How to Become a Thought Leader in Your Industry

Do you aspire to influence your employees, your colleagues and perhaps even the nation or world at large? Then you need to be a thought leader or “key opinion leader”. As an owner or senior leader in your business, your position gives you a platform. This is not sufficient to actually become someone who is respected and capable of influencing others to act toward your perspective. Becoming a thought leader is not simple, but it is possible with a combination of your expertise, hard work and good content.

How will you know if you have become a thought leader? It is when you are recognized as an expert in your field, the go-to person for advice or information on a product, process, or concept. In effect, you will have created yourself as a brand; a person who is recognized and referred by your peers as the expert. Thus, you become capable of influencing the way they work.

My field is medicine. A physician thought leader has traditionally been one who is recognized as “the” expert in a certain field. He or she usually gained that recognition by years of hard work as a clinician and as a researcher. Perhaps he or she became a professor, wrote articles for highly regarded medical journals, presented data at local, national, and international meetings.

As his or her recognition developed, invitations would come to lecture at medical meetings and then even at large international gatherings. This in turn would lead to further avenues to influence others – perhaps an invitation to write a book chapter in a prestigious medical text or even to be the editor of such a text. As a general rule, in any specific field of medicine there are only a very few true thought leaders.

By following just that route beginning in 1969, I became a thought leader – one of 3 or 4 internationally – in preventing and treating infections in cancer patients. And when I moved on in a new career direction in 1985 I was quickly left behind, as new experts pushed their way in. By 1990, I was rarely asked to give a talk or write a book chapter on infections in cancer patients, requests that were so frequent just a few years earlier that I was often turning them down. So the path up was rigorous and the slope down was sharp once I was no longer active in the field.

But it need not take so long. Content and expertise are still the key elements. But it is possible to develop your “brand” more quickly, to be recognized sooner with today’s availability of blogs, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. You can get the word out to a large audience quickly and with proportionately less effort. But your content is still king. Poor content will be ignored. But you also need to be cognizant of how to tap into the mindset of the audience you are trying to influence.

Physicians are notoriously behind the curve in using social media. As a result they (we) are losing our chance to be as influential as we otherwise might be with the general public. We may influence other physicians but we have no clue how to approach others. The issue of vaccines is a good example. Vaccines have prevented untold millions of deaths and disfigurements from diseases like measles, polio, small pox, rotavirus and others. For sure there are some side effects, most manageable. But many people believe that they are dangerous and cause autism. Jenny McCarthy, a former Playboy playmate of the year and mother of a child with autism, used her platform as a celebrity to aggressively become a thought leader against the use of vaccines.

Physicians, those in the field who knew that the data suggesting a link was false, and who were thought leaders within medical circles, found themselves unable to counteract her because they had done nothing to develop themselves as thought leaders to the general public, especially concerned mothers. The message: understand your audience and develop messaging that is relevant and that connects.

The old way is changing. Who will be listened to in today’s digital and social media age? The person with great content who make themselves clearly visible. Today, you have a microphone without needing to work your way up the ladder to the podium of the national meeting. The new channels of social media invite new approaches to gaining status as a thought leader. If your expertise is strong and your thinking is solid, you can get it out to a vast audience and be heard. Here is what you need to do to become a thought leader.

• Look at your expertise. You can or should aspire to become a thought leader only in a field you know well. Your view of your industry is unique, informed by your own professional experience. Start there. Develop your expertise further with readings, etc. Keep it narrow; don’t try to be the expert on too wide a field. Be sure you are comfortable that you are indeed expert. You definitely do not want to be caught as an imposter.
• Attend meetings of your peers and business acquaintances and actively participate. Be heard and learn from critiques of your positions and statements.
• Decide on the audience you want to influence and adjust your messaging appropriately. Although the content may be fundamentally the same, your approach to experts in your field will be different than to customers.
• Now look for whatever venues might be useful. If it is a blog, post frequently. Same for Twitter, YouTube or Facebook. Whatever you use, keep it short and to the point.
• LinkedIn gives you a good way to reach out to others in your field without waiting for a regional or national meeting. You can leave comments there with links back to your blog, etc. and you can engage in conversations with others in your Groups.
• Be controversial if appropriate.  Accept criticism.
• You should be assertive, but remain humble.
• Remember that social media is just that – a two way interaction. So encourage comments of your content and respond appropriately. This will cement your reputation as a listener, not just a speaker.
• With some hard steady work and a bit of luck you will reach the goal.
• Remember that your audience is always changing, so it takes continued steady hard work to remain the thought leader.

1815 views