Thought Leadership & Customers

When did thought leadership become a popular topic?   This is not a trick question.  If you have THE answer, please drop right down to the bottom of this post and send your comment right back this way.

The marketing advice and business success blogs, plus customer-focused newsletters that fill our inbox every day seem to have a lot on thought leadership these days.  Can this be the silver bullet or instant-success answer to high-impact, low-cost marketing that many actively seek?

Before blogging and before the Internet had the first browser, there were thought leaders walking around our marketing firm.  We know how very cool, powerful and rare they are.  We never realized how fast their value would rise, here in 2006.  Blogging and all of this open discussion seems to bring out the greater need for original thoughts.  In a world where everyone cuts, copies, pastes and searches through Google for information, the blogs with original thoughts seem to grow quickly. 

Did you notice that most of this thought leader talk has something to do with attracting customers to your business? Did you notice, for example, that there's not much talk about thought leadership in music, dance, dairy farming, plumbing, or waste management.  So this is probably a marketing and differentiating-yourself thing?

Wikipedia tell us  thought leader is a buzzword or article of jargon used to describe a futurist or person who is recognized among their peer mentors for innovative ideas and demonstrates the confidence to promote or share those ideas as actionable distilled insights.  You can find evidence of this over in ManyWorlds,  a concentration of thought leadeship for business.

It seems important, then, to get away from the buzz and break this thought leadership conversation into meaningful  bits of actionable information.   Help is on the way.  Brian Fling has posted a great piece on the Blue Flavored blog entitled Thought Leadership which covers the subjects of think tanks, research, blogging, trust, and modern business practices.

One way you spot a thought leader is the not-so-predictable title on their business card, website or blog.  This one is our favorite for today: Colin Coulson-Thomas, Professor of Direction and Leadership at the University of Lincoln.  With a title like that, you just know that Colin is going to come out with something original and useful, don't you?  He did! He is author of ‘Shaping Things to Come’ and the forthcoming book ‘Winning Companies; Winning People’ and he has recently advised over 60 entrepreneurs on how best to build their businesses.  If you want to find out more about this customer-attraction, business-building bonanza, go to Small Business Digest and learn how "Board Of Advisors Can Speed Growth Of Small Businesses, Improve Corporate Governance."