Thought Leaders vs Company Bloggers

Now that businesses have all rushed to have Twitter and Facebook profiles and to maintain company blogs, has the onslaught of information made it actually more difficult to get your message heard?

Business strategy and information technology consultant Stowe Boyd wrote a blog post on Thursday entitled “Thought Leadership: Beyond Marketing” in which he suggests that the rise of social media might be making us immune to marketing. Boyd suggests that startups might benefit from rethinking how they position themselves online to land on the side of that signal-to-noise ratio so that they’re actually heard.

Boyd observes that “Even in a time of great noise, people are still looking for guidance: they still need to make informed decisions, and to take action on their own behalf or on behalf of their companies. To do so, they look more than ever to those individuals and organizations that they trust, those that have credibility and hard-won reputations.” In order to capitalize on this search for expertise, Boyd suggests that companies try to situate their online presence less in terms of marketing and more in terms of thought leadership.

Boyd says there are three obvious ways to do this: Hire a thought leader. Ally your company with innovative, leading-edge programs. And actively participate in the community discourse in your field, either through written publications or through speaking events.

But these might not be viable options for startups. Hiring a thought leader is likely to be cost-prohibitive. As Boyd notes, “A startup wondering how it can stand out in a crowded field may just punt, and go down the classic social media route: the CEO and/or marketing folks will blog on the company website, and hope that people read the posts; they pay to attend conferences, and hope that they can get a speaking slot; and they try to make the company and its various spokespeople seem to be highly regarded in the community. This is the path that all companies seem to head down, so it comes as no great surprise that it generally doesn’t lead to outstanding results.”

Boyd suggests some alternatives… Read them via Read, Write Web

Related articles

• Recommended read: Stowe Boyd – /Message – Thought Leadership: Beyond Marketing (fredzimny.wordpress.com)
• Finding Influencers – Part One (webmetricsguru.com)
• The CEO’s Role in Big Agency Digital Credibility (socialmediatoday.com)

Web 2.0 Expo Keynote with Chris Brogan

The most recent Web 2.0 Expo in the Javits Center in Manhattan was excellent. It was an event that was not to be missed if your company was willing to shell out the fees to attend. In a recession you would think the fees for these conferences could be cut down a bit, but that is just wishful thinking because it will probably never happen.

Anyway, the event I enjoyed most was Chris Brogan’s keynote speech. Chris did a great job of breaking down some the barriers that have been erected around Social Media topics to make them very straight-forward. I thought his philosophy in relation to social media advertising campaigns was very insightful, and his insights on Twitter were were exceptional. He proposed, listening and info sharing are more important than narcissistic tweets about one’s self or one’s brand. He proposed that your “re-tweet”(RT) to tweet’s of your own of your own ratio should be about 12 to 1. Ultimately, this quote, resonated with me the most: “…what is more sad than creating electric sheep.” In other words, genuine information sharing is much more important than updating people on every mundane moment of your day.

View the video (below) of his keynote for the specifics– it is defiantly worth the 10 minutes if you are interested in social media, online marketing or web 2.0.

Connectivism And Modern Literacy

In the 20th century literacy was simply the “ability to read and write”. The subset of skills necessary to be called literate has changed greatly and the definition has expanded to encompass the, ” …ability to identify, understand, interpret, create, communicate, compute and use printed and written materials associated with varying contexts. Literacy involves a continuum of learning in enabling individuals to achieve their goals, to develop their knowledge and potential, and to participate fully in their community and wider society.” (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) With the advent of the internet and social media students have been challenged to add new resources to their tool set to be prepared to be productive citizens in the information age. Modern literacy in the information age calls for lifetime learners with a set of skills that are constantly evolving and is permeated by dynamic, participatory media (social), and web-based tools that aid collaboration and information sharing.

In the book “Using Participatory Media and Public Voice to Encourage Civic Engagement,” Howard Rheingold wrote: “If print culture shaped the environment in which the Enlightenment blossomed and set the scene for the Industrial Revolution, participatory media might similarly shape the cognitive and social environments in which twenty first century life will take place (a shift in the way our culture operates). For this reason, participatory media literacy is not another subject to be shoehorned into the curriculum as job training for knowledge workers.

Participatory media include (but aren’t limited to) blogs, wikis, RSS, tagging and social bookmarking, music-photo-video sharing, mashups, podcasts, digital storytelling, virtual communities, social network services, virtual environments, and videoblogs.”

Modern youth multi-task more often, multi-task more effectively and have shorter attention spans than any up to this point in history. This student demands the use of rich multimedia learning environments and, project-based instruction that engages the student and challenges him to use dynamic web-based tools and participatory media. Terms like “Connectivism” and “Networked Learning” are now being used to describe the new processes that are emerging. Here is a excellent video that explains these new paradigms and what they mean for the 21st century classroom.

This is a key reason teaching must change to keep up with the new paradigms called for in the information age. The lecture-based educational model is obsolete and role of the teacher has morphed from the “sage on the stage” to the “guide by a students side”.

Related articles

• Let kids ‘Tweet’ in class, says expert (cbc.ca)
• The presence of a teacher (deangroom.wordpress.com)
• Hunger to learn (news.bbc.co.uk)
• Re:Reinventing Project Based Learning (deangroom.wordpress.com)
• The Future Is Now — 21st Century Teaching And Learning (slideshare.net)
• Why we need another great education debate (guardian.co.uk)
• Techno Literacy (slideshare.net)
• Literacy -> Digital Flow: moving beyond Traditional Literacy. (dougbelshaw.com)
• Mrs. Cassidy’s Classroom: Media Literate 6-year-olds (wired.com)