets team and it’s sort of an influence model more than anything else. We are pushing on again, advancing the quality over quantity strategy, pushing on helping people see the value in adopting more of a newsroom mentality. We have really smart, capable people embedded throughout the organization, throughout service on sectors, throughout regions who work collaboratively with our front line folks around thinking through their thought leadership priorities and what they should be publishing on. And then we are seeking to work with them cooperatively around shaping that content, helping them think through positioning and narrative. So, you know, I know we live in a world of increasing specialization, and I think it’s nice to think that that, you know, you have people working on content who are subject matter experts and really, really get it. And then we have the nitty gritty. I’m not sure any editor slash writer necessarily has subject matter expertise. They have subject matter, familiarity. I think the subject matter expertise we bring is helping people understand what works for an external audience, helping them think through how to tell a story in a compelling way, how to pull people in in that first 20s, how to add color and depth and think through formats and channels and how has presented on the website from a user journey perspective. All of that stuff that is, in the absence of that, you can have the strongest distinctive insight at the core of what you’re doing. But if you don’t have all those other pieces, it just doesn’t break through. So we are working every day going, you know, helping people think through their positioning, helping to think through their narrative. You know, working through drives a lot of it’s cajoling and sort of nudging and prodding and influencing. But, you know, at the end of the day, it’s not our content. You know, the content belongs to the authors. And so they have to be happy with what gets published. And so we’re working collaboratively together to try and figure out how we tell the story in the most effective way.
Bill Sherman Well, and I think you hit on one of the things that for me is absolutely essential for thought leadership, that it has to be storytelling designed to get your audience to lean in and go, that’s interesting. Tell me more. If you haven’t done good storytelling and you’ve just written dry text, you will not get traction for the idea that there are academic libraries filled with great ideas, research dissertations, etc. that have never seen commercial utilization because there was no story.
Luke Collins No. And we I see that every day. You know, you read some schlocky novel and you think, I could have written this, but. The story. You can’t put it down, right?
Bill Sherman It’s two in the morning and you’re still reading?
Luke Collins Yeah. Like when we were still were flying. I remember I was reading the new at that point, relatively new Dan Brown book. And I kind of ashamed that I read him was on the plane. And when I go, I literally didn’t put my phone down. The I just read I read the whole book on the fly. And when I stood up, the guy behind me is like, that must have been some book. And I was like, No, it was really poorly written. But my goodness, it told a good story. So yeah, I mean, I agree with you and I think that the again, the convergence of thought leadership, the way it’s evolved from being a slightly more academic, dry, esoteric form of content to now moving really into that sort of consumer engaging branded storytelling, I think is really interesting. I think it’s exciting. I love the idea that that we begin adopting some sort of narrative techniques from the world of branded content or from content marketing as a mechanism for hooking people to again, not because you’re really trying to sell them something that because they begin to associate your brand with a particular kind of storytelling that resonates with them, They feel as though. And from our perspective, I might argue all of that content is should be reflective of the notion of building a better working world. When you come to it you way content, it is infused with the sense that at the end of the day we are all pushing towards a world of greater equality, of greater equality, of opportunity, of more socially aware organizations who prioritize long term value and have purpose, etc.. I would love to get to that point where I feel as though our content connects with users at a sort of a visceral level. Like that sounds a bit highfalutin, but I think that’s what we’re all fundamentally aiming for because you just can’t expect someone to wade through a 4000 word academic piece of content and you can expect them to do it and be I don’t think they’re going to walk away with the kind of tangible, usable advice that they might get from a really sharply written, compelling, engaging 800 word piece or a video or a podcast or an interactive.
Bill Sherman Sometimes you can do something in 90s in a short form video rather than 50 pages, right? And so it’s finding the modality to deliver the idea in a way that someone can digest and go, right, I see what I need to do next. And that call to action may be more reading or more learning for them, or maybe something they can implement immediately. Right?
Luke Collins And it can be it can be hard to change the mindset, too. I mean, I am a former journalist. I come from that world. I love the written word. I still fundamentally believe that the most effective, generally speaking, form of communication for thought leadership is the written word, partly because most of our users are at work. They don’t necessarily want to be sitting at the desk watching a video or whatever happens to be not with anyone that.
Bill Sherman Somehow it’s seen as less serious. Right?
Luke Collins Yeah, yeah, yeah. But you have to. I fully recognize that. That’s one of my Indo prejudices. I need to. I need to be accepting of the fact that, you know what may maybe a 92nd video shot with an iPhone, not particularly super well-produced, can be as effective, if not more effective, than a 2000 word article. Absolutely. If you tell it the right way, if you hit the person at the right time with the right content.
Bill Sherman Yep. And that humility to step outside the modalities that you’re comfortable with and delivered in the needs of your audience is absolutely essential. Luke Your passion for creating, curating and deploying thought leadership is really unmistakable. Thank you for joining me today and sharing your insights on some tricky editorial decisions in thought leadership, such as the content mix, the modality and finding the right voice. This has been great. Thank you. If you’ve enjoyed this episode, please join our LinkedIn group. Organizational Thought Leadership. It’s a professional community where thought leadership practitioners talk shop about our field. So if you’re someone who creates curates or deploys thought leadership for your organization, then please join the conversation in the organizational thought Leadership LinkedIn.
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