Our research back in July on the impact of thought leadership clearly demonstrated that one personal recommendation is much more likely to drive engagement with thought leadership than one email from a faceless firm – and much more likely to be the start of a conversation. But what does it take to make this happen? We posed this question to each of the ten firms who submitted a case study for our upcoming report on the distribution of thought leadership.
Are you paying enough attention to your emails?
Posted
One of the stand-out insights from our survey of 400 senior executives in the US1 is how important email is as a means of getting your content seen. Of the 200 respondents who were able to name a memorable piece of thought leadership, nearly 40% had read that memorable report as a direct result of an email from the consulting firm.
Given the value of each person on your email list, it’s a shame that:
Should you be creating celebrities?
Posted
Should consulting firms be directing a greater proportion of their time and money towards building up the profiles of individual consultants within the firm? This question has been infiltrating our conversations for a while now. Back in July 2013, when we carried out our analysis of how consulting firms are using Twitter, we noticed that it was the accounts of high profile individuals that typically generated the most engagement. And this didn’t surprise us: individuals are innately more interesting to engage with than organisations.
Should you be curating as well as creating?
Posted
Should you be curating as well as creating? That’s a question we’ve been asking many consulting firms recently when we’ve been talking to them about thought leadership. In our view, if you want to be the go-to destination for the finance director (for example), then you need to do more than just push your own content: you need to understand the concept, and the value, of curating content for specific target audiences. That doesn’t mean pushing your own view on topics into the background, but it absolutely does mean bringing together content from other relevant sources.
Making friends with TED
Posted
I recently received a newsletter from BCG telling me about their new friend, TED. This relationship appears to go back a while: BCG announced in June 2013 that it would co-curate events with TED in Singapore and San Francisco as part of its program focused on the theme of ‘Game Changing’. In terms of developing and promoting thought leadership, it looks like a great idea.