On Attribution in Thought Leadership…

I’ve been thinking about the ineffable concept of “thought leadership.” This is the idea that, “you should hire us because we are smart, and here is proof” or “I am going to stay top-of-mind for you, because I keep producing content that proves I’m smart.”

How do you handle the attribution of this content?

I’ve never quite understood to how to manage the perceptional balance between (1) the individual writing the content, and (2) the organization that employs that individual.

Whose “voice” should this content be created in?

When I worked (co-owned) Blend Interactive, I would write in my own voice. There were only three of us at the beginning, so the line between the individuals and the company was blurry.

When I went to work at Optimizely, I found myself weirdly paranoid about voice. I didn’t want to write “for” the company, because I didn’t want the company to be held accountable for my opinions. I didn’t want to speak for other thousand people that worked there, and that deeply affected my content production.

(True story: I required the web developers to move the author picture and byline to the top of the the content, rather than the bottom. I wanted the reader to know at the outset that it was being written by a human, not Opti in aggregate.)

I think the company shared this attribution concern. What if I wrote something stupid or offensive? And, perhaps even worse, what if I implied that I didn’t know the answer to something? What if I wrote something… exploratory? Companies don’t want to be associated with… discovery. They want to act (pretend?) like they know the answer to everything. They don’t EXPLORE, they PROVIDE.

I’m wondering if the key to effective thought leadership comes down to managing attribution. Maybe we should give employees the chance to produce content – even vague, exploratory content – and publish it in a way where it’s associated with the organization, but not necessarily presented as an official position of the organization?

This will require us to re-think the exact value of thought leadership. Are we trying to say, “We have the answer to everything!,” or are we trying to say, “We have smart people who think very deeply about their industry and are constantly questioning and learning.”

I like the latter. It feels honest to me. But that’s tough for Marketing to swallow, I think. So long as competitors posture and pretend, thought leadership becomes this never-ending arms race of BS.

For the record, I don’t the answer to everything. I ask a lot questions, and I have a lot of experience, and I think really hard about this stuff, but it’s complicated and not always predictable, and drawing universal absolutes is probably silly.

How can I represent that position without negative blowback on the organization I work for? What channel or presentation correctly implies, “This is Deane, not necessarily Valtech, but if you like what Deane says here, then you can hire Valtech…”?

I’m still trying to figure that out.