Are you a thought leader? Is your content marketing full of thought leadership? It’s time to kill off your thought leaders. Trust me on this. A whole lot of people are going to be very happy if you do.
One of the most common requests I get from brands, big and small, is to create content proving thought leadership. They want to position their employees as thought leaders and need content to support it. Here’s the problem; when everyone is a thought leader, no one is a thought leader. I would argue no one ever was – at least not anyone I’ve ever met. Thought leaders see into the future. They’re ahead of everyone else in knowing what’s going to happen. Most of us are happy to get on the front end of any trend and even that’s hard.
A couple of years ago I was complaining about the ubiquitous corporate visionary. I’ve also given innovative thinkers a hard time. With the exception of a very few wildly talented people, visionaries and innovators are absent from business. I would argue the same is true for thought leaders.
One of the few people I would say is a thought leader about content marketing recently outed himself as a failure when it comes to predicting the future. How I Missed On Every 2014 Content Marketing Prediction is Joe Pulizzi’s review of his performance in the thought leadership category. He and Robert Rose dissected their thought leadership shortcomings on their podcast explicitly titled, This Week in Content Marketing: Failed 2014 Content Marketing Predictions. The expertise of Pulizzi and Rose is uncontested but even they admit it’s difficult to predict the future.
BLOG Content Marketing: Are You Still Using Thought Leaders?
