What gets you into the consideration set?
I am a big fan of Tom Stewart. Tom is the Chief Marketing and Knowledge Officer (CMKO) of Booz and Company and the author of “The Wealth of Knowledge: Intellectual Capital and the Twenty-first Organization” and “Intellectual Capital: The New Wealth of Organizations”.
Forbes.com posted a short interview (below) with Tom in October about the impact of digital tools on marketing professional services. There are a couple great exchanges that I pulled out. The first is about why Booz and Company takes a thought leadership approach to marketing.
Tom suggests that they start with the question “What gets you into the consideration set?” He goes on to explain that “The primary role we try to play with thought leadership is to provoke the phone call, which, ultimately, provokes the deal.”
Booz and Company has made substantial investments in building a “mini-media empire,” including strategy+business magazine and several books. Clearly, thought leadership-based marketing is a proven way to get into more “consideration sets” than you would by relying on relationship-based marketing alone.
The second thing I wanted to flag in Tom’s video is his view on the evolving nature of content. Stewart contends that most of our focus on the impact of new social and digital tools is on the fact that they open up new channels for reaching broader audiences. Stewart thinks we should be asking what new forms of thought leadership content digital tools will enable .
“It is clear that you see both with the web and with social media new ways of attracting people to click on something that downloads a file that was, nevertheless, still created in Word. So it may be delivered digitally, but it was still created in Word. What we’re only at the beginning of seeing is what you might call multimedia native or digitally native content.”
I hope you enjoy the video. I’d also recommend reading this interview with The Bloom Group.
P.S. Hat tip to Susan Strom of Knowledge Architecture for finding this video.
P.P.S. I found out about this video because Susan posted it on our intranet, a good example of Level 5 of our Intranet Maturity Model, which suggests that social intranets can become farm leagues for external communications.
For more information about Booz & Co.’s approach to thought leadership, check out the case study in Maureen Broderick’s excellent book, “The Art of Managing Professional Services.”
http://nextmoon.posterous.com/bookshelf-review-the-art-of-managing-professi
Chris, thanks for sharing this post. It’s great to hear how other folks related to the AEC industry are managing this ever-changing landscape of sharing information and knowledge internally among staff, as well as externally with current and future clients.
After doing a little research on Booz’s background, I’m very impressed with their solid approach of creating thought leaders within their organization.
At a recent SharePoint Saturday event here in Richmond, I attended a session led by Booz Allen’s Lead SharePoint Solutions Manager and Architect, Dan Usher. It was fantastic to hear how their intranet (called “Hello” ironically) fosters much of their ability is easily share knowledge and information within the company.
Just another reminder of why an intranet should be one of a company’s most valuable resources.
Again, great post. Thanks for sharing. Wouldn’t have seen the video otherwise.