One thing thought leaders and experts such as academics, analysts, authors, consultants, influencers and speakers all have in common is that they typically have a ton of content – articles, blogs, books, keynotes, media interviews, panels, podcasts, social channels, speaking, videos, webinars, whitepapers and more!
One of the challenges with all this content is it’s often distributed all over the web on various sites such as Amazon, corporate sites, Google Scholar, iTunes, LinkedIn, personal sites, publisher sites, social channels, speaker bureaus, TED, YouTube, Vimeo and many other such destinations.
Sites such as LinkedIn are great at showcasing your resume and work experience but do little to showcase your complete portfolio of thought leadership content. What’s more, the sites just mentioned typically showcase just one aspect of the many hats you may wear as a thought leader. By their very nature, speaker bureaus highlight your speaking, Amazon highlights your books and so on.
According to Tom Koulopoulos, author of “Revealing the Invisible” and Thinkers360 member, “The great myth of the Internet is that if you have volumes of great content you don’t need to worry about creating a thought leadership brand. This is no truer for a thought leader brand than it is for a corporate brand. In many ways you must be that much more vigilant about how you present yourself to the market, prospects, and clients. My advice: craft, curate, and care for your brand as though it were your most important asset; because it is!”
To help you craft and care for this important asset, here’s four key benefits of curating your complete thought leadership portfolio:
Business & professional development
With the gig economy (freelancing) on the rise and expected to overtake traditional full-time employment by 2027, it’s valuable to build and maintain a thought leadership portfolio which can accompany your professional resume.
You can use this to further differentiate as a candidate for full-time positions as well as any time with customers and prospects to raise your profile and improve win rates whether in support of your corporate brand or your own personal brand.
Financial benefits
Strong thought leadership content which gives customers unique ideas and insights which they can apply in their everyday work also has considerable financial benefits. Some of the tangible as well as intangible benefits are highlighted in the following quotes:
“Intangible capital will increasingly determine the fate and fortune of firms in today’s global value chains” – World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) DG Francis Gurry
“People are willing to pay the highest-profile leaders over 14 times that of the standard professional” – Hinge Research Institute
Customer value proposition and differentiation
As an academic, analyst, author, consultant, influencer or speaker, having a complete thought leadership portfolio to share with your clients and prospects can really help to differentiate your profile and candidacy.
If you’re a well-known B2B influencer, for example, having this broader portfolio can help to show that you’re producing your own unique thought leadership content such as books and articles as well as having a large follower base on social media. It shows that you’re publishing your own unique perspectives and not just amplifying 3rd party content of others.
Conversely, if you’re primarily an author or speaker, having this broader portfolio – across all your various “hats” – can help to show that you’re socially-savvy as well and have a growing follower base on social media. Today’s organizations are often looking for well-rounded thought leaders who are articulate and agile and can seamlessly navigate these various roles.
Holistic omni-channel perspectives
By curating your thought leadership content across all channels and publications, you also give customers a way to consume your insights via their preferred approach. Those that prefer short articles can read your blogs, those that prefer audio can listen to your podcasts, and those that prefer video can watch your speaker videos on the topics that interest them.
With thought leadership content so ubiquitous and spread out across the web, tomorrow’s world-class thought leaders need to become careful curators of their ideas beyond simply sharing their insights. By curating your content, you can make it easier for inbound customers to find your points of view on specific topics and give them a unique perspective that they can apply in their everyday work.
Creating a standout thought leadership portfolio
While the benefits of strong thought leadership content and portfolios are clear, the challenge is that compiling this information manually can be time-consuming and tedious. What’s needed is a way to create a standout thought leadership portfolio in minutes, rather than hours or days.
At Thinkers360, we aim to help you curate and showcase your entire thought leadership portfolio across all your various channels. We utilize automated techniques to ingest your content as well as a personalized data entry service to curate your content across any of your designated sites.
As a Thinkers360 member, in addition to your private profile, you can now share your profile and portfolio publicly. You can create a personalized link for this profile and control what information is displayed in both public and private profiles. In addition, you can save your portfolio as a PDF to make it easily sharable with customers and prospects.
In summary, these profiles can be a valuable way to summarize and showcase your complete thought leadership content across all the channels you utilize, giving customers and prospects a way to easily explore your “collected works” and your personal or corporate brand.
Join Us
If you’re an individual thought leader/expert and would like to curate your content, showcase your portfolio and participate in our global leaderboards we welcome you to join at https://www.thinkers360.com/tl/users/registration.
If you’re an enterprise looking to manage and showcase your thought leaders as well as identify external experts to complement your influencer groups, we welcome you to request an enterprise consultation at https://www.thinkers360.com/enterprise.
