Chapter 14- Thought Leadership Strategy
It’s easy to get excited about tools and technology.
The Social Media world is filled with cool new toys, and every day some new site or service pops up. If you follow the tech-elite, you can be convinced that you need to do each new thing that comes along, and it’s hard not to start thinking to yourself, “If I just got on that new network, if I started twoodling more, that would change everything!”
Even the lower-tech stuff can be seductive that way. “If I just write a book… if I just start doing seminars… if I just got out and networked more… oh, look— if I joined this group, that’ll make all the difference.”
The problem with a tool-based (or tactical) approach is that every new set of tactics that comes up looks just as attractive as your current set… or probably more attractive, since you’ve already discovered that your current tactics don’t lead to instant success.
The way to increase your chances of success is to think through and create a strategy that pulls the pieces together into a unified plan of action you can implement over time.
Creating a strategy will force you to answer questions like:
Who are the people whose Thoughts you want to Lead?
How/where will these people find you?
How/where will you find them?
What will they see/hear/read at various points of engagement with you?
How will you keep yourself in their thoughts?
How will you prove to them that you are a trusted source of ideas and information?
How will you monetize those relationships?
Answering those questions will help you start to sketch out a plan. As you fill in the details of the plan, the answers to those questions will become clearer and more refined. You’ll start to realize that you have to think through issues like conversion, customer relationship management, web site bounce rates, bandwidth, time management…
Your plan should take a long view of things like content creation, SEO, and social media interaction. You shouldn’t plan to do everything all at once, and the order that you start doing things in should be based on a logical progression of client relationships— not on your ability to accomplish certain tasks or spend money on certain things.
