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Scaling Organizational Thought Leadership | Jonathan Raveh
Scaling thought leadership across roles and seniority in an organization.
An interview with Jonathan Raveh about how an organization can scale, encourage, and support people as they find ideas and their voices.
Today’s guest is Jonathan Raveh, the head of Thought Leadership at AppsFlyer. AppsFlyer helps marketers succeed by being committed to accurate data, unmatched privacy and security, open tech-stack innovation, and an unbiased, customer-obsessed approach.
Jonathan shares how he spends his days working with 80+ people. His work day covers multiple documents helping employees write, edit, and develop their thought leadership content. First, Jonathan helps them shape their idea. Then, guides them as they establish their voice and values. Finally, he gets the post onto Linkedin and tracks the performance of it after it goes live.
Employee Impact
Often thought leadership comes from the top down. But Jonathan explains why he feels that employees at all levels can have a valuable impact on both the company and the brand. We discuss the top three things that keep people from becoming involved in thought leadership development. And then, we give advice about how excuses can be overcome.
Finally, we wrap up the conversation with some advice for up-and-coming thought leaders who might get tapped to develop or lead a team in their own organization.
If you want to develop successful content and broaden the scope of the team creating it, this episode is full of insightful information you’ll not want to miss.
Three Key Takeaways from the Interview
- The difference between thought leadership and content marketing is not mentioning the company.
- Every day, you have conversations that could be used for thought leadership content. When discussing problems with others, remember to think that others are probably having the same issue.
- Posting your thought leadership to a platform isn’t enough to develop a community. You should be engaged with your posts and the posts of others.
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. And today we’re talking about one of my personal passions, organizational thought leadership. Recently, I’ve been thinking about how an organization can encourage and support people as they find their ideas and voice for thought leadership. While it’s good to have at least one voice producing thought leadership within the organization, it’s much more effective when there are even dozens or hundreds of voices. Let’s discuss scaling thought leadership today. Joining me is Jonathan Raveh. He’s the head of thought leadership at Up’s Flier, a mobile marketing technology company based in Israel. And Jonathan is supporting his executives, directors and managers as they create their thought leadership. Ready? Let’s begin. Welcome to the show, Jonathan.
Johnathan Raveh Thank you very much. It’s a pleasure to be here.
Bill Sherman It’s great to have you. So you’re the head of thought leadership at flier. What does that mean? What is your day like?
Johnathan Raveh Well, my day really consists of multiple, multiple Google Docs of LinkedIn posts that I write for company employees. So part of my day is editing some of the posts that employees wrote. Some of the day consists of writing new posts for employees and ideation, an ideation process that I do with the people that I write to. And some of it is really about thinking about new people, new departments, and new topics to talk about in thought leadership.
Bill Sherman So you talk about working with a group of people within the company. How many people are you overseeing content creation for? Because you’re talking about LinkedIn posts. What’s that constellation that you’re working with?
Johnathan Raveh So since I have a Google sheet and all the posts are there, I can tell you the exact number. Right now it’s 82 different people that I’ve written to. I’d say that anywhere between. Ten and 30 are kind of regulars that I write to consistently anywhere between twice a week to once a month. And the others are really on a case by case basis, some just one time, some once every half a year, some one when they just need me because they’re moving to a new, a new position, or they want to talk about something very, very specific and relevant to their work. In the past year and a half, I’ve written about 450 posts. So it’s about both. Were they?
Bill Sherman Well, and like you saying, you have a group of, let’s call them the usual suspects, the people who are putting out content on a regular basis. And then you’ve got people who are occasionally producing thought leadership content for one reason or other, like you said, it was targeted than that. And so you also mentioned that you’re helping in advising people on helping them either idade or polish up their writing. So your responsibility, if I understand it correctly, is really helping to nurture that flow of information across the organization. Is that fair?
Johnathan Raveh Yeah, it’s pretty fair. I, you know, it’s since the fall viewership at least it ebbs and specifically that’s right and in general on linked in a position like myself is pretty unique. So even inside the company I had to in the very first month create awareness to what I do and awareness to the impact that thought leadership has on the company’s. It wasn’t easy. I started writing only four or in kind of, you know, the CEO. And from there it kind of expanded and in the beginning expanded slowly. And in the past, after half a year, it started expanding exponentially because I people started hearing about it and they saw the impact. They saw the awareness being raised and the and the engagement. It has a far more reach than any type of, you know, LinkedIn regular standard promotional post that you see on your feed. And it was like a phenomenon that started growing and growing and growing. And so some of them, the writers, the ones that like to write that love to write, they just need my need, my help editing and sometimes the ideation process. But I’d say the vast majority actually need me to actually write the post. They have the idea, but it’s very, very unrefined.
Bill Sherman So let’s talk about that for a moment here. When someone has an idea for the Post, are they reaching out to you by email and say, Hey, let’s set up a call, let’s talk about this. Let me share the idea. How are you turning that raw idea into the content?
Johnathan Raveh So it really depends. Each person, you know, has its own kind of style of approaching other people. Usually it’s, you know, it’s with slack, you know, the approach usually the process is as follows. If it’s a new person that really wants to start doing thought leadership and create his own personal brand and represent the company better. So we do a call after the call. I kind of in the call, I kind of search, try to understand what he’s all about personally and what these all about professionally. What are what is he an expert for where he can he shine after that kind of call? It’s usually like 20, 30 minutes I create. Usually I create a questionnaire for them, like 5 to 10 questions. I have that those people answer those question roughly. Unstyled just free text and those answers. I turn into LinkedIn posts, which are drafts. They show it through them, they have their own comments, and then we post them, we track the performance and we go from there. That’s usually the process. But I have to say, each person is so different from one another that I think one of my most valuable attributes that I found that they had to have in this position is being flexible.
Bill Sherman So of those 80 people are those folks who are in product, who are in marketing sales. Give me a sense of what that population looks like, because I know you said you started initially with the CEO and then it sort of expanded. Who’s coming to you for help?
Johnathan Raveh It’s actually it’s from everywhere. I have people, developers. I have a lot of product people, product managers, directors of product. I have PMS, product marketing manager, which is totally untapped on LinkedIn. I feel that I’m writing for I got the CSM and prior customer success is very, very, very big. It’s our biggest department. So CSM is super huge on LinkedIn and we invest a lot of thought leadership there from the chief customer officer to just standard CSM people in HR. Those are really, really, really, really big. It’s like creating again, thought leadership is all about supporting your, you know, your pillars, your pillars as a company, what you stand for, your core elements. And if we say that, for example, we are people obsessed to become customer obsessed, we have to be people, then we have to support it some way. So people and HR. Are really, really big on my payroll, so to speak. I write for a lot of those. Marketing, of course, since I’m in the marketing department. So it’s really all over. It covers all seniority levels. And of course, the more senior you are, usually the more traction you get, the more impact you get. But it’s not to say that others don’t get in and get traction.
Bill Sherman So let’s rewind the tape here for a moment. 18 months or so ago, you said you started and you started this role for the CEO, Right? So what were you doing beforehand that made it obvious that you were the person to do the work for thought leadership to support the CEO? How did you land in this job?
Johnathan Raveh Well, actually, Am absolutely is a mobile marketing company. It provides marketing analytics to app developers. And the reason that the CMO approached me was working for another company is because I come from that space I worked in in marketing and brand marketing and user acquisition in all those roles in the past 12 years. He didn’t get me to work for apps because I was writing Thought Leadership. I was doing brand marketing and I was writing guest, you know, guest blogpost in some other ways, but I wasn’t even doing LinkedIn. But he knew I loved writing. He saw some of the things that I write he knew me for from the industry and that’s why he, he, that’s why he took me. I had no real tangible experience in that specific field other than the fact that I loved writing. That’s my passion. And I was experienced in mobile marketing, and that’s why he thought I should come and work and write for all. And then the role which we grew and totally changed over the year and a half because I was supposed to write only for Arin and do some other stuff relating to community marketing, and that completely, completely changed mainly because of the impact that it had on the company, on Orange, on, on everyone and, you know, on marketing, on our marketing.
Bill Sherman So if I understand correctly, you’re and we’ve seen this trend elsewhere where organizations say, okay, thought leadership starts at the top of the House one C level exact or so. But then they say, hey, we want more people to actually get content out there, whatever format linked in, for example. And it seems that you’ve taken a dedicated role to help nurture, encourage and actually make sure that people across the organization are getting that content out there. So you’re a resource and support to help make sure that happens. Is that fair?
Johnathan Raveh Yeah, that’s fair. I, I really resent the fact that, you know, that that kind of way of thinking, that that thought leadership only belongs to a to a to C-level executives. I completely disagree.
Bill Sherman And I’ll say more on that. Explain what’s the frustration and why? Because you’ve got an interesting perspective, because you’ve been working with a large slice of the organization rather than the just the top.
Johnathan Raveh I, I see employees from all seniority level levels have so much impact on the company, on the branding. You know, the CEO can post something and it may carry a lot of weight. But I have. Let me just give you an example and then. Please. I. I. Today I. Someone from the people. You choose a kind source or basically a person who’s meant to find people, find talents and bring them to work for elsewhere. He posted today. Suppose it says. Second degrees, getting your second degrees or master’s. That’s almost worthless in in the start up in the startup nation in the startup environment it’s just work that that’s kind of a provocative boast but it’s nonetheless it’s true. And that kind of thought is it has nothing to do with what amfAR seeks. That’s right. Isn’t even mentioned in that kind of provocative post, which encourage people to really think about how they should land their dream job. That’s the kind of thought. It exploded on LinkedIn. And that’s the kind of thought leadership I expect from people from all levels of the company, because a company that really believes in its employees sees all of them as leaders. It’s really easy to say, I believe in my employees. You know, they’re all great. They’re all talented. It’s something completely different to tell them. You’re an ambassador of the company and as an ambassador, I want you to relay ideas, thoughts and insights and not just push more content and promote promoting our latest product feature. That’s the easiest way to go. And 99% of the companies are doing that. And the reality is it’s almost worthless in terms of.
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. Now you come from a brand, as you mentioned. Right. So how do you distinguish between thought leadership and content marketing?
Johnathan Raveh Well, I find it very easy to to differentiate because I don’t well, when it comes to sales and marketing and stuff, this is related to our customers, then, you know, we can talk about the differences in my eyes, thought leadership. Is not promoting the company. That’s the basic rule. You never mention when I when I do a presentation to two other companies and to internally. Always use that slide. From Fight Club, the movie that says First rule of fight club. You don’t talk about fight. So that’s the first rule of thought leadership. You don’t talk about your company. Never. Once you start talking about your company, it ceases to be a promotion, which is okay. It’s just a different things. It’s a different thing. And I don’t do that because I find it less effective. When I see a Sam, when a customer success manager writes, he doesn’t write about how great APS fire is as a company as supporting its clients. No, that’s not the issue. A CSM would write how we should how often we should communicate with customers. Should customers? Should systems sell or just do customer success? How often should you communicate? What’s the value of a good relationship between a CSM and the client? Those kind of stuff. I almost never mention even the name of the company in those posts. I just want to relay the message that that specific CSM is an expert in his or her field. That’s it. I don’t need to promote the company that will be later understood from the people that are reading those posts and are commenting and engaging and later on sending them the and saying, Wow, that was a really inspiring post, asking them and offering them jobs and asking them to to talk, to lecture to a and to work for them.
Bill Sherman So, Jonathan, one of the things that we’ve talked about is writing on LinkedIn, and not everyone is comfortable as a writer and some people get very self-conscious about their writing. How are you helping them on that to communicate on LinkedIn, which is a great platform, but I know some people hesitate to post anything because they’re self-conscious as writers.
Johnathan Raveh Right. I think some of them are like anyone who’s posting on social media are like self-conscious and afraid to fail. People are afraid to fail, you know? Nobody wants as opposed to get like two likes and 150 views. But I think most of them on LinkedIn are less afraid of failing and are just saying I usually most of them are saying that I got nothing. I got nothing new to say. I mean, I’m not special, you know, I’m a CSM. I got nothing. And the other things that they say is it’s been said before, like maybe what I’m doing is, you know, is unique. But, you know, someone said it before, it doesn’t matter. And the last thing they say is, I don’t know how to write and do all of these. All of these are fears. I have a good question. I mean, if you don’t know, if you don’t know how to write, that’s for me to help you with. Help you with the structure. Help you write. That’s not a problem. And it’s been said before, I always explain to people that it may have been said before, like I understand the notion that nothing is new anymore, but maybe it wasn’t said in the right angle with the right message, with the right conclusion. And it certainly wasn’t said to the right audience or your audience. So there’s always a reason to reiterate that point of view or that message or that insight, because more people can enjoy it and get inspired. And for those people to say, My job isn’t unique, I interview them for five minutes on Zoom, and after five minutes that they’re telling me exactly what they did today or yesterday or last week. Or a conversation they had with a client. I immediately find two, 3 or 4 things they could write about, and then they just it’s like magic. They just get it immediately. Maybe it is unique what I’m doing. It’s just a matter. It’s kind of a matter of a confidence. I’m not a culture, but sometimes my job is kind of like coaching people to understand their value. Yes, You are special. Yes. You have something to say and you can say it sometimes. You know, thought leadership is all about just giving people the confidence.
Bill Sherman You raised a couple of great points there. I love the list of three objections. The it’s been said before, I have nothing to add to the conversation. And then, you know, I’m not a good writer and being able to defuze those objections, those are excuses in some ways. And you sit in on two things one, which is repetition. In terms of thought leadership. If you make the claim of, it was said before, once by someone, somewhere. Good luck. It’s a big noisy world saying something one time. Even if you’re the person saying it isn’t enough, you have to say it again and again. And then I love what you said about drawing out the experiences even from the day. One of the things that excuse me, that I wind up doing is listening to the conversations I have day after day. Right. And I take notes. And for me, the conversations that I have during my workday, if I look at them over the course of a week, there’s always something new that I’m able to talk about, to post about to do a video on because of a conversation that I’ve had during the week. And I think we lose sight of that when we’re in the moment so deeply. We don’t realize that question we answered for one person, for one customer, really. We could answer for dozens or hundreds of customers. There are a lot more people who have the same question.
Johnathan Raveh Absolutely. I, I really relate to what you said. For me, it’s kind of like Amazon, you know, And after a year and a half and 450 posts, I’ve trained it. It’s quite a big muscle for me. So I learned how to pick up on almost every everything a person says to me sometimes our outside work and I always think about what people say to me as this could this be something that other people can learn from? And, you know, quite often the answer is yes. And when the answer is yes, it’s worthy of a thought leadership post on LinkedIn. Absolutely.
Bill Sherman And you went back and you said a lot of people have the fear of the hundred and 50 views and two likes, right. That they’ll only be talking to a small group. One of the things if you have the right audience, though, those two likes and 150 views may be significant on their own if you’re narrow casting. If it’s the right two people who like it, that can be significant for you. And so you don’t want to say, I didn’t get 100,000 views, therefore it isn’t worthy. No, You may be speaking to a small group.
Johnathan Raveh That’s very true. We always like the big numbers. Of course. The big numbers. We chase.
Bill Sherman The numbers. Yeah.
Johnathan Raveh Yes, but sometimes I have a one of my I think my first successes in my first success in the company was I road to the GM of Latham. And I wrote for him a first post, which was great. It got a lot of traction, a lot of reactions. And then the second post, I think I probably used the wrong image. It was less than successful even I would call it not successful. Like not a total failure, but definitely not good. And I came to him later on. His name was Daniel. I said, you know, something went wrong. And he said, GM, you know, maybe something went wrong. We got like. I don’t know, 20% of the views we got in the first post, which was really successful with all the comments. But someone it was probably very focused because someone saw that post messaged me later on and he’s now a lead is going to become our client. And that really taught me a very valuable lesson that sometimes, you know, size doesn’t count. Sometimes when it’s very, very focused, very laser focused on the right audience, it can work better even if the numbers doesn’t show that. But what I tell what I tell everyone that I do, I understand the fear of failure. And I understand one of my objective is to reach a bigger audience. I tell them 99%, you know, you can have 99 posts that are a total failure. And then the 100th post will be a success. No one will remember those 99 failures. You’ll only see nobody counts it for you. Except for me. Of course. Nobody counts it. If they see something that they can react to their react to it, they wouldn’t think, that. Express And you had a lot of posts that didn’t reach anyone. I’m not going to I’m not going to answer him this time. No. If it’s interesting, if enticing, if it’s engaging, then you’ve succeeded. And then all your, you know, your failures, your past failures are just deleted from the collective memory of, of the LinkedIn community, which is great for people. It’s really reassuring.
Bill Sherman Well. And I think a good way of thinking about that is every day is a fresh opportunity for thought leadership, especially on LinkedIn, because the way the algorithm works, what you posted two, three weeks ago probably won’t be seen. And so how do you stay engaged in a conversation? And not everything that you say in a conversation has to be brilliant. But if you don’t have a conversation at all, if you’re not showing up, if you’re not talking in that conversation, you’ll never have a chance to have that one post that will shine.
Johnathan Raveh Absolutely. I one of my biggest challenges in this position is to get people to understand that just posting isn’t enough. They have to invest more time than just, you know, working and give me feedback on the text that I’ve written for them. It means engaging in means, commenting on other people’s post. It means being, you know, going to, you know, visiting LinkedIn at least once a day, engaging with people and then engaging with people who comment on your posts. That’s super important, which actually pushes them to comment on your future posts as well. And starting a conversation. That’s really the that’s the biggest secret. It’s not the biggest secret. It’s a secret of success in LinkedIn, getting conversations going. And it’s, you know, it’s work. It’s, you know, you can’t hide it. It’s a lot of work and it’s a lot of it’s time consuming. And people, you know, see it as, you know, a great opportunity, but they don’t understand the amount of time they need to invest to get it working.
Bill Sherman So you’ve given a fair amount of advice to individuals on the writing side because you do encouragement. You made the comment that you feel that in many ways you’re kind of unique in your role, okay? But at the same time, we know more and more organizations are hiring people or assigning people to focus on thought leadership. What advice might you give someone doing a role similar to yours? So say they’re stepping into a role that would be like yours. What would you suggest to them? How do they help the organization and how do they shine?
Johnathan Raveh Wow, that’s a big one. I think internal education. Is this probably the most important or the most important element of succeeding in this kind of role, making the company understand the value, using success stories to understand, to make people understand the value, showing people not only leads that you got or approaches, but CVS that were sent to C-level executives that posted LinkedIn connections profile views using data impressions, posting post views, engagement shares, all those kinds of data points that actually can actually contribute to proving that it works. So Internet education is super important. I would advise that person not to focus on C levels. I think that’s a big, big, big, big, big mistake. It has to be across company effort. And when I do across company, it’s just across departments, it’s across levels, seniority levels. And I would really advise that person to write a few linked in the post himself if he hasn’t done that yet. To try to understand the state of mind, not only how the algorithm works, because of course the LinkedIn argument has its own feel to it, but to experience the anxiety, awaiting, seeing results, understanding results, all of those you need to experiment it, you know, on your own, on your own flesh to understand how it works and write. Just write a lot. Engage in conversations with employees day in and day out, understand what they’re doing, prepare question news. If you want to get a conference, if you want. If you want to. Like if you zero in on the person that you want him to write. Make it easier for them. Prepare a questionnaire, get them to write their answers in free text, you know, make it work for them. Don’t expect people to be good writers because 99% of them aren’t. Become a ghostwriter, at least in the beginning. And listen to you can train them to do it themselves.
Bill Sherman Jonathan That’s really good advice. And I want to call out a couple of things. The metrics and understanding metrics more than just because I think content marketing chases, the likes, takes, chases, the shares and those impressions. But you talked about how many CVS were acquired for, you know, potential employees or potential customers. There are things that, for thought leadership, often tied to business metrics that are longer and than just the initial impressions, how many people viewed it. And so it’s about nurse nurturing relationships and conversations, not only internally but externally. I want to thank you, Jonathan, for joining us today. This has been a delight.
Johnathan Raveh It was all my pleasure. You know, you have to invite me again. Thank you.
Bill Sherman 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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