Share Your Expertise Challenge™

This month Caver Public Relations has been celebrating our 5th Anniversary. During the month, we have been reflecting on our success and planning for the future. There is a lot to celebrate as it's been a pretty good five years of building foundation and developing relationships with our clients. As we focus toward the future, we are very excited about our business, our partnerships and our clients.

To celebrate, we are kicking off the inaugural Share Your Expertise Challenge™.  For the month of October, we have challenged ourselves, our clients and our partners to share expertise for building business. Over the last five years, we have been inspired by the thought leadership and expertise of our clients. Though we all know that sharing our knowledge and expertise is good for business, we often see that experts find it difficult to take the time or focus for outcomes. If you are already pretty good at sharing your expertise, we challenge you to pause, refresh and think about your thought leadership goals. It's a good time to make sure you are truly achieving your goals and that they are tied to business objectives. For those of us who are having a hard time getting started or developing consistency, we're asking you to take the month to implement a new habit.

• Tweet
• Blog 
• Write an expert article 
• Mentor 
• Donate your expertise to charity 
• Speak 
• Read and comment on an existing Blog

Here are 5 Tips for Getting Started:
Schedule time. Don't break the appointment with yourself, but also be realistic about the time you actually have to commit. 
Create a list. This is a list of expert topics you'd like to share and noted resources you'd like to reference or highlight. 
Pick Your Vehicle(s). What comes natural? Speaking? Writing? One-on-One?  
Set a Goal.  What do you want to accomplish from the challenge? What is personal success? What is business success? How does this fit into your other communications and thought leadership goals?
Spread the Word. Tell people what you are doing. Encourage others to join you in the quest.

It is only fair that if we ask you to take the challenge, we share with you our goals. My personal goal is to blog at least once a week. Provide a newcomers experience dialogue on Twitter from BlogWorld, October 15-17 and present a Social Communication Bootcamp for Executives seminar in late October.

Thanks for taking the Share Your Expertise Challenge. Please let us know how it is going and share your results!

What's New About You?

Recently on Twitter, I Retweeted @AlexGoodall with a quote from Thoreau, "How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live."

The Thoreau quote greatly exemplifies why I suggest you go through the initial three phases outlined in previous posts. You truly need to have developed an expertise and lead before you will be a successful thought leader. And in most cases, I find leaders have been so busy leading that the initial phases give clarity and insight to what you want to be known for and how you want to help others.

So far in our thought leadership preparation process, you have determined your commitment level or that of your company, you have taken time to do a real self evaluation of your assets and you have begun to develop or fine-tune your skills. Now we are ready to get down to thought leadership.

So, what's your platform? Generally when you develop a thought leadership platform, you are focusing on a niche area of which you can stand out. You need to determine exactly what you stand for and what you don't? Are you going to be preaching to the choir where leadership is all that is needed or are you going to have to evangelize for a while. Are you focused mostly B2B or are you consumer focused? We find it helpful to develop a thought leadership platform vision statement and checklist to provide ongoing focus.

Here are some questions that I discuss with my clients:

• Can you take a stand? What is it? What are the limits?
  
• What do you have to say that is different?
• How do you stand out from the competition?
• Who else is saying what you are saying?
• How much are you willing to share with others?
• Do you have an outside view to give you perspective?
• How will you continue to have fresh incite and stay a thought leaders?
  

Ultimately, why should anyone listen to you? What is the value you are adding? Are you making a statement that is new or are you just regurgitating thoughts of others? You may be an expert on a topic but you are not a leader in that topic until you can take the information that is out there and put it with the knowledge and experience you have to develop a path for others to follow that is new, foreshadows the future and teaches others.

Develop Your Fame

To this point, you have determined that you are committed to thought leadership for yourself or your company and you have done a thorough evaluation of your potential for success as a thought leader. To continue our series for preparing yourself for thought leadership, we come to step 3 - develop your fame.

Think of this as building your resume for thought leadership. Do you have the credentials and experience to be recognized as a thought leader or are you just another vendor who wants to speak at the breakfast. Here are essentials for developing your resume.

• What are your credentials for leadership on this topic?
• Who recognizes you as a leader?
• Are you already published?
• Where have you already spoken?
• What kind of training do you need?
• What kinds of tools do you need?

So, is your thought leadership resume full? Are you a regular writer and have spoken at the convention of your peers for each of the last three years? Or is your resume blank? If your resume is blank, this was probably identified in your evaluation stage. Now you need to get to work. Building this resume is what makes the difference between introducing the speaker and being the speaker.

Evaluation

Okay...you have determined that you are committed to thought leadership. So what's next?

We suggest evaluation is the next step. In this step, you are trying to determine if you are a leader or just have thought. Everyone has an opinion but that doesn't make them a thought leader. You may be an expert but not a thought leader - yes, there is a difference (referenced in earlier post). You may have great insight but no interest in sharing it with others (competitors), or you're just not ever going to write or speak in public. You may have such advanced thought that no one is ready to listen. Here are some questions to examine in the evaluation stage of thought-leadership preparation:

• What makes you a leader? In what subject(s)?
• What makes your thoughts provoking/different?
• Are you published?
• Are you a speaker?
• Do your peers listen to you?
• If you were a teacher, what would you teach the world (your audience) to do better?
• What do you like to do best?
• Have you been honored in this topic?

The evaluation step is so important to the success of a thought-leadership campaign that we suggest you go through it with an outside source - a pr consultant, a business coach, a trusted business peer. Because you are either likely to be too critical of your abilities or not entirely realistic to the value that you have to offer. An outside, honest point a view will help make this process a success.

Commitment

So you think thought leadership is right for your company or for your organization leadership? Now what do you do?

Well let's see just how committed you are and can be to the process. Here are a few questions to ask yourself:
• How much time and budget do you have to spend on thought leadership?
• What are your goals around thought leadership?
• What will constitute success?
• Who will manage and organize the process?

Evaluating commitment is key to preparing yourself for thought leadership. If you don't have the time and can't make time to write or speak or blog, then how much commitment do you have to this type of campaign. If you don't have budget or resources to travel for speaking engagements or have white papers written, then how much of a commitment can you make to thought leadership? And you must have goals to measure success. Does thought leadership need to elevate your presence in the industry? Is the process meant to generate leads? Is thought leadership a brand exercise?

Though simple questions, establishing your commitment level and goals will determine your success probability from the beginning before you waste time or money on developing a thought leadership campaign.

Thought Leadership

Are you a thought leader or an expert?

Some would say that the two are interchangeable. Many experts are thought leaders but thought leaders aren't always experts. A formal definition of thought leadership is helpful to start: A person, company or organization that is recognized among their peers, customers and constituents for innovative ideas, industry leadership and insight.

Thought leadership should drive agendas, engagement, business success and brand initiatives as a public relations strategy. Thought leaders take a stand, shape opinion and provide a voice above the crowd with a unique point of view.

In developing thought-leadership campaigns for our clients, we have developed a 5-step process to prepare yourself for thought leadership.
1. Commitment
2. Evaluation
3. Develop your Fame
4. What's new about You
5. Delivery focus

In most cases, we find that clients want to start with Step 5...Where can I speak? When can I start a blog? As with all communications strategies, thought leadership requires planning to be successful.