According to a LinkedIn study reported in their Sophisticated Marketer’s Guide to Thought Leadership eBook, 88% of IT buyers said that thought leadership was important or critical in determining their short list of vendors. And, if they did this study with other industries, I’m sure they’d find very similar results.
So, why aren’t business, sales, and marketing leaders focused on providing specific thought leadership content that’s relevant to extremely targeted, specific audience? Why are we going for reach and pushing out content (in many cases other people’s content) just to get the like, share, comment and exposure?
Why aren’t we challenging the common social media best practice that the majority of the content you share should not be your own and challenge experts like David Meerman Scott (best-selling author with more than 250,000 books sold worldwide, keynote sales and marketing speaker) who believes that only 10% of the content you share in social media circles should be your own? Why aren’t we challenging Wayne Breitbarth (author of The Power Formula for LinkedIn Success) who believes that for every 10 updates, 6 should be for content you didn’t create?
These best practices automatically put you as a resource rather than an expert who’s putting his or her thoughts out there on a regular basis. LinkedIn gives you the opportunity to go directly to key decision-makers and communicate to them your business value, which should be demonstrated through your thought leadership content. Your business value shouldn’t be that you can curate content that would be relevant to them!
Don’t get me wrong. I love resources–and I’ll connect with someone that can be resourceful to me. But I’m not going to invest in a resource.
The 2nd reason why you are thought of as a resource: You’re simply giving reminders
Viveka von Rosen, author of LinkedIn Marketing in an Hour a Day (and one of the most well-known LinkedIn marketing consultants) talks about how to customize your invitations on LinkedIn. Melonie Dodaro, a contributor to LinkedIn Sales Solutions blog (and the best-selling author of The LinkedIn Code) shares on the LinkedIn publishing platform the “7 messages that you should not send on…
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