Thumbnail Marketing

Consultants and entrepreneurs are typically thought leaders, but may not realize or appreciate it, so they miss personal marketing opportunities. That’s often true of marketing consultants, who excel at marketing their clients but not themselves. And it’s even worse for many women consultants, according to Kate Purmal, a consultant in the San Francisco Bay Area, told the Women in Consulting North Bay/Marin group. “You know your material, you deliver it, it all seems painfully obvious, but you feel you don’t have that much to contribute.”

Purmal, who has her own firm — Kate Purmal Consulting – works with start-ups, emerging ventures and small businesses to launch and implement strategic initiatives and coaches clients on thought leadership and sales skills.

The term “thought leader” was coined in 1994 by Joel Kurtzman, editor in chief of Strategy and Business – one who is a “futurist” or is recognized among peers and mentors for innovative ideas and demonstrates the confidence to promote or share those ideas as actionable distilled insights.

Why position yourself as a thought leader? The advantages are clear, Purmal noted:

• Establish yourself as a credible source
• Showcase the breadth of your skills
• Deepen your role as a trusted advisor
• Create more exposure and generate more leads
• Build and elevate your brand
• Raise rates and increase revenue when you develop supporting collateral, such as a book

Thought leaders establish their positioning in various ways. Some thought leaders are trend-spotters (Faith Popcorn), others are provocateurs (Timothy Ferris, author of The 4-Hour Workweek). Some have a unique voices while still others are curators of ideas and aggregators of thoughts, but applying them in fresh ways.

Working with clients to develop and promote their own thought leadership, I’ve found that it often takes a particular lens and outside perspectives to identify and put shape to what’s potentially “thought leadership.” That can apply to personal and small business marketing, as well. It’s smart to bounce your ideas off others and work carefully to refine a succinct message. But that shouldn’t mean paralysis-by-analysis either. Here are other ways Purmal advises to get started or continue the thought leadership journey:

• Don’t be afraid. Take a stand.
• Pick the most valuable thing you do and use that as your calling card, at least to get in the door.
• Craft a compelling and credible bio.
• Convert your area of expertise into a thought leadership platform that you can use in a variety of ways.
• Find the hook — and apply it in blogs, whitepapers, email newsletters, presentations and social media posts (Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn).
• Believe in the value of improvisation, innovation and the “art of possibility.”

OUT with “Survival,” IN with “Growth” — these lead my What’s Hot/What’s Not marketing trends for 2010.

Feeling whiplashed by 2009, many of us have been talking about a sudden flurry of activity as 2010 opened. Pushing uphill with ferocity the first week of the new year, a university colleague mused, “I think we’re just doing more with less.” Had the economy suddenly improved by leaps because the year had turned? “Clearly there are signs that things are better,” a nonprofit recruiter noted as she posted a surge in new positions for several clients, ”and organizations have decided they can’t keep demanding too much of their existing staff if they want to move forward once again.”

Years ago I wrote regularly about “What’s Hot, What’s Not” trends in columns for Knight-Ridder Newspapers (which moved from the “Hot” to the “Not” column all too quickly as a newspaper chain that disappeared in recent years). So I’m reprising that Hot and Not snapshot with 5 top trends with broad implications for marketing communications for higher education, nonprofits, small businesses — and personal marketing — in 2010:

Hot: Growth/Not: Survival

Hot: Reinvention/Not: Relapse

Hot: Mobile/Not: Wired

Hot: Fresh content/ Not: Disregard for usability

Hot: Managing social media/Not: Letting social media manage you

What are your top picks for 2010?

These two wise approaches set a wise foundation for your rethinking  about a rebalanced 2010 — Zen and the Art of Twitter and Rohit Bhargava’s Non-Obvious Marketing Trends.

Now’s a good time, too, to consider a brand update – without overinvesting in unnecessary change or cost during this still somewhat transitional time.