Time and again, I see companies relying on their marketing departments to develop and disseminate what they think is thought leadership. And marketers think they are doing a great job because they are so good at disseminating the stuff. They put those case studies out there on the web site, push them out through PR channels and reuse them in all sorts of different forms, from podcasts to videos to conference presentations.

The dissemination is great. But what we need is more focus on the content generation. Of course, not all of this is under marketing’s control. I’m sure many of you have pleaded with your businesses to offer up content and they haven’t stepped up. But you have to try harder. Thought leadership should be managed by marketing, but it can’t be sourced from marketing.

I’ve offered up an example of how you could create a thought leadership engine inside your company in the slides from a (free) presentation that I link to at the bottom of this post. If you do nothing else, get a budget for creating internal knowledge share sessions.

Any company should be able to get executive commitment to make employees present their latest hot projects or thinking that is coming out of work with customers. You can have weekly or monthly presentations and sweeten the pot by setting it up as an awards program, with the best submission receiving stock options or a gift card.

The other key elements are research with customers and among competitors and some kind of external check and balance, whether it’s creating alliances with academics, research consortia, and/or analysts. There needs to be a way to test your thinking with third-party experts to make sure that your ideas are worth pursuing.

The idea here is to create a closed-loop cycle that includes internal subject matter experts, customers, external resources like academics and analysts, and primary and secondary research. You start with a nugget of a POV and you put it through this cycle and refine it with all those constituencies. And then send it around again. There no reason why you can’t do this in stages-build upon the POV and report it—then report it again when you have more to say and more proof points.

http://www.brighttalk.com/webcasts/2656/attend

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