Many companies view thought leadership as an esoteric marketing idea requiring "high- brow" intellectuals who can evangelise path breaking new ideas. In reality, thought leadership programmes can be launched by re-purposing and re-energizing existing resources and tools. Here we discuss practical ideas that can be implemented by companies who wish to launch a thought leadership programme.

What a thought leadership programme does is to influence prospects and long term potentials that your company is best suited to be their IT vendor when it comes to your area of expertise. This it does by building credibility and reputation about your company's skills and capabilities - not through hyped up marketing documents, but though third party reinforcements and indirect messaging about your expertise.

But before we get into the tactics of setting up such a programme, why thought leadership? For one, it's a key differentiator - while you may not be saying something radically different from your nearest competitor, a structured thought leadership programme will ensure that your target audience - customers, prospects, industry analysts, investors - definitely get your message, loud and clear.

Secondly, it helps build a company's reputation and credibility, since a defined programme ensures re-inforcement from multiple sources, including some third party ones. After all, trust is built on reputation and reputation is built on what others say about you.

Thirdly, by positively impacting mindshare, thought leadership directly impacts lead generation, by influencing prospects at the very early stages of a decision cycle. By constantly reinforcing a relationship with its target community, it can also keep your company in top-of mind recall for a customer who is not yet prepared to make a decision.

Strategies and Tactics

Companies have deployed different strategies to stay ahead of the pack in the thought leadership game. The least opportunistic and therefore, the most high impact, have been through books. Thomas Friedman's The World is Flat, not only gave Infosys its tag line, but it made the company representative of a paradigm shift in the way business is done globally. In measurable value, such an association is priceless.

Since it is not every day that a Pulitzer prize winning columnist is going to write the "book of the year" based on a conversation with your CEO, companies have other ways of exploiting the excellence within their employees. Chicago-based Thought Works, an IT consulting firm plays up books written by both whom it calls "ThoughtWorkers" (current employees) and alumni on its web site. A quick scroll reveals that most books are technical - "Planning Extreme Programming", "UML Unlimited", to name a few - but for customers that's excellent reinforcement of the technical capabilities of the Thought Works team.

Traditional consulting companies have got the thought leadership programme down to a fine art - since clients hire/retain consulting firms based on the acuity of their perception and far-sightedness of the demonstrated vision, these firms use their thought leadership programmes to showcase the best knowledge generation the firm has to offer. The excellence of their programmes is directly linked to the effort and orchestration that goes into it - Accenture, for example, runs a Thought Leadership Community- which is really a group of Accenture's leading marketers who meet regularly via conference calls to discuss the thought leadership in development. Developed resources are made available through e-mail programmes that a visitor to the Accenture website can sign up for.

This underlines the key success factor for getting a good thought leadership programme off the ground - getting internal experts to share their knowledge and motivate them to contribute. Transforming good ideas and knowledge into readable articles and whitepapers is a challenge - and it is a very real issue for many companies - so, getting an external agency to ghost write pieces is one answer to this problem.

Another "trick" that most companies don't adopt is re-purposing content. Webinar transcripts, video recordings of group discussions where company leadership has participated, presentations made at industry for a/customer meets - these are excellent resources that can beef up the thought leadership content of your website and reinforce key messaging.

Case Studies can also be well re-purposed - across websites, customer/user community newsletters, - and with a little work can also provide the anchor for a newspaper/magazine article. The critical thing is to choose the right kind of case studies - from a choice of deployments - that lend themselves to being re-purposed.

Events are a natural vehicle to re-inforce the thought leadership messaging of a company. Events offer tools such as speaking opportunities, booths to display and distribute company information as well as advertising opportunities to reinforce key messages to what is effectively a captive audience. Companies who sign up for events - and many of these are fairly expensive - may think that by deputing a group of managers to attend, the job is done. Getting an event to work for you involves legwork - companies should get involved in setting the agenda (possible through sponsorships), getting managers to make compelling presentations and doing some creative networking. One idea for the last one - you could get plenty of footfalls into your booth by announcing a "fun" quiz on your company's products/solutions which wins an interesting prize. While this approach may be more expensive than a simple sign up for a bunch of delegates, it may be more worthwhile to go all the way at a few events instead of simply showing up at many.

Media and PR is an important thought leadership tool, but one that can be deployed without huge advertising budgets. Getting CEOs to write for magazines/newspapers is extremely effective and guarantees a good reach. Another alternative is to sponsor relevant research for a widely read trade journal. Placing executives on industry panels is also an excellent way to be in the news, while influencing audiences relevant to your company. The bonus here is that it enhances your company's credibility and therefore differentiates your messaging.

To sum up, here is a toolkit of ideas that could be used in a thought leadership programme: