To be seen as the ‘go to’ per­son for your industry, you build cred­ib­il­ity as the thought leader, but how do you earn this grand status?

If you can por­tray a mes­sage to your mar­ket­place with a level of author­ity, where you inform, inter­act and advise this helps to por­tray a per­cep­tion in the minds of the receiver and the long term goal of becom­ing the mar­ket leader.

Here is the magic formula:

Level of trust + cap­ab­il­ity to ful­fill what you say = com­munity accept­ance and advocacy

When a mar­ket­place trusts an organ­isa­tion and is sup­por­ted by an ongo­ing dia­logue as high­lighted in other posts (such as reg­u­lar news­let­ters and tar­geted dir­ect mar­ket­ing), this helps to define your place within your area of expertise.

Only today, has the inform­a­tion about the iPhone 5 star­ted to build momentum for an autumn release. This show­cases the power of Apple, in terms of when any inform­a­tion is leaked about a product, we all sit up and listen.

To be the thought leader, you bring all your com­mu­nic­a­tion tools together to spread your mes­sage in a vari­ety of ways, namely the use of blogs to get your view across, the social media chan­nels to tease and invite, the rela­tion­ships with the press to inform (not self con­grat­u­late), to lov­ing your imme­di­ate customers/​community by treat­ing as the VIPs with a small num­ber of prin­ted reg­u­lar newsletters/​magazines (not a ‘down­load­able pdf’ or page on Mailchimp).

The suc­cess to being a thought leader is to cut a cake in half. The first half is to have a multi chan­nel approach and the second half is when you engage with your audi­ence, it is a two way com­mu­nic­a­tion where added value is key. What this leaves is a cake that people will go for time and time again, no mat­ter how much icing is on the others.