How do you decide whom you’ll pay attention to when you want to learn about topics that matter to you, in your business or for work reasons? Why is it that you’re happy to favour some sources ahead of others? And more to the point, what can you learn from the thought leaders you chose to rely upon?

If you’re in a role where you need to influence others, you’ll need more than good arguments delivered with conviction and a winning smile to win hearts and minds. You also need to be trusted.

As the American author, pastor, and writer of many books on leadership, John C. Maxwell put it so succinctly many years ago: “Leadership is influence.”

And the upshot is, if you want to be thought of as a go-to source on any subject, you need to pay attention to your reputation. You need to give your audiences reasons to count on you. And these days, and although it’s hugely important, it can be folly to merely count on offline presence to encourage others to place their confidence in you, your knowledge, and your ideas.

Increasingly, you need to focus on your digital footprint – since that’s where conversations commonly begin when audiences first seek information on topics you’d like them to consider.

And with that in mind, and much of this interview will build on a recent post about the power of niche speaking, I’m delighted to welcome SEO expert and Director of Inbound Marketing at Kemp Technologies, David Quaid. In today’s conversation we take a detailed look under the bonnet at thought leadership – including strategies that can help you to be found, heeded, and highly regarded online when it comes to your chosen topics.

The Inside Track for Speakers on Thought Leadership

Listen in as we discuss:

• What it takes to build sufficient authority to be become a thought leader
• How to cut thought the clutter and noise online to be known as a ‘go to source’ for given topics
• Why deeper, and even methodical, thinking boosts the value associated with what you share
• Reasons why the word ‘consistency’ should be a priority for you as you build your reputation
• How come having a presence in many social media channels is not enough to build a great platform for your messages
• The myth of viral content that happens by chance
• Something you should value and crave ahead of a boat load of impressions
• Why you must keep things fresh as you pay attention to frequency
• The power of paying it forward and what audiences really care about
• Why public speaking should be an essential strategy for thought leaders
• And more

Over to You

What thought leaders do you rate highly, for any topics of your choosing? Why?

What influences you when deciding whose material you’ll consume vs ignore?

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Interview Transcript

Eamonn O’Brien:
Today we’re talking about thought leadership and what it really takes to connect or to marry all the things that you might do offline with what you’re doing online. We have a fantastic speaker today, a guest at, on the other side of the country at Limerick. It is David Quaid.

David Quaid
Hi Eamonn, how are you?

Eamonn:
Great. How are things in my tribe land over in Limerick?

David:
Good, it’s getting colder. But it’s dry.

Eamonn
Good. Well David you’re formerly the founder and director of SEO, a primary position and expert on SEO in general. And you’re currently now the Director of Inbound Marketing at Kemp Technologies. So, if anybody knows about being found online, it’s you.

David:
Hopefully so.

Eamonn:
Yes. Tell me when it comes to people that you perceive to be thought leaders in their space, where do you think that authority comes from?

David:
Nowadays it’s certainly coming from how mid-tier leaders are sharing other people’s thoughts. It can be difficult to enter a particular group of expertise and simply think out of the box because a lot of people will knee-jerk against that. It depends on where you are. If there is a lot of analytical data, that can show up. That’s why it’s become such a big phenomenon online where instead of having a tiny number of thought leaders, say somebody who’s elected or somebody who’s CEO of a very big corporation, you can now have a very small business leader who can show vast amounts of data. Because everything online, for example, is trackable. And so marrying that big data with an opinion helps a lot.

Eamonn:
Yes. Well you know I deal, of course, with a lot of professional speakers as well as people who want to be known as expert speakers in general. And one of the issues is that when you’re in front of an audience they can see you they can hear you. The credibility, the confidence in what you’re saying is terrific. But of course, when you’re dealing with online situations you’ve got a major league problem, which is there’s so much noise out there. Tell me a little bit about your thoughts or your ideas about what it takes if you like to cultivate online presence and credibility as the go to source on something.

David:
I think the starting point is you’ve got to note what you’re doing. I think as well you’ve got to make sure that you’re not a fast follower. There are a lot of people that come in as fast followers and they don’t realize other people are talking up so that really requires getting a sense of depth across that industry. It might be easier to be a thought leader in Ireland but outside of Ireland, in a country like America and the UK, a thought leadership tends to wane. It’s probably going to be very very methodical but also very very repetitive in what you do. You take, for example, Seth Urban who talks a lot about marketing and he’s certainly a thought leader in marketing both offline and online. He’s a well-respected speaker. I think he charges in the tens of thousands of dollars per hour. He really just has one subject that he talks about and he just has a different play on it. So he does his blog post every week or every couple of weeks. And he’s just taking the one thing he’s an expert at and just looking at it, and just looking at it from different angles and different points of view. And his case is normally quite compelling.

Eamonn:
Tell me, is that then really all about consistency and, if you like, building kudos in a particular arena? You’re talking about America for example or you’re talking about Britain so Ireland would be a relatively small pond. So maybe we don’t have as many people who are as visible online. But in a very crowded space like America, where you have any number of people who would claim to have a real expertise in marketing. He absolutely is fighting above, if you like, the general wage. So what is it that he’s doing that is different from maybe what others are doing who don’t get noticed?

David:
Thank you for giving me the word. Consistency here is a grasping point. Most thought leaders redefine things. So if I wanted to disrupt a SEO I would come in an offer an entirely new definition of the word SEO that looked at where SEO is going in two years, and brought that definition to now. And I think that’s what Seth has done so well, he’s redefining everything about marketing. One of the things I’ve taken away most from him is that marketing really before was advertising. And now marketing has become so much more. So going viral, getting shared on social media where you don’t have to pay, that’s marketing. The risk was just advertising management. The second thing is he’s actually been able to put it into practice. He’s able to use his social media platform, his writing ability, to write books that have become best sellers. I think he has eight or nine books, if I’m not mistaken.

Eamonn:
Yeah and he started off with permission marketing, I think it might have been at the outset. And you used an interesting word there. You were talking about the importance of platform and I think that’s probably the word that needs to be front and center for most people in creating online visibility. But if you had four or five or three or two tips that you would share with people on advice that you would give on creating better and more powerful platform, what would be front and center of thinking?

David:
Good Question. I think that a lot of people mistake channel and platform. A platform can be a channel. If you take a social media channel, or search engine channel their platforms, unless you built an audience on them, you’ve got a double-edged sword or a double challenge to undertake. And that is you can write good content or you can produce good content, but that’s not going to draw the masses. You have to understand the mechanism of how that gets out there. Most viral content is planned well in advance with very very huge expertise. I would be very surprised if Gangnam Style wasn’t thought about five months before it launched. I would be very surprised if there wasn’t a lot of money involved in pushing it. I suppose there’s that thing, “if it’s going viral, its going to go viral”.

Eamonn:
And interestingly, you have to say. Until this, you said at this very second, I had completely forgotten about Gangnam Style. Thank you for that.

David:
It’s looking at the way a lot of the platforms work. Twitter is the only platform that’s non-algorithmically driven. So if you post it on twitter, it gets a fair shot with your audience. When I look at people who are doing PR or want to get communications out there, there is still that expectation that if you publish it you’ve put it out there. You know, you’ve sent a tweet so you’ve publicized it. But of course, you may only have 50 followers and none of them may even be online or even real people. So you actually haven’t done a good job even if you have the best content in the world.

Eamonn:
Yeah I think that’s exactly right because the major league issue there is that there’s no real engagement. You can put a lot of noise out there but if nobody’s paying attention and you’re not entering into conversation, chances are that not much is going to happen with that.

David:
Definitely not. I think even we’ve borrowed many terms from print world, for example impressions. Impressions online is a fantastical unicorn number that has no meaning. I have a report that says, “In the last 90 days, we’ve had 52 million impressions”. While it looks good and I’m happy to email it around the company, I don’t think we’ve had anywhere near 52 million impressions.

Eamonn:
No. I don’t know if you know this about me but in the years gone by, I used to make a lot of commercials in America. Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of them. I used to do a lot of advertising in newspaper and I was always amused when I would get statistics about circulation and distribution numbers. And of course, the question was not how many people got it, but how many people read it and there was a big difference between one and the other. It really depended on the vehicle.

David:
Somebody was telling me the other day that if you’re a car marque and you’ve launched a new brand, and you want to get to a point where people recognize your new, your updated Audi A6 or Scoda Octavia. It takes 150 notices of the car and the ad before somebody realizes, “hey that’s the new Scoda.

Eamonn:
Wow. Well can I tell you something from back in the nineties that, at that time it was considered that you needed people to see a print advertisement seven times in national press in order to get people to react to it. And that typically requires 21 impressions in order for people to actually see it instead of flicking past whatever you were doing. So when you multiply that out, of course it’s not surprising that that online staff might be as far from the truth as you imagined when you think there’s now over a billion websites. Now of course a lot of these aren’t active but you know, blog posts alone two and a half million extra blog posts a day vying for views

David:
So there’s well over a trillion websites.

Eamonn:
Trillion? Oh, okay.

David:
The number is statistically crazy. I think the last I read was 24 trillion. Which

Eamonn:
Okay

David:
Has to be refreshed by google every 24 hours. Google was the largest search engine in 2000 when, I think it was 2001. It was the first search engine to index a billion websites.

Eamonn:
Yeah. Doesn’t that create a problem one day because, you know, regardless of whether it’s a trillion or it’s a billion, it’s an awfully big number. And the problem for anybody trying to create visibility is you can do, and maybe you comment on this, you can do a lot of things that actually can undermine your ability to get noticed and to start conversations. And if you were thinking about the things that you shouldn’t do, what would be on top of your nasty list?

David:
Coming back to impressions and being on top of my nasty list is, I suppose, if you know that number that you need 21 impressions to get that many people to read your ad. Well you can’t really tweet the same tweet 21 times over in the hope that you would get more people because you’d do the opposite, right?, you would be counterproductive. And I think that’s my number one pet peeve is people doing too much of the same thing and expecting a better result and it applies to search as much as it does to social media. If you’re not getting engagement, change the story. Do something different.

Eamonn:
So it’s a question of having a lot of variety?

David:
In search, definitely not. You should be consistent. Google is looking for thought leadership, it’s looking for… if I was an off license, and if I was a quality wine producer, I would want to talk about wines by the region, by the grape, very specifically. I almost wouldn’t want to mention spirits. If I was an off license, I would want to mention variety. That’s what I am going to play to, a wider broader audience, a couple of neat products but I am not going to really be known as a neat wine producer. And if I wanted to be, I’ll have to be there. I think far too many people try to get more traffic to a website by going off topic or too broad. And google is smart enough to catch up with that. The same with twitter if you want to be known as a thought leader, as an accountant or a consultant, if you go off topic too far people aren’t going to know what to do. And there has to be a balance, you can’t just talk about yourself all the time. There has to be some entertainment. But I think the repetitive stuff, you know, “why buy from me? Ten things you should know when hiring an expert like me”. These kinds of narcissistic posts.

Eamonn:
So few in wells beats many in shallows is what you’re saying
David:
Definitely, if you’re blogging five times a week and your traffic is stable, bring it back to one and put all of that effort into rewriting 100 times. And come up with something really good. Probably the best way to do it is not try and fix the world from your point of view, which many of us do. It’s a natural instinct. But look at your twitter stream. What are people asking all the time? What’s the problem that people raise? And say, you know, design it from you asked, I am answering.

Eamonn:
Yeah. So ask people the questions.

David:
Yeah definitely. Get them to write the blog post in terms of what they want to read about.
Eamonn:
And they will. I am going to tell you for example before I launch my book that one of the things I did, in fact you were one of the people who commented on it, was to put out examples of the kinds of covers that I produced and tell me what you think of this. And it started a good conversation, hugely informative. And people love to be involved

David:
I remember that. And of course, it creates an association with it. So if I pick the winning cover, its almost a part of me that I want your book to do well
Eamonn:
That’s it. And in fact, its part in parcel of how a more and more things are happening in commerce today, which is your audience, is more involved in the process. And that’s especially true in terms of what you’re doing online I guess. And I suppose if we were to round out our conversation and boil things down just in terms of one or two ideas that if somebody is looking to be known as an expert in a particular area or as a thought leader. If they did nothing else, what would be the one-two here is what you really ought to consider that you might share with people?

David:
Okay. I am going to borrow one from google and that’s go out and talk. Stand up in front of people and talk. So if its your local chamber of commerce and they’re having a networking event, you can find a way to get up and talk to people. Pay it forward, don’t go out there to show people that you’re an expert that’s why they should engage with you, but go there and give people something for free. Tell them look, if you do this you can fix that problem. And then you’re going to find a small percentage of that group, might be two percent, might be five percent, they don’t have the time or money to waste. They are just going to want to hire you to do it. And that’s the best advice I can give. Actually, go out and meet and talk and present, even if you start the local boy scouts club. And move up from there. Work your way up and that’s the number one thing I think people can do.
Eamonn:
Well there is no doubt about it, David. The truth is that if you are out speaking with people that you are getting undivided attention. And if you’re sharing something that is valuable as opposed to engaging in self-promotion, you will find people who will beat a path to your door. And incidentally event organizers love people to share something valuable because they’re in short supply.

David:
That’s true and people will tweet about you. And they will quote you on twitter. They would read your blog and it’s a real connection. They can look at you, they can get a sense of who you are, and it’s the best way to go out and do the best job online.

Eamonn
Well listen David. Thank you indeed for joining me this evening. I appreciate that. I know its getting late here so we’re going to leg it very shortly. Thank you for listening today and you have been listening to Eamonn O’Brien and this is the reluctant speakers club expert series and until the next time. Happy speaking.

Photo Credit: Christian Weidinger