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MODULE SEVEN : TOPIC 2

HOW TO BUILD YOUR BRAND

Transcript

Thought
Leadership

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Thought Leadership

In the last topic, we talked about your brand as a reflection of your social capital.
Your social capital makes up your brand, and your brand invites more social
capital to flow back into your life.

When it comes to how people find and perceive you in today’s world -- which
we could also call your reputation -- one type of social capital plays an especially
huge role, and that is knowledge: the information, skills, insights, opinions and
perspectives that you possess.

When you take your knowledge, make it consumable, and share it with the world,
it becomes thought leadership. Thought leadership is really just a fancy word
for ideas that are expressed and shared deliberately with a wide audience.
When knowledge becomes thought leadership, it turns into even more valuable
social capital, and starts to shape your personal brand.

Thought leadership has always been important, but it’s absolutely critical in
the digital age. Now that Google is basically our portal to the world, and our
main tool for doing research on new people, search results have become our
modern resume: a snapshot of who we are, what we’ve done, and what we’re
known for. Fortunately, we now have more power than ever to determine what
shows up in those search results, since the means of publication are available
to everyone. With some deliberate care, we can actually determine our online
reputations. Our main tool is knowledge, shared online as thought leadership.

The best networkers are thought leaders in some shape or form. At some
point, they each decided to formalize their knowledge, turn it into something
consumable, and share it with a wider group of people. You won’t find someone
with a great brand who doesn’t have some way of sharing knowledge with an
audience, whether it’s a blog, a podcast or a weekly email. That’s how the best
branders amplify their social capital, and use it to build strong reputations in
their respective fields.

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Without thought leadership, we leave a huge amount of our personal brands

to chance, especially online. We allow other people to brand us with their
content, instead of branding ourselves with our own, and we give up valuable
real estate to people who take their branding more seriously than we do.
Thought leadership is the raw material, the content, of our digital reputations.
Without it, we either don’t exist online, or we exist on someone else’s terms.
So developing thought leadership isn’t just a luxury anymore. It’s a requirement.

In this topic, we’ll be exploring thought leadership as a powerful way

to establish, grow and solidify your brand.
We’ll focus on digital thought leadership, like blogging and podcasting, since
the internet is the main tool for knowledge-sharing these days. But the same
principles apply equally to analog thought leadership, like live speeches and
dinner-party conversations.

What we won’t be doing is teaching the super technical nuts and bolts of online
branding, like improving your Google ranking, upping your Klout score, SEOing
your blog posts, gaining Twitter followers or writing the perfect online bio.
Not that these topics aren’t important -- they are -- but they’re really just
symptoms of a great brand. They can enhance your reputation online, but they
don’t create a great personal brand by themselves. When it comes to those
technical questions, there’s an embarrassment of riches online to guide you,
and we highly recommend you check it out. Instead, we’ll be focusing specifically
on maximizing your social capital online -- without which your Google ranking,
Klout score, and social following wouldn’t be possible.

So let’s start by exploring the types of thought leadership available

to you.

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Thought leadership can be any kind of knowledge that gets expressed and
shared in a consumable form, like a

- Book
- Blog post
- Article
- Podcast
- Webinar
- Speech
- Ebook
- Infographic
- Newsletter
- Or even a department-wide email

Each of these types of thought leadership has two components: a format, and
an audience.

At the same time, every personal brand has two constituents: you, and the people
consuming your brand.

The people you want engaging with your brand are your target audience.

So which form of thought leadership should you choose to build

your brand?
In short, the one that best serves your natural communication style and the
audience you want to reach. It’s really as simple as that.

So if you gravitate to writing, enjoy developing your ideas over time, and want
to share your knowledge with someone in text, then a book would serve your
interests well. If you are more comfortable out loud and off the cuff, and you

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want to speak directly to your audience, then a podcast is a better fit.

An analytical writer covering the tech community might primarily blog and
author books, like journalist Kara Swisher does, while an outspoken stand-up
comic developing new material might primarily perform and podcast, like
comedian Bill Burr does. Both of these figures chose formats that reflect their
personal brands and get their social capital in front of the right audience.

In most cases, you’ll find that the best social capitalists have built their brands
around one main medium. They’re either authors or podcasts hosts, keynote
speakers or bloggers. Over time, they usually end up distributing their knowledge
across various platforms, but they generally dominate in one or two -- just
like we do at AOC, where we’ve built a great community around our podcast
and live residential program, which eventually grew into a blog and the course
you’re following now.

The next question is where to share your thought leadership.

This is important, because an audience isn’t just a who but a where. When people
engage with your brand, they engage with it in a specific place. Part of developing
your personal brand is deciding where to publicize it.

Usually, the format you choose implies a venue. Podcasts get distributed through
iTunes and podcast networks. Blog posts get distributed through search results
and other blogs. Newsletters get distributed through websites and mailing lists.

Ultimately, you want to go where your desired audience is.

A helpful guide is the three questions that branding expert Dorie Clark uses

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to decide where to build a brand. Once she identifies who the intended audience
is, she asks:

- What are they consuming?

- Where are they?
- And how do you reach them in that place?

The answers to those questions will tell you where and how to share your thought
leadership.

Vine and YouTube celebrities, for example, have this down pat: They know that
their audience is consuming short-form video, they know they’re primarily
consuming it on mobile devices, and they know that the best way to reach them
is by publishing funny, quick, engaging videos.

Alex, one of our AOC alumni, used the exact same framework to become an
influential thought leader at his management consulting firm.

Since he loved reading business blogs, and was using what he learned to deliver
better work for his clients, he one day decided to start sharing that knowledge
with an audience: his colleagues. He realized that they wanted strategy theory
applied to specific client situations, that they consumed information on their
laptops and iPhones, and that they preferred to read in the form of short emails.
Perfect. A week later, he send out a digest of the best insights he had read that
week, written in short, punchy paragraphs, delivered straight to their inboxes.
That email became a weekly series that developed his brand as a client-focused
strategy geek who empowered his colleagues and his firm. He started landing
promotions at his firm much more quickly, and later parlayed that brand into
a great gig doing in-house strategy for a Silicon Valley start-up.

In both of these examples, you can see how the brand, the format, the content
and the audience all line up perfectly. YouTube and good old-fashioned email

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aren’t just great platforms to distribute knowledge, but the answers to the important
question: How do I reach the people I want to reach in the right way? The platforms
and formats you use become the scaffolding, the architecture, of your personal
brand.

If you followed the principles from Module 3 about building a platform, then
you’ve already created a place to share your thought leadership, and you’re
already sharing your knowledge with an audience. That platform can shift and
evolve as your branding goals change. Some platforms, though, will be valuable
no matter what. A dinner party, for example, is an analog platform that will always
deepen your brand, because it will always serve your brand, format, content
and audience.

The bottom line here is to share your social capital where your audience is. At
the end of the day, you want to share your thought leadership in a place and in
a way that maximizes the value of your brand with the people you want to reach.

Now let’s turn to the substance of thought leadership.

What should your thought leadership actually be about?
In short: Whatever it is you want to be known for. The ideas, skills, experiences,
and insights that you want other people to associate with your name are the raw
material for your thought leadership. Here, taking an outside-in approach is
extremely helpful. Imagine what information you’d like people to know you
for, then work backward to create and publish that information.

Alex wanted to build a brand around his business knowledge, so his thought
leadership, which took the form of a weekly email, focused on finance and
strategy theory as it applied to specific clients. If he wanted to build a brand
around, say, kiteboarding, he would have spent his time writing blog posts for

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a kiteboarding magazine and posting kiteboarding stories on Medium. That

seems obvious, but it’s useful to call out: You publish the thought leadership
that advances the brand you want to build.

In the last topic, we talked about personal branding as a journey of

organic discovery and deliberate effort. The best thought leadership
reflects that journey.
Remember how important it is to embrace the role of student, especially early
on. Publishing blog posts as the student learning about a field is one of the best
ways to approach ideas and connect with other people at your level. As your
expertise grows, your thought leadership will grow, too.

Your blog posts will become bolder, more sophisticated, more prescriptive.
Your online bio will reflect your increasing authority. Maybe you’ll jump to a
new platform, like podcasting, that delivers your knowledge to even more
people. If your thought leadership reflects your brand at each step of the way,
it will naturally grow into a body of work -- collected online and indexed by
Google -- that will eventually make up a large part of your brand.

Now let’s talk specifically about how to get your thought leadership
started.
(Even if you’re already on your way to sharing knowledge, the following principles
will help you revisit your current strategy, or imagine how you can create new
thought leadership to change or broaden your existing brand.)

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The first step is a simple mental shift. Starting now, challenge

yourself to go from being a passive sharer of information to an
active sharer of information.
This is similar to the concept we discussed in Module 5, where we talked about
becoming an active rather than a passive consumer of information. If you can
identify the needs of the people around you, and actively fill them with value,
then you’ll create social capital wherever you go.

In the same way, if you start thinking of yourself as a reservoir of knowledge,

an open source of information, then you’ll start to turn the knowledge in your
head into knowledge for an audience, which is how it creates social capital.

Practically speaking, that means:

- Taking an extra moment when you learn something new to think about
how you can package and share it.
- Pushing yourself to form unique opinions and perspectives on the
information you learn, which is the stuff of great thought leadership.
- Sharing your information in small doses whenever possible, whether
it’s in a blog post, a Facebook status or a brief email.

Eventually, that mindset will get you into the habit of sharing knowledge, which
is the most important early step. Once you figure out how that knowledge
serves your brand, you’ll start turning it into thought leadership.

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The next step is something we covered in the previous topic:

turning your skills and interests into social capital, by sharing
knowledge in small doses.
You’ll remember that this was the intermediate step between organic and
deliberate brand-building. As you spontaneously discover the sphere you want
to build your brand around, you start testing that brand by sharing social capital
within that sphere. For example, if you know you love fixing old cars, you might
start leaving comments on vintage car blogs. If you know you’re passionate
about politics, you might start writing short opinion pieces on Facebook.

These aren’t full-blown “thought leadership” just yet, but they are forms of
knowledge shared with the world. How people respond to that knowledge --
and whether you actually enjoy sharing it -- will tell you whether it’s worth
turning into thought leadership.

If you really engage with this step (which, by the way, is one of the best-kept
secrets of networking and brand-building), then you’ll find yourself creating
thought leadership without even realizing it. You dip your toe into that pool,
you measure the response, and then you dip another toe in. Eventually, you’re
fully immersed in the world, sharing your knowledge formally, and building
a brand as a result.

Finally, continue to obsessively focus on creating value for your

audience which is really a continuation of everything we’ve been
talking about in the course up till now.
By sharing knowledge formally with your audience, you’re creating social capital.
As a result, you’re reaching new people and creating an emotional connection
with them -- which is how the best thought leadership pulls in the other two
types of social capital.

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If you think about your favorite bloggers, TV hosts and podcasters, they probably
weave together all three types of social capital at once. They introduce you to
new voices and faces, they share interesting ideas and information, and they
create an emotional bond between you and the creator. All of that social capital
is swirling around their thought leadership: knowledge they’ve chosen to
deliberately share with you. In the process, they’re creating social capital left
and right -- both in your life and in their lives -- and building their personal
brands in the process.

You can also see how thought leadership becomes a super powerful
technique for networking.
Because when you create a piece of thought leadership, you also create an excuse
to share it with the other people. Reaching out to someone new by email is
great, but reaching out to them because you have a great blog post to share is
so much more powerful. When you kick off a relationship with your knowledge,
you’re reaching out through your brand -- and sharing something of value
from the moment you two meet. Using your thought leadership to meet new
people is the best way to give before you to take, and start the relationship off
from a place of generosity.

Once you see how thought leadership makes your networking easier, you’ll
start to have a lot of fun with it.

For example, the next time you want to meet a high-profile writer or the CEO
of a company you admire, but you don’t quite know what to say or what to
offer, take a moment and imagine what sort of knowledge that person would
appreciate receiving. Then, create a piece of thought leadership -- say, a blog
post or a synopsis of industry trends -- and send it to that person with some
personalized thoughts on how it might be useful. Just like that, you’ve transformed
a rote networking move into a true exchange of value. Instead of the usual Hi, my

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name’s Jason, and I’d love to jump on the phone for a few minutes and get to know you,
you’re saying Hi, I’m Jason, and I just created something that I know will directly add
value to your life. Talk about leading with generosity. Talk about branding.

In this topic, we’ve zeroed in on one type of social capital -- knowledge

-- which is the most important material for brand-building.
We then explored how building your knowledge into thought leadership, and
combining it with people and emotional connection, will build your brand and
sophisticate your networking.

Because by creating thought leadership, we’re basically taking all three types
of social capital and sharing them in a consumable way with the world. In the
audience’s hands, that social capital expands. The result is a personal brand, a
reputation, built on the quality of that thought leadership, and amplified by
your people and emotional support.

The benefits to your social capital will start compounding immediately. When
people Google your name, they’ll piece together your reputation from the
thought leadership that shows up in search results. When you reach out to new
people, they’ll be more likely to respond. When readers and clients seek out
an expert in your field, it’s your name and ideas that will come up. And when
people have to decide whether to work with you, hire you or listen to you, it’s
your reputation that will inspire their confidence and trust.

That’s why you have to build a personal brand -- as a byproduct, as a tool, and
as a home for your social capital.

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