The State of Thought Leadership | Peter Winick & Bill Sherman

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Discussing the state and current trends of thought leadership.

A conversation with Peter Winick & Bill Sherman about the current state of thought leadership, developing trends, and the future.

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Today, our dueling hosts Peter Winick and Bill Sherman sit down together to give an overview of the thought leadership world.

First, they begin with the topic of Organizational Thought Leadership, which TLL is heavily focused upon. We examine why more and more companies are investing in dedicated thought leaders. Then, they discuss how those companies are struggling to define what thought leadership. It’s difficult to  figure out what it means to them and where it falls in the company. Also, they explain how to measure its success.

Peter and Bill chat about how finding the right audience for both organizational and standalone thought leadership can be a challenge. The old method of broadcasting to as many people as possible isn’t as effective anymore. They give us some insights into how narrowcasting small chunks of information can have a greater impact.

Finally, we wrap up our one on one discussing the transformations that have happened over the last year due to COVID-19.  With most in-person events canceled, people are missing the community aspect of conferences. How can you build a successful community online and have members become engaged and excited? The lack of travel to events has given many thought leaders far more free time which has caused creative renaissances, but when the world fully re-opens will that come to an end?  How will thought leaders protect that time they’ve gained for deep thought and development?

Three Key Takeaways:

• If an organization is going to invest money into thought leadership, they need to have a firm grasp on what that means to them. Also, they need to know how to scale it through the organization and beyond.
• Measuring the success of thought leadership isn’t a simple metric. It has to be measured over a long period of time and the precise ROI often cannot be calculated.
• With so many events being digital, the barrier to entry has dropped. This allows thought leaders to attend more events and still save time and money.

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If you need a strategy to bring your thought leadership to market, Thought Leadership Leverage can assist you! Contact us for more information. We can help you implement marketing, research, sales and other aspects so you can devote yourself to what you do best.

Transcript

Peter Winick And welcome, welcome, welcome. This is Peter Winick. I’m the founder and CEO in Thought Leadership Leverage. And you’re joining us on the podcast today. Today my guest is hardly a guest. He lives here, too. It’s Bill Sherman, who’s the chief operating officer at Thought Leadership Leverage, as well as the co-host of the podcast and the lead of our organizational thought leadership practice area. So I know him quite well. And those of you that don’t can look up some info on him, but I’d rather we just dive right in, so. Hey, Bill, what’s going on?

Bill Sherman Peter? So what I was thinking we could do today is sit down and just have a conversation. You and I spend a lot of time working with individuals and organizations around thought leadership and just do a conversation around sort of state of thought leadership, some of the trends that we’re seeing, you know, and bounce back and forth.

Peter Winick Yeah. So that that would be fun. Couple of things. I’ll throw out a couple of things that I’m seeing and I think you throw out some and we’ll see where we wind up. So one is you and I have sort of latched onto this. I would call it more than a trend. I think. I think it’s here to stay of large organizations making significant investments into fall leadership, but for different reasons than the folks that we’ve traditionally worked with. So, you know, big organizations, high tech financial services, professional services, nonprofits. Like what? What do you see underneath that? Like, what’s in it for them to start to get into the thought leadership game, if you will?

Bill Sherman So it’s really interesting. And I think one of the things that happens is there’s a trend within large organizations where they’re realizing that they’ve been doing thought leadership work. It may or may not have been called that. So it might have been someone in content marketing to someone in strategy, someone in research or public policy started dabbling in thought leadership, and then all of a sudden they had a success or two or there was a champion at the executive level and they said, Hey, there’s this thought leadership thing. We need to put some time and energy here, because a lot of organizations have spent an incredible amount of time and effort finding smart people and building an organization with knowledge workers. Right. And the question is, if you’ve got this wealth of knowledge, talent and skills, how do you help those ideas circulate well to scale within the organization and then beyond the organization. And I think what a lot of organizations are realizing is that process doesn’t happen by accident. The curation of thought leadership, the decisions of what ideas are we amplifying and making sure that the organization is applying its resources to make sure that ideas gain traction just doesn’t happen. And instead of serendipity.

Peter Winick I see it also maturing because it’s started in many organization as a skunkworks or like a special projects. And one of the things that I think is really interesting at sort of a macro level is there is no agreed upon definition at large to what it is. And in many instances when you get inside of a large company, there isn’t even agreement in the company that has millions of dollars of resources allocated towards this thing called thought leadership. It’s sort of a little bit of the Wild West, so we don’t have agreement on what it is. And then we also don’t have agreement yet as to who owns it. We’ve seen everything from policy to marketing to product to special office of the CEO or whatever. So I find that really fascinating because I don’t think it’s that often that you get to watch something sort of evolve and sort of see where does it stick in this company? Look at this company, solve that problem. Look at this one. Because if this was a typical business issue, like, we have a supply chain problem, we know where that goes, Right? If we have a cash flow problem and we know where that goes, we kind of don’t know who owns this yet.

Bill Sherman And what’s in the remit. So not only who owns it, but what things do they touch? What do they not touch, what’s in the span of control, and then educating colleagues in other departments as well to say, Hey, this is when you should call on us, this is what we do really well. And these are things that, yeah, go off and do on your own. You don’t need us from a thought leadership perspective to help you out, right?

Peter Winick Yeah. And you and I are now working with a couple of organizations that have been at it for a bit and a long time in this space is a handful of years and they’re now struggling with the issue of, geez, how do you measure it? Right? If it’s a skunk work thing in the CEO gives me a half 1 million or 1 million or a couple of bucks, whatever to go do some fun stuff, great. I don’t really have to justify the existence on an ongoing basis. It’s a passion project, but ultimately those numbers get bigger and we need to start to think about what that ROI is. And it’s a really interesting question and I don’t think it’s a one size fits all answer of the ROI is, you know, the total client acquisition cost divided by total cost of the campaign because you can’t think in terms of campaigns and, and thought leadership. One of the things we did some research you’re in change ago got to have senior leadership. You’ve got to have a long term time horizon. You’ve got to have. There’s several other pieces here. So even when it fits into marketing, marketing tends to think in campaigns because that’s how they’re wired. You can’t I mean, one of the biggest mistakes you and I have seen and you can probably jump on this as well, is that when you run thought leadership is a campaign, it’s almost a guarantee that whatever you’re investing in, that campaign will not yield much.

Bill Sherman Well, and you if you’re looking at it from a perspective of a quarter or a month, you’re looking on to sort of a time horizon. What you have to be able to do is say, who are the people either as individuals or avatars that we’re trying to reach? How are we going to get information to them and help them be exposed to the ideas and lean in and understand them? And that’s not something that you can do often with one single touchpoint. You can’t just put a white paper out, hope people will download it and read 50 pages. That doesn’t happen. So you’ve got to meet people today where they are and give them small snackable bites of content that they look and they say, okay, that’s worth 90s of my time. I’ll take a look at it if that’s interesting, maybe I’ll spend ten, 15 minutes. Yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s permission based marketing it in some certain ways where it’s, it’s the small steps but you’re asking for permission for larger blocks of time. Mindshare. Attention.

Peter Winick Yeah, I think. Well, I think it’s blocked, like you said. Would you give me two minutes to watch your short video? Okay, great. Would you give me ten minutes to read a 2000 word article? Maybe. Would you give me, you know, a half hour? Would you maybe even ultimately give me eight hours of your life for a book? One of the things that I wanted to touch on with this is in the absence of sort of bespoke metrics, because I think that’s where we are right now is in a world of an organization, we’ll need bespoke metrics. We’ve seen people fall into the trap of, well, I’ll just borrow a little bit from here and there. So the social media folks, they measure impressions and they measure comments and they measure retweets. And so I’ll just do all that. And my response to that is always end meaning, okay, great. So that looks like a lot of numbers against that one piece of content that one day on LinkedIn. And what were the goals? And to your point, who are the advertisers you’re trying to reach? Were you reaching those people? What were the outcomes that you’d like? Did they download the white paper? Do they call up your salespeople? Did they come to an event? Did they? What was it? Because if you can’t answer that end question, much many other things out there, it’s all noise and noise wrapped in numbers. Looks legitimate, but it’s not.

Bill Sherman Well, and I’ll build on that. Right? So not all likes or downloads are created equal from that perspective, right? And so you could have a asset that goes out that only reaches a handful of people, maybe a couple of dozen. But if those are exactly the right people and those are the people that you’re trying to reach that will help you take an idea and create impact. Or that though those are your buyers you’re trying to reach, all of a sudden an asset that’s reached two dozen people may be wildly successful. And so sometimes you have to think about broadcasting. But many times in thought leadership, especially at the organizational level, you have to think about narrow casting and sometimes a white glove sort of approach to thought leadership really works.

Peter Winick Yeah. No, and I think the ultimate I mean, we’ve all grown up in a broadcasting world. I mean, literally there were three major stations, stations on TV. So you had, you know, all in the Family or good times or whatever to watch. That’s not our role today. The choices are infinite, right? Depending on what you’re counting, streaming online, etc., etc.. So I think the narrow casting piece is really the key. I know in our work and actually we eat our own dog food in our work on behalf of ourselves as well. When someone says to me, I saw that thing that you did, that video that you did whatever, and it felt like you were talking right to me or you were describing exactly the symptom I have. And the symptom isn’t marketing demographics, you know, 18 to 40 male married or something like that. It’s like, wow, you figured out what kept me up at night. And I think that’s really the secret to really good narrow casting is a thinking about you probably don’t need to reach hundreds of thousands. If you do, there’s probably better ways to do it or more effective ways to do it. But if it’s smaller laser focused numbers, how do you find out like what would feel like it’s bespoke to them?

Bill Sherman Well, and I’ll give you an example from a couple of guests on the podcast from a while ago. They have a list of they’re in manufacturing for mining and cement plant equipment. Right. And they know the decision makers. There’s a list of about a couple hundred of them globally that will make the investment to build a plant or a mine. And those folks aren’t in the buying cycle every day. And so you can’t send your salespeople out every month to say, hey, you’re ready to build that plant. You put in out an RFP. You have to. The reason to stay in front of them, and it’s got to be tailored to them. If it looks generic, if it looks and smells like content marketing, they’re not going to open it. They’re not going to give it that first glance of 10s to see if it’s even worth 90s of their time.

Peter Winick Right. So the dummies book with an airport buy. Probably not going to work for that.

Bill Sherman Exactly. Exactly. And that’s thought leadership at a deep relationship level where you’re literally talking about a buy that’s hundreds of millions of dollars and a long buy cycle. And so you’ve got to look for that sort of investment of leadership differently because those decision makers, you can make a list and you know exactly who you’re trying to reach.

Peter Winick And yes, I mean, that leads me to think about what I call sort of tactical misalignment. So it’s sort of the opposite of best practices. When I you know, if I am a CPA and I have a firm of such and such a size dealing with such and such a client, I would want to understand what folks like me are doing and those are best practices and say, Great, I’m going to adopt some of those if they work for me. What we see in the leadership world is people see a tactic. And I was I was being snarky about an airport buy and they borrow it even though it doesn’t align with who they are and what their strategy is. So we see this all the time. You’re not Jim Collins.

Bill Sherman Right before someone gets a launch of a book on the Today Show. Yes. You get a lot of visibility. But is that reaching your audience? And could you apply sort of that impact in a different way?

Peter Winick Or even writing the book? I mean, I mean, the point that you just made that there’s probably content that that organization could put out that’s somewhat technical, highly valuable, but to a very, very, very small group. So, you know, putting that in a book is probably really, really silly in that why would you spend 12 or 18 months in $100,000 to get that message out? And that way you can hold an event, you can do what many of other ways to reach their population you’re trying to reach.

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. And thought leadership, I think. And this is the place I want to go and conversation with you is about creating a conversation with the right community of folks. Right. And one of the things that I know you’ve been looking at with the in-depth on the independent side of thought leadership is that community building, especially the transformation in the Covid world of things like speaking on stages has just disappeared.

Peter Winick Right? Yeah, I think so.

Bill Sherman Let’s talk about the transformation in the community and the relationship and the connection building.

Peter Winick Yeah. So I think what we tend to forget is B to B, b to C, B to whatever. It’s all humans, right? So one of the things that we’ve noticed in the I don’t even know what world we’re in now. So pre-COVID post-COVID, it’s still all Covid all the time. But the changes in the way we work. Right. So the changes and nobody’s going to events and even when they do come back, it’s going to be a trickle. Right? It’s going to be a long, long time to we have another 2019 terms of milestone and nights and hotels and all that. So what people were missing very, very early on in Covid and I think it continues to this day is not so much the content. So I don’t get to see you speak like I can buy your book or I can go watch your book you like I can still get your content in other formats and mediums. And it might not be the one the way that I preferred it, but it’ll make do right If I can’t see you live. Okay, I can watch on a webinar and then.

Bill Sherman I don’t get to shake your hand after and get you to autograph my book. But I can see you talk online.

Peter Winick Yeah, I mean, so it’s we’re all having to make those compromises. But the piece that’s missing is the community. So when I go to see somebody speak or I go to a conference or I go to an event, there’s a couple other reasons on Google. There’s other people like me and there’s other people not like me, but we’re all gathered because whatever that, you know, the body is that bring us all together. We have an interest in that space, in that field, in that industry and that discipline, and there’s something there. We might all be practitioners, we might all be just curious. We can all be whatever. So the community is important and the connections are incredibly important. The random bump into is on the on the buffet line, you know, getting a Caesar salad or something. Hey, where are you from? Those things evolve. So I think what’s happening is really good. Thought leaders are trying to figure out how to fill this community gap and do it in a way that doesn’t compound the zoom exhaustion and all that.

Bill Sherman So what have you seen that’s been working?

Peter Winick Yeah, I. Group masterminds. So I think it’s about your point on that network casting, creating scarcity and creating limitations. So like I was I was on a webinar the other night for a book launch and I thought it was without naming names, possible because it was a one too many. Like it didn’t feel like I’ve been to far more book launches and book parties than most. But there’s usually a sense of there’s a rhythm like, Hey, we’re all gathered in this place tonight. Maybe it’s a really cool place. Maybe it’s an okay place. Most people are going there for the food or the wine. The author is going to talk about their experience and then we’re going to chat with others that are either know that person personally and or what brought you here? They wrote about me in chapter three. Really? I’m really passionate about this. Whatever. And this was more of a broadcast and I felt like it could have been recorded and I could watch them any time. I didn’t have to be there at that time, at that day, because there was no interaction amongst whether it was dozens, hundreds or thousands that were in the audience.

Bill Sherman And I think that sort of sense of interactivity and you make a good point that we don’t need to be in person, but we want to be part of the conversation. We don’t want to just listen to the presentation. How do we get involved with the idea?

Peter Winick One of the things, breakout rooms breakeven. Yeah. So where I was going before is masterminds are important if you can create some small group continuity. I think I think one offs versus continuity. I want to be able to think about something and come back to my tribe, you know, next Thursday and say, you know, I was struggling with this, and here’s what I thought or the comment that Bill made got me thinking. And I think there is this build, you know, call it a cohort, call it whatever. Then a transaction of this is a one off piece.

Bill Sherman Well, and where I was going with that is not only the masterminds, but the flow of conversation both on LinkedIn and then on new tools such as clubhouse at this point. And I don’t know if clubhouse will live and become a standard or not. But this point, people are experimenting with new ways of driving conversation and having those community-based conversations right Where you can have people who have similar interests can dip into a conversation and say, Yeah, I want to be a part of this for a while. And that’s something that I think has accelerated the flow of ideas. I think ideas are moving actually faster now than they did in a pre-COVID world.

Peter Winick I think they’re moving faster. And I think I was talking to someone the other day, you know, and I actually happen to live maybe 10 or 15 miles from me, but it didn’t matter. And the conversation was about, you know, in Covid world, yes, the benefit we have is we’re not traveling as much or commuting, whatever, but time is sort of pointless now, right? So, you know, where is it where you are? Where is it where you are? I’ve got a client in Paris. I’ve got a client in here. I’ve got a client in Israel. Whatever. You’re sort of all over the world all the time, which is good. And that, like, it’s kind of cool that I think there are these preconceived notions of, no, I’m a North American practitioner, or maybe I live in the Northeast or Milan. It matters. We all live in from Zoom.

Bill Sherman Right, exactly. And so with that, it is quite common that you’re following the sun on a series of calls. I know you do it and I do that right. And so it’s interesting when you hear ideas cascading because it used to take a lot longer for thought leadership within one market to travel other to other markets. I think that time is compressing.

Peter Winick Yeah, because if we were getting a lot of our information in the event space, the barrier to entry to an event is if I was in Paris and you were event in Las Vegas, that’s pretty high. That bar was an opportunity cost time, whatever. So not that I wouldn’t go but the difference between that and like this is maybe kind of interesting. I’ll pop in on a clubhouse for five minutes. Totally different game, almost zero barrier to entry, and then I can decide if I like it or I wouldn’t, you know, invest five grand in a week of my time to go to Vegas from Paris unless I really, really sure. Or thought that I would get something out of it versus 20 minutes on clubhouse. Like that’s a that’s a pretty, pretty easy.

Bill Sherman Well, and this goes back to our point on barrier to entry. If you make it for the snack snackable bites that you can dip your toe into the water, see if it’s interesting and if you go, yeah, I was five minutes of my time spent, I’m not feeling it. You move on, right? The investment to go travel to that conference in Paris and okay so you travel to Paris and you’ve got other things planned, but at the same time, you’ve spent a lot of time offline and you’ve got to make sure that in-person event is worth it. And I think one of the things we’ll see coming back is people will be more conscious about the choices they make of what you attended person versus what can I do? Remote.

Peter Winick Yeah. When the sunk costs are low, like I’ve been to several events where I knew within an hour like this is not going to be a good two days, I’ll make the most of it and I’ll develop some relationships and blah blah blah blah, blah. But this is not what I expect.

Bill Sherman But you know, you’re on the cruise ship and the cruise ship is that sale, right?

Peter Winick Yeah, pretty much, yeah. Yeah. So couple of things I’m excited about as we start to wrap up because the good, the bad, the ugly, you know, in terms of what’s going on in leadership, I think there is a massive renaissance that is upon us in terms of this was the ultimate sort of AB experiment over the last year where you get a lot of really smart people, a lot of time back and what did they do with it? What they did with it is they create what they did, what they wrote. What they did is think things through and all that stuff. And we’re just at the beginning of seeing that wave of what comes out of giving lots of people 20, 30% or whatever that is, 50% or more of their time back. And I think it’ll be interesting, you know, as we start to normalize in the next year, three, five, whatever to go, Geez, I wish I had the time I had back then because, you know, how do we how do we put fences around it and make sure we don’t go back to the sort of busy, busy, busy world? We were confusing activity with productivity.

Bill Sherman Well, and I think about that. So both on the independent thought leader side, your speakers, your consultants, as well as your organizational thought leaders, the people who are putting ideas out there, the I would assume and I don’t have data on it, but that many of those folks were flying and traveling and we’re road warriors, right? And we have sort of three cycles on that. Right? The pre fi on planes world where you brought a book or you did something on your laptop, but you had time to stop and think. Right, Right. And you were in a mobile office at 38,000ft where you were still connected. You weren’t doing Zoom calls, but you were still doing emails and that and still accountable to be productive. Now, that’s sort of time travel fatigue and everything. Like you said, I think you wind up having this renaissance of creativity where people look and say, Well, shoot, I do have more time and I don’t have that travel fatigue. It’ll be it’ll be very interesting.

Peter Winick I think you also have the brain cycle because yeah, you know, I know in my world, when I when I was travel as much as it was when you’re on a plane, there are certain things. There are two different plane activities that we do deep thinking because I’m definitely more anything else and a good wow, three hours of uninterrupted time. That’s a gift. I can go think about some things. And then the other was just, you know, brainless task, just painting and let me clean up my email box, whatever, whatever. I think that people need to now carve out that time for the deep thinking, you know, in different ways.

Bill Sherman And why where is that going to sit on your calendar when the world goes back to being sort of a regular rhythm and cadence?

Peter Winick Yeah, because I don’t want to give that back because I think there’s a lot of cool things. And it also forced everybody to question everything that they do in every way that they do and how they serve their clients. Their price makes everything about every business is being put under a microscope and hopefully put back together more effectively. Smarter in many ways. But we’re still in the middle of This is a lot of fun and I hope everybody enjoyed it. Thank you, Peter. Cool. See you. To learn more about Thought Leadership Leverage, please visit our website at ThoughtLeadershipLeverage.com. To reach me directly, feel free to email me at Peter at ThoughtLeadershipLeverage.com. And please subscribe to Leveraging Thought Leadership on iTunes or your favorite podcast app to get your weekly episode automatically.