I know from our research that marketers are sick to death of hearing about Web 2.0. But at the same time they acknowledge that they haven’t done much with it.

I know why people are so sick of it. It’s because it’s presented to them as a bunch of technologies that seem disconnected and overwhelming. Podcasts, Twitter, linkedIn, Facebook, videos, blogs—right now it seems like the path to marketing hell is lined with Web 2.0 tools.

But if you start thinking of these tools as a supply chain for the development of thought leadership, they start to sound a whole lot more useful and less threatening.

For example, point of view is the essence of good blogging. Readers expect strong opinions backed up with research and experience. Find out who inside your company is blogging on their own and you may find some new subject matter experts who can help develop and refine thought leadership. Record internal subject matter experts giving conference presentations and release them as podcasts and use the transcripts as fodder for blog posts. Use research results as the content for a time-boxed blog. Run the results on the blog and see how subject matter experts and customers react. Use their reactions to refine the content further. When you run out of results, shut down the blog and put out the summary report or whitepaper.

Blogs are still so young that we haven’t yet seen that they are going to have lifespans like anything else. As I’ve said before, I think a lot of marketers look at blogs as life sentences: How the heck do I keep this thing going for the rest of my life? The answer is you don’t have to. Most people find blogs through searches rather than subscribing to them anyway. If it’s useful content, people will appreciate finding it even if the blog hasn’t been updated in a long time.

But the point is that thought leadership doesn’t need to be finished before getting it out there. The process of developing a point of view, research, and case studies takes time. The advantage of the new forms of social media is that they are informal and episodic by their very nature. The phrase to be continued is in the DNA of all this stuff. You can come back around to the same idea endlessly in a blog as long as you have something new to say each time or a different twist on it.

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