Bob Buday's blog

After 26 years of watching consultants and other advisers successfully use ghostwriters, I was stunned recently to hear a professional services marketer who didn’t believe in the practice.

It happened at a March 27 Association of Management Consulting Firms seminar in Boston, a gathering of about 30 people on a topic dear to everyone’s heart: the evolution of online publishing in consulting. In the morning, I presented the results of a new study that we conducted with AMCF on consulting firms' online publishing practices. (You can read that study report here.)

Our survey of 50 consulting firms found that only 33% of the average consultancy’s online content last year was ghostwritten; consultants wrote 67% of the content themselves. However, consulting firms whose online articles generated more than 40 inquiries from prospective clients last year had a much larger percentage of ghostwritten content (49%) than consulting firms that generated only 0-20 leads (22%).

Ghostwriting can be good for two reasons: most consultants and other professionals can't write at the level of a professional writer, and most don't have the time to write. They are paid to sell and/or deliver expertise to clients.

But in an afternoon breakout session, an anti-ghostwriter sentiment emerged. One participant in a group I led said he didn’t believe in ghostwriters. The subjects are too complex for a non-expert to capture, and most do a poor job, he opined.

“Interesting,” I thought to myself, as I facilitated the breakout discussion, thinking about my experiences, which argue to the contrary. And then “Wow, really?”

I didn’t utter those words to my group of nine. But I thought of mentioning to them – blurting out, actually -- that the authors of many bestselling business books don’t actually write the words; the ideas are theirs, but the way they are communicated isn’t. Same with many Harvard Business Review articles, research reports and other prose that tries to prove the authors have unique expertise on an issue.

But then I remembered the statistics from our study: 67% of consulting firms’ content is not ghostwritten; 34% of consultants are not at all or only slightly comfortable with using ghostwriters; and 23% are “somewhat comfortable.” A minority of consultants (43%) embraces ghostwriters. (The participants in the morning session were surprised by this.)

All to say that this marketer’s opinion may be more common than I had realized, although it didn’t seem to be the prevailing opinion of the seminar participants.

So instead of pushing back, I asked the group whether they used ghostwriters, and, if so, whether they were successful. The answer was yes to the first question, although another participant (an editor at a large consulting firm) said his colleagues don’t call themselves ghostwriters. (A great point. I also believe the term doesn’t capture what the best at this profession do. I have written about this before, which you can read here. Ghostwriters who focus on making something readable provide a necessary but insufficient skill. Those who also help the expert develop his thinking provide far more value.)

My group's answers to the second question – what makes some ghostwriters successful? -- included knowledge of the subject matter and the use of outlines to help the subject expert structure her ideas before penning prose.

But given that in the consulting firms we surveyed, ghostwriters produced an average 30% of their online articles, the gentleman in my breakout session is obviously not alone. His opinion and the survey we conducted remind me that there is still lots of skepticism about a practice I thought had gone mainstream.

Now I realize why so many B2B firms struggle to become recognized as thought leaders: They don’t realize their experts need help in developing and communicating compelling ideas. Or if they do, their experts reject it.

I hate to dampen any firm’s enthusiasm about investing in thought leadership. We believe B2B firms that bring superior expertise to solving their customers’ problems (not just superior products and services) will be the ones that thrive.

Yet it’s easy for B2B companies (and particularly their CMOs) to become giddy about thought leadership and then watch the rug get pulled out from under them. A downturn forces them to gut the thought leadership budget. Salespeople pay little attention to thought leadership marketing campaigns that generate leads. And (worst of all), the professionals who deliver the firm’s expertise (consultants, accountants, lawyers, architects, bankers, VCs, and so on) behave as if there’s little to learn from new research or a codification of some innovative firm practices.

Without strong pull from the top – a deep understanding by the people who run the firm on what thought leadership is and how it can propel the firm – thought leadership investments will not go very far. And I’m aware of few B2B chief executives other than those running consulting firms (and just some of these) or research companies who view thought leadership as vital to success.

As I mentioned in my previous post, one of seven elements of a sound thought leadership strategy is “strategy alignment.” An ugly and nebulous term, indeed. So what do we mean? It begins with people at the top recognizing investments to make their firm the premier expert in its domains as essential to executing the business strategy.

In many companies, this connection is tenuous. But I’ve seen other companies that do this well. Here’s what they do:

• They use metrics that resonate at the top: e.g., number of prospect inquiries, leads and revenue. One of our clients showed senior management the result of a thought leadership marketing campaign using the following indicators: attendees at a symposium (about 160), number of requests for their white paper (more than 350) and names of the requestors (many Fortune 500 companies), and number of discussions asked for by prospective clients (14). Our client also used indirect metrics of market interest (indirect in that these numbers don’t directly indicate buyers are at hand): news coverage and website visitors, to name two. Nice, but not as interesting as the metrics closer to money.
• They talk CEO-speak, not marketing-speak. All of us in marketing easily forget how the shorthand we’ve adopted goes over the heads of the people who run companies. The CMO says, “Our last thought leadership campaign generated 1,000 unique viewers, 100 downloads, and 150 retweets.” “Huh?” says your CEO. OK, let me phrase that again. “Our last thought leadership campaign brought 1,000 people to our website on a day when we typically get 100. The people who downloaded our research report – 100 in all – were CFOs, CMOs and chief R&D officers at companies with average revenue of $12 billion. We know that because we went to the Fortune 500 list and other sources and did the calculations. Of those 100 who downloaded the report, 18 asked to talk to the authors of the research. And of these 18, four have already asked for a proposal, the average value of which is $250,000. And 150 people who use the social media tool Twitter liked our study enough to recommend it to the 52,000 people who follow them on Twitter. And we found that 10 of those 150 who recommended our study on Twitter were stock analysts and reporters from the Times and the Journal.” See the difference in those messages? Communicating effectively about thought leadership requires explaining everything, not taking for granted the terms we all are familiar with. 
• They explain clearly how thought leadership can help the firm accomplish much more than just getting the market to recognize it as an expert on some issue (although that, of course, is a sizable benefit). They lay out how thought leadership could help the company a) sell more services and products, b) increase profitability, c) attract talent and d) create new services. Here’s how I would explain those four potential benefits: a) thought leadership can help your firm sell more services and products because an increasing number of potential customers believe you know the most about how to solve their problem; b) thought leadership enables you to raise prices because your expertise is viewed as superior and well worth the premium (every consulting firm with a hot concept should hike its rates), c) thought leadership can become a magnet to college graduates and established professionals who are looking to get on board a company with a hot concept (many consulting firms can attest to this too); and d) thought leadership provides a company with greater ability to scale expertise that it previously had not codified. In other words, you take the best practices you identified in your research, have people who love creating methodology turn them into methods and training and development curricula, and then put your people through extensive training and development so they can learn how to do it too.

I see these three elements as essential to making thought leadership truly matter at the top of your company. You need metrics that matter, language your CEO knows well, and clear explanations about how investing in thought leadership will help deliver what he wants to achieve.

How have you pitched thought leadership to the people who run your firm? Is it working? Why or why not?

Many B2B companies (and not only professional services firms) are investing vast sums today to be regarded as “thought leaders” – as renowned experts on the issues their products and services address.

I like microsites – good ones, that is. When a professional services or other B2B company has a lot to say on a narrow issue or to a narrow audience, and when it wants to be regarded as the go-to firm on that issue, bringing together a mass of content in one place on the web makes a great deal of sense. And of course, it’s a great deal of work.

The grand experiments that Harvard Business Review, Forbes, McKinsey Quarterly and other business publications have been staging with their online editions if anything are proving one point: Readers don’t want to be just readers anymore. They want to engage in online discussions about the articles they’ve read – discussions not only with the authors but with other readers as well.

You’ve no doubt read on other websites about the need to bring a publishing model to thought leadership marketing. We actually think the opposite is true: If you’re following a publisher’s mindset with your online journal, you'll miss a big opportunity to sell more productively. Let me explain.

When we entered the thought leadership marketing business back in 1998, our clients rightly asked us what would make them thought leaders. We told them then, as we tell them now, that there are two pieces to the puzzle: great content and great marketing programs that implant that content in the minds of their audience. 

As a long-ago graduate of Penn State (1977) who covered Joe Paterno and Jerry Sandusky’s football teams for the school newspaper, I feel the following goes without saying.

Sandusky’s alleged sexual abuse of boys, first and foremost, is an enormous tragedy for his victims. Their emotional health matters far more than does the university’s public image. The latter’s will recover somewhat over time if it conducts a thorough housecleaning and actually sticks to its newly issued code of ethics.

The term “knowledge management” was big in the mid-1990s when big companies saw the need to share expertise beyond those proximate to it. A decade and a half later, the term “thought leadership marketing” is in vogue, and some see a connection between the two.

My post in this series laid out five elements of a thought leadership content machine. This post will go deeper on the first element: your ambition or purpose for such a function.

But before I talk about ambition, I need to clarify a key term here because its ambiguity contributes to the problem I’m going to probe in this post. That term is “content machine.” By this I mean the group(s) in a company charged with creating new ideas, ones that demonstrate the firm’s know-how in solving the business problems it solves. The content machine is the group that creates such content.

In just the last two years, we’ve been asked the same question by six very large B2B firms (two consulting, two IT services, one financial services and one software company): how build a thought leadership content machine.

By this, I mean creating a department of people who produce compelling content that demonstrates their firm’s expertise. No easy task, not even for the biggest consulting firms, the sector in which thought leadership marketing has been practiced the longest.

It will sound like circular logic, but it still needs to be said: Great thoughts are the foundation of highly successful thought leadership marketing campaigns. Yes, you need skillful and concerted marketing to distribute those great thoughts widely. But you can invest a lot in marketing some idea and come up empty if your point of view is shallow, has been heard before, and lacks substantiation.

I know lots of people who, with varying degrees of success, are trying to get their boss behind thought leadership marketing and raise their organization’s investment in it. I can assure you the more successful ones get attention by being crystal clear about the “why”: "We should do this to generate leads and revenue." When they see soft benefits thrown at them, CEOs, CFOs and even some CMOs tune them out like they do their mother-in-law.  Want to make their eyes close? Use words such as “enhanced reputation,” “cachet,” “speaking engagements,” or “market buzz.”

In a previous post, I laid out four stages that professional services and other B2B firms go through in becoming thought leaders (Stone Age, Medieval, Industrial and Post-Industrial). Each stage reflects varying levels of sophistication in the way a firm develops and markets its expertise. Because thought leadership marketing is a relatively new marketing discipline, it's no surprise to me that many firms are in the Stone Age and Medieval eras.

Google’s announcement yesterday that Eric Schmidt would relinquish his CEO title set off a flurry of derisive Twitter chatter about one term he used for his new role: “technology thought leadership.” Here’s what he said (but don’t expect elaboration on what he meant by the phrase).

From 23 years of helping companies become recognized as experts in their domains, I have found their ability to do so has varied greatly.  And it wasn’t because of their gray matter -- the expertise they could bring to bear on their clients’ problems.  Most of these firms had people who were highly knowledgeable about their domains.

Several consulting firms recently have asked for our opinion of their management journals.  All of them are well-written, graphically appealing, and chock full of articles. But beyond that, they all fall quite short today because the very model on which they are based is obsolete.  They are akin to the automobiles at the turn of the century that continued to use the horse-and-buggy and bicycle technologies that preceded them.

Companies with savvy marketers spend lots of time determining how to market a piece of compelling “thought leadership” content, especially one based on deep primary research. What blog posts can we create, and what bloggers should we contact? What about a webinar series? What opinion articles can we craft, and which publications should we target?  Is there a worthy Harvard Business Review or Sloan Management Review submission here? Perhaps even the basis for a book?

But I rarely see companies spending a similar amount of time determining how to use that content in their services. 

Nice to see we’re not the only ones who complain about indecipherable business communications.

Check out this Oct. 29 column by New York Times media critic David Carr about a CEO’s internal memo at magazine magnate Conde Nast (Vogue, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, etc.).  Looks like employees are having a hard time understanding their boss’s lingo (“consumer-centric business model,” “holistic brand management approach” and “multi-platform, integrated sales and marketing organization”).  Sounds like a consulting firm ghostwrote the memo.

Thought leadership programs serve one master in most B2B firms: Marketing.  Marketing generates content (commissioning studies, writing white papers, and so on).  Marketing packages and distributes that content (producing academic-looking publications, seminars and webinars, educational PR campaigns, email newsletters, etc.).  Marketing then turns over the resulting client inquiries to account executives. Thought leadership is a Marketing activity.

But that robs thought leadership programs of their greater potential value – as sources of service innovation, not just marketing content. 

We continually look for signs that thought leadership marketing is gaining adherents outside of professional services.  The most recent nugget we’ve seen is one from Borrell Associates, a decade-old company you probably haven’t heard of unless you’re in the newspaper business. (They are a research firm that tracks local advertising spending, especially online.)
 

In my last post I said that developing fewer but more substantive points of view (sometimes even just one) is much more likely to make the phone ring than letting a hundred points of light shine in your firm. That’s for sure. 

But when you place your bets on fewer but deeper points of view, you will soon need someone who’s responsible for the end-to-end process of developing and selling a big idea.

Last month I explained the second of five factors behind companies that excel at thought leadership marketing: patience for the time it takes to develop a compelling point of view and attract an audience to it. (The first factor was a huge desire to distinguish one’s offering on the basis of possessing unique expertise.)

I find the third success factor rarer than the first two: focus.  By this I mean a company’s ability to invest its content development and marketing resources in fewer points of view rather than more.  Many fewer, in fact.

Good marketing generates many leads. It also gets a firm recognized by companies that don’t need help at the moment but will in the future, what marketers call “market awareness.”

That's the value of good marketing. Great marketing produces an abundance of leads – many more than a firm can handle at the time. It also spawns widespread awareness. But great marketing generates two other things that are even more important: the discretion to work only with clients who share your vision and values, and the dignity of knowing you can stick to your principles. 

In my last post, I laid out the first factor behind companies that excel at thought leadership marketing: a big appetite for differentiating their product/service offering on the basis of possessing truly unique expertise. These companies don’t want to compete on price -- whether they are an IT services firm that can’t match the costs of the offshoring contigent or a consulting firm whose brochures make it indistinguishable from hundreds of advisers in supply chain improvement.

This post is about the second of my five factors: organizational patience.

In my last post, I cited five factors that determine how proficient a company will be at thought leadership marketing – whether it becomes the recognized expert on some issue or not (and then enjoys the accolodes, leads and revenue).

Let’s look at the first factor: a big appetite for the type of differentation that a market-recognized thought leader possesses.

It’s great to see so many companies today that want to be recognized as “thought leaders” on the business problems their services and products address.  Software companies, transportation firms, financial institutions and many other sectors want in on the game. 

But what these companies often don’t recognize is what it takes to be seen by the market as a thought leader – a go-to organization on a particular issue. From doing this work for more than 20 years, I see five factors that are key to determining how well a firm plays the thought leadership game:

I was delighted to hear last week that Harvard Business School selected long-time HBS Professor Nitin Nohria as their next dean.  (Here's the news on that from Harvard Magazine.)

I caught of glimpse of Nitin’s intellect and working style 15 years ago in my days at the Cambridge, Mass., consulting firm CSC Index.  In his non-teaching time, Nitin helped Index’s utility industry practice develop new thinking on strategy in a fast-deregulating industry.  That effort led to a prescient Sloan Management Review article.  

I keep hearing people say that developing great content for thought leadership marketing campaigns requires instituting a publishing process, populated with reporters willing to become “corporate journalists.”  

I say that’s partly right and mostly wrong.

It’s amazing just how ingrained old techniques and old ways of thinking can be.  Especially mine (as my kids often remind me).  But the reason old habits are ingrained is that they work – at least for a long time. Then they begin working less well.  And at some point they don’t work. 

Here’s what I’m getting at: I believe we are on the cusp of seeing the longstanding way in which a subject expert or team of experts and their marketing colleagues produce and market a compelling piece of content become obsolete.