G'Day everyone.

It's Coach Michelle J Raymond, your trusted guide for building your

brand and your business on LinkedIn and listeners this week we've

got a bit of a different episode.

I've got one of my favorite guests of the show back again.

I'm pretty sure this is the third time lucky.

Because there are some topics that I think we need to get a little spicy

on and sometimes it's a bit of fun for me to do that with a friend.

Ashley Faus, welcome back to the show.

Thank you for having me.

You're one of my favorite people to do podcasts episodes with as well, so this

is, this is a treat for me as well.

We are going to be talking about all things thought leadership.

And if I have to quote something from one of my podcast episodes, the standout

quote for me every single time is "Ashley, what is thought leadership?

And your response is, well, Michelle, big hands have thoughts, be a leader.

And so I knew when we started there, that literally is my response when

somebody else asked me, what is the, your definition of thought leadership?

I can't get that out of my mind.

But today I wanna talk about something a little different.

We're going at thought leadership, not in the standard kind of way,

because that's been done to death.

We're gonna talk about are people creating in their brands the thought leader that

they actually need, or the one that everybody tells them that they should.

What do you have to say on this?

Well, I mean obviously you've asked me a leading question.

So I'm glad that the whole founder led brand is actually already starting to die.

Like I. I cannot, I'm actually hosting a debate inbound titled Why

Founder Led Brands Falter, and this idea that your executives, your

founders, people with a big fancy title are the best thought leaders.

The only thought leaders, the people, I think, is fundamentally wrong.

I'm not saying that those people can't be thought leaders, but the idea that

they should be or are the best or are automatically thought leaders just

based on their title is nonsense.

And like I have, I have zero words to mince about that opinion.

Oh, I can't stop laughing on this one 'cause I knew you were gonna go there.

And yes, I did set you up to smash that one out of the park, which you did.

What do you think is the thing that most B2B brands get wrong

about thought leadership?

I think there's a couple things, and I'll relate it back directly

to this founder or exec thing.

Um, let's first start with have thoughts, and I don't think that just saying

contrarian things or saying the opposite of the status quo automatically means

that you are having innovative thoughts.

However, when you are being innovative, when you are helping people think

and take action in a new direction, that tends to ruffle some feathers.

And so if you look at what founders, executives, a president, a CEO

generally are supposed to be doing, they're supposed to be ensuring that

everything is steady as she goes.

We're on a stable, predictable upward growth trajectory up into the right.

And so basically they, they never actually say anything controversial

or new because that's not what they're supposed to be doing.

They're supposed to assure customers that the product is stable and it's

gonna, you know, we're gonna stay in business or the services, we're gonna

continue to provide those services.

They're supposed to assure employees.

That, Hey, this is a great place to work.

You're doing good work.

Customers are happy.

You're gonna get paid.

They're supposed to if you've got investors or VCs, or you're

public, you've got shareholders.

They're supposed to ensure that everybody knows, Hey, you're gonna

get a good return on your investment.

Our stock is a good buy.

If you come outta left field and suddenly radically put forth this brand

new vision for something no one's ever heard of, nothing about that is stable.

Right?

So at minimum, it's very hard for them to have time to think about these radical

new things, let alone codify them.

And then even if they do manage to do that, they're generally discouraged

from talking about it because their whole goal is to be stable.

So that's just on the have thoughts part.

So I'll pause there before we even get to be a leader, because that's gonna be

a very spicy course for us to go down.

I actually, as you were talking, wanted to interrupt so badly 'cause I wanna

say, Ashley, please tell the audience that just having posts go out on LinkedIn

underneath your founder or CEO or some kind of high up execs account is not

thought leadership as defined by this.

And so for me, I often see that people wanna go, yes, let's go and just post

under that account and then tick that we are building thought leadership.

I love that you were saying that it's not that, but I'm gonna

let you go onto the second part.

Let's go to the leadership part because I think.

You are right.

There's an element, and you and I have spoken about this before, that leadership

requires having some kind of audience, and you can talk about how you define

that a little bit, but ultimately you have to inspire that audience on some level.

And for me, it's a two-way street.

Not just preaching at said audience, which again is often that the post

goes out on LinkedIn under the account.

That person is never to be seen.

They don't respond to comments.

They don't go and engage with other people's content.

It's just thou shalt listen to me and that is not thought leadership like

that drives me crazy and I don't know if it does more damage than good.

Where do you fall on that one?

I actually think the perfect type of content to demonstrate both the lack

of thoughts and lack of leadership is the company earnings update.

This is something, this is like a core responsibility for a CFO, a President, a

CEO, depending on the size of the company, a founder, somebody with a very big title

must give the quarterly earnings update.

Everybody recognizes that just because that's coming from a C-suite title, that

is in no way thought leadership, right?

It's news and that's fine and you gotta do it.

Um, but I, I feel like that's actually the perfect example to kind of

show the have thoughts be a leader.

Being a leader in a business and this is something that people get wrong, they

think that if you're good at your job, that automatically makes any content or

something that you post out into the world thought leadership, that's not the case.

You can be very good at your job and not be a thought leader.

You could put content out into the world that is not thought leadership

and that does not actually help you build an audience, right?

Like people are not following these huge company leader, you know, profiles

for the quarterly on earnings update.

Like that hits the headlines.

Or you can go to the company newsroom and get that right.

Like it's, it's so it's that I think is like the perfect type of content to show

the lack of thought leadership from.

You know, a C-Suite person or why just posting on LinkedIn without

engaging or without saying anything new doesn't mean that you're actually

building and engaging that audience.

Like you said, in fairness to these execs and the people at the

top of the food chain, they are kind of tied in a lot of ways.

Unless you are the founder and it's your business and it's probably in

startup mode and you can go crazy and build everything from scratch.

A lot of these B2B brands are legacy brands have been around for a long time.

They're established out in the marketplace and to just show up all

of a sudden, like you said, and throw things out of left field like that

is going to unnerve a lot of people.

But is there any other reasons that you think that these people may not be

best suited to be thought leaders and represent the business in that way?

I think the other big thing is actually the time component.

They don't actually have time to do, make a hypothesis, do the research on

it, test it, codify it in a way that somebody else can use, those people,

then test it, those people codify it.

Whatever they learn from it gets put back into the original hypothesis and

the original research and that iterative cycle like if you're talking about true

thought leadership, you are talking about putting new knowledge into the market.

You are talking about putting things out in a way that people

can actually learn from it, take action on it, do something new.

And most execs just do not have time for that kind of rigor.

And that's actually fine.

It's not their core skillset and it's not how they should be spending their time.

And I, I wanna be clear, like execs add a lot of value, both from a

communication standpoint, from a marketing standpoint, from a business standpoint.

They add a lot of value.

And I think people, this idea that thought leadership is, is quality

content or it's the only way to put value out into the world if you're

on LinkedIn or you are standing on a stage, like that is actually incorrect.

I have spicy opinions about what is thought leadership.

I also have some spicy opinions about the fact that thought leadership is not

the only way for people to add value.

I think that's the other big thing.

They just do not have time or the mandate to do the kind of research

testing, codifying, iterating, updating, and then obviously sharing that is

required for true thought leadership.

If I think about just trying to write normal, everyday content for myself in

my business, I've been writing content for around 10 years now, and doing it

for other people and businesses as well.

But if I look at my own, realistically, if I was to sit down and write just a

normal post, most of the time, that's half an hour to an hour for me, depending

how deep I want to go into things.

That's not even at the level of thought leadership, like you said, with all the

extra, additional research, you know, proving things that are working out,

coming up with something entirely new.

That's a whole other level in itself.

Like if I then take this to when I'm presenting on stages, trying

to come up with the next big idea that's taking me months.

And you know, I've noticed that by doing that and getting focused on doing that

as a small business, what happens is I drop the ball on lots of other things

that I should be doing to make it happen.

So I absolutely can relate to why it's not possible for people in these businesses

to make thought leadership happen.

This is not something that is for the faint of heart.

It is not something that is for everyone.

And that assumes that you've got a predisposition to actually

enjoying and wanting to be that you know there's nothing worse

than, oh, you are the leader.

You have to do this.

Like nobody wants to be forced to create content of any kind, let alone at that

thought leadership, which is like the elite status level of creating content.

But I don't wanna leave our listeners with the, well, they're the wrong person,

so ner ner ner ner ner kind of feeling.

Ashley, let's go into taking a look at where else can we find

people that might be suitable for thought leaders in the business?

How can we flip this around and really spot an opportunity that might be

in a place where people have been so focused on the CEO and execs and

overlooked a massive opportunity to find other people in the business?

I will frame this up in terms of my framework, which is the four

pillars of thought leadership.

So you and I have done, I think, two episodes on, on some of this,

but I'll, I'll give it as a framing.

So, uh, the pillars are credibility profile, being prolific, and

having strong depth of ideas.

We've talked in the past, I think, about kind of the different types of creators.

So thought leaders are strong across all four pillars.

Influencers tend to be strong in terms of having that really high audience.

They've got a decent amount of credibility, and they're usually

prolific in one channel, but they tend to be talking about

existing problems and solutions, so they're low on depth of ideas.

Subject matter experts are the perfect place for you to start looking internally

because they have very high credibility and they're actually usually pretty

strong on depth of ideas because they're entrenched in these problems.

These are your senior level practitioners.

A lot of times, particularly on the SaaS side, they sit in solution engineering

or customer success management.

They are so close to the problem space and they're constantly trying to

solve new iterations of the problem.

And so because of that, they're also pretty good at coming up with

new solutions and then looking at adjacent problem spaces and coming

up with new solutions for those.

Where they struggle is on that profile and prolific standpoint.

And so from a business standpoint.

They've got the credibility through their expertise and experience.

They've got the strong ideas, based on their proximity to

the problem and solution.

And so where you as a business can help them is by giving them space to

codify what they're seeing as they're solving those problems, which then

helps them be more prolific, and then you can help amplify their voice.

Giving them the space, putting them up to be the person who speaks to

press or putting them up for podcasts or conferences or pairing them with a

marketer or a writer who can help them create more content based on their

excellent source material that they can then use to build their profile.

And so that's a place where actually you've got this wealth of information.

With these senior level practitioners, you just need as a business to amplify

their voices and provide them support.

Again, don't try to force them to go out and be influencers if that's not what

they wanna be, or force them into that public eye if they don't wanna be there.

But that's a great place to start.

And obviously I have a bit of a luxury, I work for a very large

company, Atlassian, and we've got tens of thousands of employees.

So even if only 1% of those people are like, Hey, pick me,

I wanna be out there speaking.

You know, that gives us, what is it?

Let's call it a over a hundred people that we could choose to support.

So we have a almost an embarrassment of riches in that way, but

even for smaller businesses.

There is probably someone who's smart, capable, and willing.

They just aren't able right now.

And so that's where you as a business can help make space by either pairing them

with resources or giving them training and then giving them the opportunity.

I would say in my experience with trying to get help businesses get

their teams active on LinkedIn, calling for willing volunteers who are

open-minded and interested in becoming this, is probably the first stop.

Because I'm not convinced as much as those that are big proponents

of employee advocacy and they're cheering on that employee generated

content is the next best thing and it's all gonna take over the world.

Until you sit down in an actual company and find out who wants to post.

And in general, if you can find that 1%, I think you're doing pretty well.

Lucky for you, like you said, you've got tens of thousands of employees to pick

from in smaller businesses, you'll be struggling to find a willing participant

and not because people aren't capable.

That's a very different conversation.

I agree with you.

There are lots of capable people within businesses.

But whether they have that interest to put themselves out there for judgement

is what it feels like in their mind.

Like, why should I do this?

You are not paying me.

There's nothing in it for me.

My KPIs in my job don't say, go and do this stuff.

How can a business support people to kind of take that person from capable

into that next step of actually, okay, we're gonna do this together.

How can we help them make it happen?

So the call out about KPIs and it's not my job is not small,

that is not a small blocker.

And one thing I'll note, even from a super tactical perspective, right?

Um, someone's title, and I hear this a lot, especially on kind of

the comms or PR side of the house.

Oh, they reporters don't wanna talk to somebody without

this certain level of title.

And it's like, is this person doing that level of work?

Then change their title.

Right?

There's this concept on the engineering side of the house,

of a field CTO, or a field CIO.

And this is somebody who is not actually the CIO or CTO of the company, but

has that level of experience of either running a large org, they've maybe been

a CTO or a CIO previously and now their whole job is to go out and be the face

of, you know, the ideas or the process change or the research or whatever.

And they are an individual contributor.

They really don't have a team.

They're not managing an org anymore, but they have that title so that they have the

gravitas to actually be able to do this.

Um, so yeah, if, if all your KPIs, if this is an interruption to your day

job, you get no credit for doing it.

It doesn't go into your promotion pack to say, Hey, I'm, I'm ready to be a more

senior level leader because I'm out there being the face or advocating or helping

to shape the industry conversation.

If it's in no way acknowledged or celebrated internally, then like,

yeah, most people aren't gonna do it.

So there's an element of this where they're not wrong.

When they push back and say, this is nowhere in any priority

either for intrinsic or extrinsic motivation, like companies, you,

you have to offer some upside.

And for some people that is recognition for other people, particularly as

they grow more senior in their career.

This be the face thing is something that is considered to be a requirement.

So like.

Note that this is directly tied to your promotion as you get more senior

or do spot bonuses or make it a KPI.

Their KPIs are around content creation, sharing, speaking at conferences, being on

podcasts, posting on LinkedIn, et cetera.

So there is some of this where the person is not wrong.

Like companies you do have to figure out how to incentivize this and

how to make it less burdensome from a time and resources perspective.

Yeah, absolutely.

Otherwise, there's all risk and no upside for the person.

And it may not be that the upside's not there.

It may be that they can't see it because you haven't had

that conversation with them.

And in an employee's world, it feels like I'm putting my job

at risk, my career at risk.

What will my peers think of me?

What will our competitors, what will my leaders think?

The more I've done this business, the more I speak to people, the

more I have conversations and ask people, why aren't you posting?

The more I realize that this is one big scary place.

And when you are talking about, go and be a thought leader on LinkedIn,

where you're gonna put out original ideas which will get judged.

And I'm a bit of a sensitive petal not gonna lie, Ashley like feedback

for me sometimes cuts like a knife.

I am so precious some days that I drive myself crazy.

Lucky for me, I've got Lil in the background who is always there going,

it's okay Michelle it's just feedback.

It doesn't mean anything about you.

But again, I've been doing this for 10 years, you would

think I'd be used to it by now.

No, no, no.

All these other emotional things get stacked on top.

When I know I can write a post with my eyes closed, on any topic

pretty much, and make it work.

But I'm human and I think this is what I wanna bring into this conversation

today, is that you are working with real humans who are just, just human.

I, I think that's all I can say.

I, I wanted to go further with it, but I think we just need to

understand that people get scared.

That people, even if they want to do this, may still not do it.

But one of the things you were saying, how we can help them is by having a

resource that can actually help them with the being prolific side of this.

What are some practical tips you can recommend from that side of things?

There's a couple ways to approach this depending on how big your team is,

how big your budget is, et cetera.

To your point about humans, I will reiterate that none of the

things I'm about to say replace the original human, and you and I have

talked about this before, right?

In order for a ghost writer to work, they have to have someone to ghost.

You can have a ghost writer, not a ghost thinker, if someone think that

they're just gonna be like, Michelle's gonna write all my posts for me.

No, she's not.

What is she gonna talk about for me?

If Michelle's writing, if she's doing all the research and all the writing, and all

the publishing and all the responding.

Isn't, isn't Michelle the person who's doing every, like, aren't

they just hanging out with Michelle?

Which again, I think that's a great choice.

Like Michelle's super smart, but if you wanna hear from

Ashley, I have to show up.

So depending on the team, and the internal company culture.

There is a ton of really smart content ideas, knowledge, recommendations, et

cetera, hiding in Slack messages, in our case, in Confluence pages, if you're

in an office, it's on a whiteboard.

There's, it's covered in sticky notes, right?

Like all of this great content is actually stuck somewhere

that just needs to be let out.

And so whether you use AI to do that, whether you partner with a

ghost writer, um, I think step one is getting everything into a central

repository and that can be daunting.

So my book is coming out in a couple of weeks, right?

Everybody when I first started writing was like, you have so much source material,

just pull all of your LinkedIn posts in, and that's a book right there, right?

It is daunting to go track down everything you've ever said or

thought and dump it into a repository.

If you are a large company, this is a great way for, like, if you've got AI

or you've got something embedded in all your systems, put in some prompts

and say, go pull all of these pages.

Here's kind of the questions that we're trying to help someone answer,

pull in all of the knowledge that you have, and you'll probably start to

see certain names pop up frequently as like, all right, this is the expert.

Right?

I actually write a fair amount internally about LinkedIn and about,

you know, content and building your personal brand on LinkedIn.

So let's say if Atlassian suddenly decided we're gonna become the leaders

in how to post on LinkedIn, right?

The prompt for our.

You know, agent basically would be robo and you type it in and

you'd say, okay, robo, go find me.

The person who knows about this, my name would show up a lot.

Right?

So then at that point, it gives our comms team or our marketing team,

or if I'm the person writing it, it gives me something to start with.

I've had this question before of like budget of like, if you had unlimited

budget, what would you spend it on?

You know, a campaign or a Super Bowl ad?

I'm like, no.

I would pair one-to-one, a marketing generalist with a like smart, capable

person who wants to be a thought leader, but they're just not fluent

in the skill of creating, right?

So having somebody who can help with graphics, who can help with, um, writing,

who can help with videos, et cetera.

So if you are running very lean, what I would recommend is focusing

in on a couple of key pillar assets.

And from my perspective, I think it's easiest to do something with a

conference presentation because it gets you visuals, it gets you audio, it gets

you video and it gives you something like a transcript to start with.

If you wanna do long form articles, which you can then obviously repurpose

all of that into social media posts.

You can pull your slides out and turn them into carousels.

You can save your slides as images for posts.

Um, the big key there is you have to think about designing the entire talk

and the entire slide deck for long tail distribution, and this is where

someone that is a marketer or a comms professional like this is where we

shine because this is how we think.

So those are some opportunities, whether if you're a big company, you've got a

whole comms team and a marketing team and a graphics team, or if you're a lean team,

and you're running kind of on a shoestring budget with limited time and resources.

Those would be my tips.

Thank you for so many cool things.

'cause most content is hiding in plain sight.

The skill is discovering what's all around you already.

It's not necessarily even creating from scratch, which is the kind of cool thing.

But you mentioned something that I'm so proud of you and excited 'cause I

know the amount of work that you have done to get your book ready for launch.

Depending on the timing of this episode, it may already be out.

Of course, all of the details are gonna be in the show notes.

But anyone that's listening to this point in this podcast has loved

this conversation and I know is gonna love your book even more.

Can you give us a bit of an insight into how that's gonna help people

get more out of what they're doing?

Sure.

So the book is titled Human-Centered Marketing, How to Connect With

Audiences in The Age of AI.

So it goes back to the, there's humans in this.

They have their fears, they have their hopes, , they also have their

very smart thoughts that feed into having thoughts and being a leader.

Um, so the book does lay out a couple of different frameworks.

There's a whole set of chapters on the four pillars of thought leadership,

different types of B2B creators.

There's step-by-step instructions about how to find your ideas, how

to think about your personal brand.

I give very few tactical LinkedIn tips given that the algorithm

changes every two seconds.

And then there's two other frameworks.

One is this playground mindset shift, and there's some details

and tactics in there about how to really design an audience journey

that converts and builds that trust.

And then another framework, which I've talked about a little bit, but it's

less, uh, prominent in my own work, and that's the social media spectrum.

And it's how do you go beyond just communicating and broadcasting

information even beyond conversations?

I find that a lot of brands get stuck there and going into community, which is

something that I know you are excellent at and is core to a lot of your work.

The core thesis is really around building trust, rapport, and affinity.

If you can win hearts and minds, then you have a chance at winning the wallet, but

most companies have it backwards where they're just chasing the money and they

don't understand why they need to build trust and affinity and rapport and you

know, shocker that business impact doesn't come if you only focus on the money.

You might be on the sales side of LinkedIn and using it for that side of things.

You should go and read this anyway, because I think the crossover between

sales and marketing when it comes to social selling on platforms

like LinkedIn is they're pretty much the same thing these days.

I'm just gonna put it out there.

I don't think that there's.

This distinct line anymore?

And the more that we can work together, the better the results that we get.

So I wish you every success with your book launch.

Again, super proud of you.

Super pumped for you to get your ideas out in the world.

Listeners, all the details of this super cool book will be in the show notes.

Go and check it out.

Grab yourself a copy and if you grab one and read it and love it.

Don't forget to leave Ashley a recommendation or review.

These things really help authors, uh, speaking from experience.

Ashley, as always, has been everything I thought it would be.

Thanks for getting spicy on the podcast.

And will you come back again one other day.

Anytime, every time.

And one other sneak peek for the book.

Uh, Michelle is also featured in a couple of places in the book because, you know,

if we're gonna talk about human centered marketing, we gotta talk about Michelle.

The love goes back to her from an expertise standpoint as well.

This is my favorite part and I do hope that you're making an adventure back to

Sydney sometime in the near future so that we can have another one of those

big hugs and a walk by Bondi Beach.

So listeners, I hope you've enjoyed this episode as much as what I have.

Remember, have thoughts, be a leader.

Are you choosing the creator your brand actually needs?

Or are you just following what you think is popular and the expected choice?

'cause I promise you, if you take a look around and follow Ashley's advice,

you might actually have the right person hiding there in plain sight.

So until next week, cheers.