BookJive

I just started reading Get Slightly Famous (2nd ed.) by Steven van Yoder when a friend forwarded below article to me which I think is worth reading as almost every business owner would want to be known as experts in their own field.

Thought Leadership Marketing

By Steven Van Yoder

When David Silverstein launched Breakthrough Management Group (BMG) in 2001, he sought ways to establish BMG as business performance improvement specialists in the financial services, healthcare, and manufacturing industries. Knowing that advertising was not a viable strategy, he embraced thought leadership marketing to establish BMG in key target markets.

Silverstein spoke at industry conferences and commented on industry trends in his Leadership and Business blog. He coauthored INsourcing Innovation, a book that articulates BMG’s approach to developing core business competencies that drive innovation. He offered his expertise to the media, helping BMG garner coverage in over 100 publications, including the Wall Street Journal, Business Finance magazine, and Investor’s Business Daily. He also appeared on CNN’s Squeeze Play.

In roughly five years, thought leadership took BMG from an unknown startup to a global organization with eleven offices on five continents. “Our reputation as a thought leader helped us expand into core markets, including Asia and Latin America, where credibility and name recognition go a long way,” says Silverstein. “Our reputation now helps our sales team get their foot in the door in key markets.”

The Age of Thought Leadership

Marketing used to be about “getting in front of” prospects, delivering your pitch and making the sale. Today, the Internet has permanently changed the way people and companies find and evaluate products and services. Consumers now find companies through their own efforts, often through a search engine.

Moreover, buyers increasingly distrust marketing “claims” and expect businesses to show, not tell, when demonstrating their products and services. They shun self-serving salespeople and seek businesses that focus on making a difference, not getting a sale.

Thought leadership centers on earning trust and credibility. Thought leaders get noticed by offering something different—information, insights, and ideas, for instance. Thought leadership positions you and your company as an industry authority and resource and trusted advisor by establishing your reputation as a generous contributor to your industry.

Thought Leadership in a Virtual World

The Internet has permanently transformed marketing. Regardless of your company’s size or industry, people expect to find basic information about your company at the click of a mouse. The Internet empowers prospects that now expect easy access to information about your products and services.

Prospects often form a Virtual First Impression ™ of your company in an Internet browser. They expect your company to be “findable” on the Web, and demonstrate a credible record of results. If you appear lackluster compared to your competitors, you lose potential clients or customers and risk becoming obsolete.

To make the Internet an effective part of your thought leadership strategy, you must focus on showing your value, demonstrating your worth, and making a difference. Your website should provide fresh, educational content that helps prospects see your business as a solution.

Elements of a Thought Leadership Program

Thought leadership centers on sharing your knowledge and giving your expertise generously and frequently in a variety of formats.

Thought leaders position themselves as centers of influence who are always “present” within their target markets. Seek opportunities to be seen, read, and heard on a regular basis by the people who matter most to your company.

Media Strategies

The public values the media, and so should you. In one way or another, the media reach and influence everyone with a direct impact on your business. As a thought leader, your should establish relationships with editors and publications in the trade, and in local, national, and international media to enhance your credibility, build your brand, and reach far more prospects than you could in person.

The Internet

Share your knowledge by creating and distributing content online contributes incrementally to growing your business brand. As the Internet evolves to an interactive online community, new technologies collectively labeled “Web 2.0” enable people to collaborate, co-create, and share information online rather than simply peruse information.

Syndicate articles on web sites that reach your marketplace. Embrace blogs, podcasts, social networking websites, social bookmarking websites, and online communities as virtual platforms to demonstrate your expertise and engage in two-way dialogue with your prospects.

Speaking

Speaking can be the fastest, easiest, and cheapest way to establish yourself as a thought leader, and it gives you tremendous credibility that increases over time.

Identify trade shows, associations and conferences that customers and industry influencers are attending, and get on their panels or lead workshops. You don’t have to be personally present to give a talk that reaches your target market. Online chats and teleconferences, using your own or others’ Websites or telephone lines, can help you reach a lot of people eager to hear your message.

Publish Valuable Content

Thought leaders create and distribute information, such as white papers, books and reports, that educate their target market about issues related to their business.

White papers can be easily created in Adobe pdf format and offered from your own or others’ web sites. When done correctly, a white paper is a powerful vehicle for a thought leadership marketing strategy that attracts prospects via search engines and other online channels.

Thought Leadership Starts at the Top

Regardless of a company’s size or industry, thought leadership always starts at the top. When you are deemed a thought leader, it is a broad acknowledgment that your company, in a real, authentic sense, leads the thinking in your industry. Thought leadership is most effective when led by a company’s top management, who develop and express new ideas that keep a company at the forefront of change.

Steven Van Yoder is an internationally recognized expert on public relations, executive branding and thought leadership marketing and author of Get Slightly Famous ™: Become a Celebrity in Your Field and Attract More Business with Less Effort (Second Edition). This article was originally published on the Get Slightly Famous WebZine, an online publication offering free articles, resources, white papers, podcasts and resources focused on thought leadership marketing.

I received a book from the moderator of DearReader.com,  Suzanne Beecher   - the book is called From the Sandbox to the Corner Office: Lessons Learned on the Journey to the Top by Eve Tahmincioglu.  The book features interviews from CEOs of different companies and corporations about their journey to the top. It’s obvious that these people became leaders not because of their DNAs but with sheer hard work and perseverance.  It’s also amazing to note that Winston Churchill and Abraham Lincoln emerged as most idolized personality; almost everyone loves Jim Collins’ Good to Great — maybe this is because almost all business owners wants their business to be really great and not just good; most of them fear “failure,”  and when asked how they’ll describe themselves, “ambitious” is the most used word.

Journey to the top is not that easy - whether it’s business’ journey or life’s journey. Every step we make gives valuable lessons each of us should never ignore to be able to make it to the top.

No time to read? How can anyone claim such a lousy excuse when technology is at our command? Jeff Bezos, the founder and CEO of Amazon.com introduced Kindle last month. With the screen size of 4.5 inches by 3.5 inches, and the whole device measures 7.5 inches by 5.3 inches, with 0.7 inches thickness, who wouldn’t love this gadget? Kindle weighs about just a little over 10 ounces. It’s just slightly larger than a mass-market paperback yet weighs far lesser!

Amazon Kindle has a cell phone modem in the device, making it capable to wirelessly download books, magazines, newspapers and blogs. It can accommodate up to 200 books, more if an SD card is added. There’s also a full-alphabet keyboard at the bottom of the screen for easy navigation, for easy searching, and for annotating. A word help is available with a few clicks of a button. A web browser is also included that allows users to surf for free. Not perfect by everybody’s standard, but what is? The battery life is pretty decent but can still be improved. The public is also already looking forward to an advanced feature of a colored screen…

With Kindle at your fingertips, you still cannot read a book? Think another excuse. Another company will surely benefit from your whine!

Thrilling love stories like Romeo and Juliet, Titanic and others of such kind never fails to amaze me. Such unforgettable stories of all times leave legendary thoughts of wisdom to everyone. Adaptable to all levels of ages from its picturesque scenes and simple lessons learned by lovers lingers on…

Time will come our Bible, Koran, or other religious texts will become worn or unusable. Do you know how to dispose them properly? The following info came from The Fayetteville Observer September 21, 2007 issue, pages 1E and 2E. Thanks for the info, Fayetteville people!

Jewish Tradition:

According to Rabbi Josef Lavanon of Fayetteville’s Beth Israel synagogue, all damaged or unreadable Jewish sacred texts, including any book that contains the name of God, should be buried, not burned. All materials containing God’s names, three or more words of a biblical verse, written with the intent to quote the verse; all holy objects including but not limited to Torah scrolls and book, their mantles and sashes and dust jackets, slip covers or other parts. The materials are collected then buried together.

Islamic tradition

According to Abdul Haneef, Imam of Fayetteville’s Masjid Omar Ibn Sayyid mosque, the sanctity of the holy book remains even if the book is damaged. Thus, burial, not burning, is the prescribed ceremony. Tradition calls that all unusable texts be wrapped in clean linen as its burial shroud. Another way is to wrap the book in cloth, attached it to a weight and respectfully place it in a body of moving water.

Christian tradition

There is no fixed way to dispose unusable Bibles. Some rebound the Bible and send them overseas to churches in Africa; some simply removed them and started over. However, “a Bible that cannot be used may be burned. Once the Bible is burned, the ashes are to be buried”, says Terry Jackson of Raleigh.

Lutheran tradition buries the Bible, allowing the nature to reclaim its pages while some Episcopal churches offer memorial services for unusable Bibles.

My word for the week is genetics (closely followed by scared silly, but that’s for later).  Gregor Mendel spent years in meticulous research to provide the world with his theories on genetics, dominant and recessive genes and the consequences of genetic interplay when same mixes with same.  I could have spent my whole life being resigned to mousy brown hair, muddy green eyes, and a short stature, the consequences of sharing DNA with parents who are tall, blond, and brown eyed.  I am the youngest of five children, and while you can see a definitive family resemblance, my four older siblings are certainly my parents’ children.  I have two theories on this.  First, my Mom had too many martinis with the guy across the street, or more realistically, I was the last combination of two exceedingly tired parents and thus received the dregs of genetic material.

I stick by the latter because, of all my family, I seem to have inherited every genetically linked disease that ever poked its nasty little head into my family tree.  The difficult part of accepting this is that each separate disease does not live comfortably with the others.  As a rheumatoid arthritic, my joints are in a constant state of destruction and I must take drugs to counteract that destruction.  These drugs suck the calcium from my system and thus aggravate my inherited tendency towards osteoporosis.  Large amounts of calcium supplements aggravate my kidney’s inherited tendency towards kidney stones.  Many episodes of passing these stones (and if you have never experienced that, you will never know what it feels like to be drawn and quartered, disemboweled, and burned at the stake!) necessitates the need for even more drugs that interfere with the properties of all the other drugs I must ingest.  Being a diabetic just complicates the issue even further. 

I spent a few days this week being evaluated for joint replacement.  It is a remarkable experience having several therapists bend you, poke you, stretch you, and throw 30 pound medicine balls at you and have several doctors stand by to ask you “How much did that hurt?  On a scale of 1 to 10?”  Mmmmmm.  I thought of several answers my mother would be shocked to hear.  In the end, the evaluation was that I was in desperate need of joint replacement.  After another few hours of having the procedures explained to me by the physicians and a few hours spent with a psychologist to ascertain whether or not I fully understood what was going to happen and how I felt about it, I settled into my 2 hour drive home with only one clear thought—“Yeah.  Right.”

I am a fairly eclectic reader, but truly enjoy science fiction and am thrilled to pieces that this genre has become so popular in media during the last few decades.  Many books and movies were written and made in the ‘pulp fiction’ days of the 1930’s through the 60’s although all were considered lowbrow.  Even the original Star Trek, which lasted only 3 seasons, was considered unsophisticated and popular with only a few fanatics.  Then came Star Wars—a big screen, big money, action-packed, sci-fi adventure comic book that took the world into the joys of a visually real future.  From there, science fiction became the ‘in thing’ and has been able to hold its head up high through the continual production of high quality motion pictures (the Star Trek movies, the Star Wars movies, the Terminator movies) and novels that not only have been on the best selling lists, but have stayed there.  (Douglas Adam’s Hitchhiker series, Michael Crichton’s JurassicPark, Carl Sagan’s Contact).

I have a theory about this, too.  My grandmother, born in 1898, used to brag that she was born when the horse and buggy was the norm and lived to see a man walk on the moon.  Since I have been born…wow!  How do you explain the tremendous leaps and bounds in technology in the last 40 years?  When I was a kid we had portable record players and neat little cases for our 45’s.  Today, I pop an almost indestructible plastic disc into a device attached to my belt to listen to music so clear and defined it is as if I was listening to it live.  Computers, the internet, the space station, GPS devices, smart cars, microwaves, robotics, the list goes on.  The interesting thing is, is that most of today’s technological wizardry had already been invented in the minds of the early sci-fi writers. 

So, as I contemplate the amazing advances in science and, more particularly, the advances in medicine (they want to saw away a major part of my skeletal structure and replace it with a metal facsimile!), I am drawn to my lessons in science fiction.  I am fully cognizant of how lucky I am to be able to benefit from the major advances already made—the thought of being a bedridden arthritic in the 1800’s, addicted to and eventually dying from overdoses of morphine is hard to contemplate—but my inner ‘scared silly because they want to do this for my own good’ reaction is definitely rearing its terrified head.  What I really want is to have Dr. McCoy strap his device on my joint and non-invasively heal me.  I want Dr. Beverly Crusher to tap into my obviously warped DNA and with a twitch of a button take away all the nasties.  I even, in a perverse sort of way, want Data to tell me how lucky I am to be biological.  I don’t think that technology is too far around the corner do you?  I think I’ll wait.

I recently read Ram Charan’s Know-How:  The 8 Skills That Separate People Who Perform From Those Who Don’t, and although I am a total non-aficionado of business books in general, I found this one quite illuminating for many reasons.  While it was very much directed towards high-level executives in charge of large, multi-faceted organizations, much of its information is adaptable to small, individually owned businesses, and interestingly enough, adaptable to facets of individual lives outside of the business mentality.  Its points are clear common sense and provide pretty specific guidelines on how to live a life, not just run a business. 

Charan’s precept in Know-How is to build leaders, specifically leaders of business who will successfully enhance the economic quality of capitalism and thereby enhance the quality of life for everybody.  As America is presently struggling to keep from drowning in the domino effects of a falling housing market, it is easy to see that exceptional leaders are needed to maintain economic stability through successful, growing businesses that keep the dollar cycling through society. 

It was through my eventual understanding of what Charan was trying to teach, that I was more than a little perceptive of John Dickerson’s recent article in Slate, “All the President’s Flunkies” (August 27, 2007).  The article, as suggested by the title, covers Dickerson’s analysis of why President Bush seems to be losing his top-level aides.  Charan fresh in mind, I began to correlate the 8 Skills of Know-How to our President—supposedly the Leader of our country.  If one takes Charan’s wisdom to heart—and I do, for as in all of his books, it is broken down to basic common sense—one can totally fathom Dickerson’s thesis and recognize not only the practical value of the know-hows, but that Mr. Bush needs a hard lesson in nearly all of them.

Although Charan’s know-hows are all interrelated (each skill is a necessary ingredient to the mastery of all), his know-hows regarding people skills and social systems are the ones that come to mind.  Charan states “Leaders often avoid conflict, hoping that a problem with one of their direct reports’ behavior will somehow resolve itself…The hard truth is that if you want to mold a team of leaders you must have the inner courage when an individual’s behavior is destroying the team to confront that person head on and say it isn’t acceptable and has to change.” 

Dickerson counters this sage advice with, “As a broader management practice, though, Bush has made a fetish of loyalty even when unaccompanied by ability.”

Dickerson goes on to say, “Bush also feels the essence of virtue is resisting any public outcry.  He does this for public as well as internal purposes.  ‘A president has got to be the calcium in the backbone,’ Bush told author Bob Woodward.  ‘If I weaken, the whole team weakens.  If I’m doubtful, I can assure you there will be a lot of doubt.’” 

Charan goes into great detail on the necessary psychological attributes of a great leader as well as the consequences of allowing the “dark side” of these attributes—over-confidence, narcissism, abuse of power, close-mindedness, or avoidance of reality—to cloud judgment or influence decision making.  His 8 know-hows are like a progressive gym where one moves from one piece of equipment to another in order to strengthen individual parts of the body in order to strengthen the whole towards a healthy, robust body.  It is not done in a single session and requires conscientious, consistent effort.

In looking at the political landscape against that of business, it makes me wonder how the concepts of team building, positioning, priorities, success, and leadership can be so different between the two. 

The Da Vinci Code written by Dan Brown created so much talk that will leave one wondering what is in the book to merit such attention. Classified as mystery/detective novel, it touches sensitive topics like the Holy Grail legend, Mary Magdalene and her relationship with Jesus Christ, and Christianity as a whole. The novel was a hit in 2004 and said to have been translated into 44 languages, 60.5 million copies in print as of May 2006. Despite the sales, there are still many people who question the validity of what was written by Mr. Brown. In fact there are books that help crack The Da Vinci Code, books that aim to help readers separate facts from fiction. Now, 3 years after, the book continues to sell and  still is a good topic for debate. Nice work, Mr. Brown!

Traditionally, a book club is a group of readers who convene together to discuss a particular book of common interest. These groups personally meet once or twice a month in libraries, private home, bookstores, cafes or park or any agreed convenient venue to exchange views about a book and get involve in a lively discussion.

A book club is also a way of selling and publishing books where a member may be required to purchase a certain number of books in a year to fulfill his obligation as a member; others operate in agreement with the members to receive books by mail and pay for them COD (cash-on-delivery).

The rise of the internet paved the way to online book clubs where members get notified electronically via email, participate in online discussion forums and even receive books in electronic format (the e-books) — simply put, everything is done virtually. I’m not saying that gone are the traditional book clubs because they still do exist and most book reviewers are still in to traditional book clubs. However, web 2.0 made book clubs available anytime, anywhere to anyone who loves reading making it more convenient to everyone. It eliminates the obligation to attend a scheduled discussion meeting or forum. Everyone can meet and discuss in virtual libraries, online discussion forums, email exchanges or even through blogs any time they want; all they need is a computer and an internet access and they’re ready to go.

But then,  book clubs in the virtual world deprive their members of the opportunity to experience the personal touch of discussing face-to-face with other readers.  Let’s face it, any opinion or views are laid down with more conviction when done personally through verbal communication thus making the discussion livelier. On the other hand, discussion forums held virtually gives everyone the opportunity to express their own opinion in the most conservative or liberal way they want.

I was “forced” to read The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne during my school days. I like the story and the way it was presented though the topic was beyond my years that time - adultery. It touches, however, one topic that never ceases to capture anyone’s attention – love! Hester, the main character, endures to wear the red letter A in her clothing to remind everyone of her sin. But is it really a sin to fall in love? Some would say it depends on the person whom you fall in love with. Others would argue that it is alright to fall in love even with the “wrong person” and be hurt than not to experience how to love and be loved at all. My two cents on the matter? Only the society dictates what’s right and what’s wrong. The society, however, has no heart so it doesn’t know how to love and how to be hurt. It’s a happy thing to love and be loved no matter how long or short a time you spent together; needless to say no matter who you choose to love.