When Marketing Becomes Thought Leadership: Why Your Employees Should Have a Point of View
For ten years, I had a very predictable interaction whenever I wore my 13WHAM ABC jacket in public.
Someone would notice the logo. Then came the double take. Logo. My face. Logo again.
Do I know her from TV?
Nope. If someone asked, I'd politely explain that I worked behind the scenes. If they'd ever seen a business logo incorporated into a newscast, that was much closer to my work. I had no problem appearing on camera when I needed to. Being the face of the content just wasn't part of my day-to-day job. I've spent most of my career helping organizations and other people tell their stories.
I'm only recently realizing how different it feels when the story you're responsible for telling is your own.
Personal Brand vs. Corporate Brand
I've started listening to Octavia Goredema's Brand Yourself for Success again, and she makes an important distinction early in the book between personal branding and corporate branding. It sounds obvious, but it made me think about how much of my marketing career I've spent getting very comfortable with one while barely thinking about the other.
Corporate communications asks us to think about the organization. How should the brand sound? What does it stand for? How do we communicate a product's value? How do we respond when something goes wrong?
Most marketers are pretty comfortable working behind that curtain. Write the thought piece, develop the customer story, produce the webinar, prepare someone's talking points, find the interesting story inside the product and figure out how to make other people care about it. Then someone tells us to build our own personal brand and suddenly we're staring at an empty LinkedIn post box.
Marketers spend their careers helping other people become thought leaders. Then we're surprised when building our own voice feels different.
Except I've Been Doing This Since 2016
The funny thing is, I haven't actually spent my entire career without a public point of view.
I've just been sharing most of it in a classroom. I started teaching college students in 2016 and have tried to teach at least one course almost every semester since.
Public Speaking. Business Communication. Technical Writing. Mass Communication. Branded Content.
Every semester requires me to stand in front of a room and essentially say: Here's what I've learned. Here's how I think about it. Here's what I think matters. Now let's discuss it.
That's thought leadership. My audience just happened to be sitting in front of me instead of scrolling LinkedIn. That's part of what Story Behind the Strategy has been teaching me. I'm not suddenly trying to invent a point of view because someone told me I need a personal brand. I'm learning how to take the conversations I've been comfortable having in classrooms and behind the scenes at work and put more of them somewhere public.
What Employee Thought Leadership Can Look Like
I've also had the opportunity to work alongside people who were much farther ahead of me on this. Christine Barnhart is one of them. When we worked together at Nulogy, Christine already had something incredibly valuable: a recognizable point of view. She's known as The Supply Chain Whisperer. She hosted and appeared on podcasts, talked about supply-chain transformation and wasn't afraid to have an opinion about what companies were getting right—or wrong.
Today she has more than 7,000 LinkedIn followers. Something to aspire to from my newly authoritative 400. But the follower count isn't actually the part I find most interesting. It's that The Supply Chain Whisperer travels with Christine. Her expertise doesn't belong to one employer. Her perspective doesn't disappear when the logo next to her job title changes and the organizations she works with still benefit from it.
That's the sweet spot of employee thought leadership. A strong personal brand doesn't have to compete with the corporate brand. It can make the corporate brand more credible.
Your Best Spokesperson Might Not Work in PR
Living next to a newsroom for ten years also changed the way I think about PR. The company isn't always the interesting story and the product usually isn't either. The people are.
Maybe it's the engineer who can explain why an industry has been solving a problem incorrectly for 20 years. Maybe it's the product leader who sees a shift happening before everyone else does. Maybe it's the person talking to customers every day who keeps hearing the same question and finally writes down the answer.
Those people already exist inside organizations. Good PR can help find them. Marketing can help them shape their ideas, find opportunities, prepare for interviews, turn conversations into articles, get comfortable on podcasts and distribute what they create, but there's an important distinction.
If every employee post sounds like it came from the same approved corporate template, you haven't created thought leaders. You've created additional distribution channels.
Thought leadership requires some actual thought. And that means organizations have to be comfortable allowing knowledgeable people to have recognizable voices.
The Expertise Should Be Portable
There's another reason I think this matters.
Companies change
Leadership teams change
Jobs disappear
Careers pivot
Your ideas can travel
That's one of the pieces of career advice I've heard repeatedly during this job search: don't build your entire professional reputation inside someone else's brand. That doesn't mean withholding your expertise from your employer. Quite the opposite. Your employer should benefit when you're known as someone worth listening to.
But your expertise shouldn't cease to exist when your employment does. Your employer can benefit from your expertise without owning your expertise. Christine is a good example of what that can look like and I'm starting to understand why that's valuable from the other side too.
In my last post I wrote about how Bob Marshall's LinkedIn posts influenced the way I perceived Ting Labs while researching an opportunity there. His content eventually sent me down a research rabbit hole about AI infrastructure and data centers that became my first Story Behind the Strategy: Field Notes. He didn't know I was reading. Christine probably doesn't know every person who's encountered one of her posts, listened to a podcast or remembered “The Supply Chain Whisperer” months later either. That's the invisible part of employee thought leadership. You don't always know who's paying attention.
When Marketing Becomes Thought Leadership
For most of my career, I've been comfortable behind the scenes. I've helped other people look good on camera, written content under corporate brands, taught students what I've learned and have helped organizations explain why their products and ideas matter.
Now I'm experimenting with putting more of those ideas under my own name. Not because I've suddenly decided I need to become a LinkedIn influencer and definitely not because I've reached the prestigious threshold of 400 followers. I'm doing it because I'm starting to see the value of having a body of work that answers a question a résumé never really can: How does this person think?
That's what the best employee thought leadership can do for both the person and the organization. The company gains a credible human voice. The employee builds a reputation around ideas and expertise that can grow throughout a career and the audience gets something far more interesting than another product announcement.
So What?
I'm still figuring out what I want my own name to become associated with. Maybe that's part of the process, but I'm increasingly convinced that the people I remember on LinkedIn aren't necessarily the people who post the most. They're the people whose names eventually become associated with an idea.
Who does that for you? Who do you follow on LinkedIn because they have a recognizable point of view—not simply because of the company they work for? Tag them. I'd genuinely like to expand my list.
