How To Find Your Thought Leadership Voice Online

There is plenty of information online about using social media for thought leadership. The returns and values have been well-calculated and, in some cases, well-articulated. One great example is our friends over at Bloom Group, who are the thought leaders for thought leadership.

Few seasoned marketing professionals would argue that online thought leadership is a waste of time or money. Most would say it's an imperative. But while the "Must dos!" on this topic are whizzing past, the instructions on "How?" seem to have been left behind. To help with the how, I work with thought leaders within enterprises via a social media immersion program. The program's goal is to help marketing and other thought leadership executives make the shift away from traditional to online and social thought leadership - cuz it ain't easy! It means rethinking the "how."

Here's a personal story about rethinking "how." I was at a holiday party when the wife of my colleague gushed about how I must go on this amazing European tour with her and a few other people...for 3 weeks. I smiled politely -- it did sound lovely -- all the while my thoughts screamed "How in the world can I do that? I have responsibilities, staff, mouths to feed and a thousand things that must be done!" The activity seemed frivolous, and the list went on and on about why I couldn't participate. But as it turned out, conversation and comradeship on that trip gave birth to a new company, one that succeeded and where I would have wanted to work. In fact, I could have figured a way to make the trip work if only I had put my mind to rethinking the "how I can" instead of the "why I cannot."

So it is with developing a thought leadership platform using social media channels. It is both temptingly exotic and long, scary step away from the status quo. The toughest part about thought leadership online is inverting the behaviors used for thought leadership off-line. Consider these old school vs. new school comparisons:

Old school: A thought leader dominates that stage and takes questions after - if time permits
New school: A thought leader engages online with other people's ideas from the start

Old school: Ideas become seasoned through the publishing process, massaged by many people and presented in edited form
New school: You can have a choice on timing. Either you are instant, blogging-tweeting-updating and -- please! -- remember to spell-check, or you work it over a bit and release it in a timely way

Old school: Your detractors are hanging out at the bar after the presentation, but you have no chance to talk to them about what worked and what didn't
New school: Instant feedback -- positive and negative -- plus new ideas, alternative approaches and support are all available online for you to use

This is just a sample of the differences, but they illustrate how a modern thought leader cannot apply his previous knowledge and experience with traditional thought leadership to this new social world and expect it to work the same way. Indeed, it's likely to backfire badly. To succeed as a thought leader online today, I believe you must be accessible, open, collaborative and patient. This means:

• Show Up Online: The old saying "Fifty percent is just showing up" should be raised to ninety percent in the online world. If you aren't visible online, you are not accessible, and being inaccessible will thwart the best social media intentions.

• Support Knowledge Exchange With Others: Once you share your ideas online, encourage healthy discussion and knowledge exchange about them. Use your social tools to invite discussion, broadcast your openness to engaging with and rewarding people who interact with you.

• Enable Access To Tools And Resources: As a thought leader, you are very knowledgeable about your subject matter. Share openly and help others to gain insight too. Collaboration does not devalue your years of expertise but rather, broadens your influence by helping others become better at what you all are doing. This also builds personal ties and make valuable contributions to your profession.

• Wait For It: Real thought leadership needs time to take hold, for followers to arrive and build support. Sustaining the initiative takes patience and perseverance, but good ideas always find their audience and grow from there.

The Difference Between Doing Social Vs. Being Social

There is a rather large difference between companies "doing" social and "being" social. For a company to succeed at this new business model, they must learn how to do social and also, enable their people to be social.

Doing social is the imperative part of the equation. This means making plans, defining objectives complete with outcomes, tracking and measuring success and making adjustments to the plan along the way. Most companies start doing social within their marketing and sales departments to drive traffic to their site and raise awareness about their products or services. This usually looks like marketing managers using social tools to broadcast their message to the world.

However, being social means building competencies across the organization that encourage, support and institutionalize the use of social tools by a broad cross-section of employees and other stakeholders. For an organization to be social, the people who are part of the organization should be able to use the tools available on the open web, and also have a clear voice and a comfort level about interacting with customers online.

You can spot the truly social organization -- doing more than just "doing" social -- by looking for these behaviors:

1) There are many people within the company who have the power and skills to utilize social media across many different facets of the organization - from sales to engineering, from marketing to customer care.

2) The social organization has many different channels for engagement and strives to meet their customers where they "live" online. This doesn't mean implementing a random smorgasbord of tools, but rather, a dedicated, strategic approach to connecting with customers online.

3) The social organization brings social data into legacy systems such as CRM, customer satisfaction scores and customer support, They have connected their disparate databases to the social network and can gather information about customer needs - socially.

4) Customers are at the center of the company's products and services. Social tools are used -- judiciously -- to engage and understand the customer.

5) Social organizations understand the largely unwritten rules for "being social" that mandate being generous with ideas, appreciation, thought leadership and relationships online. They give more than they take from the customer.

Being a social organization requires acting socially -- maintaining a deep dedication to supporting business relationships online. This doesn't mean employing armies of millennials to tweet all the live-long day. It does mean placing customer satisfaction as a paramount strategic goal for doing business over the long haul.

To move from doing social to being social, an organization must ask itself 'who drives social bus?' If the marketing group is just "out there" tweeting away, joining LinkedIN groups and setting up Facebook fan pages without a plan to build a deeper understanding of customer needs, or if the data generated by online social relationships are not being traced throughout the organization's core operations, then chances are the company is just "doing" social.

Moving from one camp to the other is not light work, but will be required to build and maintain competitive advantage over the next year or so. In particular, core operations must change to integrate social data - both technically and behaviorally - across the business. Companies will need to learn how to make sense of raw data found on the social Web. Organizational designs will adapt to reflect the new reality that everyone owns the products of social business activity. The notion of social business changing enterprise core operations is not widely discussed (yet!) but I found this great article that discusses at "How Social Computing Will Improve the Enterprise Value Chain" that I think is spot on.

The new social mandate means everyone is now accountable: to pay attention to the customer, to listen and truly hear, and most important, to figure out how to sense and respond to the subtleties of conducting social business online. This is the new way of doing business -- demanding but well worth the effort in the long run.

The Humanness of Moderating Online Communities

Effective community moderation often requires the ability to engage in (sometimes shameless) acts of human exchange. This has long been understood by experienced moderators.

We understand that modeling conversations is critical to getting people to engage with each other. We reach out to people by phone and email to ask their opinions and ideas, we search countless databases trying to find commonalities among people. We make jokes, we make friends, and perhaps most importantly we make human connections all mediated, to some degree, by the computer screen. In earnest effort to get people to participate online we even often talk to ourselves online in hopes of inspiring someone (anyone) to talk back to us.

A colleague sent me this video on YouTube recently as a funny - but Oh So Accurate - commentary about being a leader and I laughed very hard because it was especially reflective of the act of moderating a community! This is social media.



Cheers to all my fellow community builders who have also done this dance online! At the end of the day, online community building is about the humanness of it all as we solve problems, share experiences and ideas and ultimately model behaviors to help others learn how to use this brave new world.