Brand building used to be about what people said about you after you left the room.  Now it’s about what people share about you…often while you’re still there in the room.

Smart content widely shared can help build brands and promote ideas.  But while digital distribution creates an easy route to an audience, the most powerful catalyst for sharing is often through live ‘thought leadership’ events.  In the same way live music has grown exponentially (while physical and online music sales have collapsed) thought-leadership events are now the new rock and roll.

So making it easy for your clients, guests or professional network to share something smart and intelligent about you is a great way of marketing your brand and, the icing on the cake is, its usually free.  Many of us enjoy discovering and then sharing something cool amongst our friends, colleagues and (hopefully with some discernment) our professional network.  The brevity and convenience of Twitter has also blurred the types of content we share across these various networks; randomly scattering witty engagement across family, friends, business associates and customers in less 140 characters.  The ‘holy grail’ of social sharing used to be “You will never believe who I met last night” (with appended hazy photo of very famous person).  Now the professional equivalent is the clever info-graphic, the gif, the jpeg, or the video link to something cool, interesting or compelling.  

To, ahem, illustrate. The graphic artist Helen Green recently shared a hand-drawn montage [a gif] she had created of David Bowie, his face morphing through the multiple-personas of his career in seconds.  As something created to mark his birthday it was beautiful in its own right.  The great man then died the day after and it became like a gift to the world; viewed and shared by hundreds of thousands of people.  [You can check out the image and her other work here, at:  http://helengreenillustration.com]

But it does not have to take a creative genius’s death to get your content noticed.  You probably already manage content sharing campaigns through a myriad of channels and there is much good advice on here and other forums on what content to create and how to go about getting it seen.  Even so, that recent article you posted on your beautiful website about your Firm’s ground-breaking ‘white paper’ or insightful perspective just doesn’t seem to be flying between devices...  My advice?  Get a room.  Or rather, get people from your firm and your clients in the right room.

Are Thought Leadership events worth the money?

Think about the last time you received one of those emailers for the very latest “thought leadership” seminar.  An opportunity to spend anything up to 5,000 dollars a time seeing the latest greatest most cutting edge thought leadership speakers at some cool conference with an even cooler name: Wired, Zeitgeist, TED XYZ, Smorgasbord, or Whatever.  Tempting and sounds interesting you think, but is it really worth it?  

There has been an explosion of formats, venues, providers and sponsors of ‘thought-leadership’ events.  In 2015, the FT reported the huge growth in players seeking a part of a burgeoning market for “thought leadership” with strategy consultants, Big Four advisors and even headhunters seeking a piece of the market which was once the preserve of the Business School.  Strategy consultancies such as Bain and Boston Consulting Group have long fashioned themselves as thought-leadership providers, but now publishing companies, technology start-ups and recruitment consultancies are striving to land chunks of a global market.  While many of the world's leading Business Schools now stream the content of their annual strategy forums and flagship classes online for free, there still seems to be a growing demand to actually be there, in the room.

As the the UK Editor of a leading print and digital magazines told us: “We used to produce a magazine and put on the occasional event.  Now we manage a complex events and conferencing business, which allows us to continue publishing a print magazine”.   Meanwhile, the Marketing Society showcases big name speakers and captains of industry at ‘masterclass’ seminars.   The annual Festival of Marketing in London flies in former Space Shuttle commanders and Mindfulness experts to help you realise your strategic ambitions.  These events cost almost a £1,000 a ticket.  PR Week have just announced that their 2016 event will last 4 [yes four] days at £1,800 a ticket.  The CEO has to stump up a six-figure "patron fee" to get an invite to (real) TED or sell and lease-back their corporate headquarters to secure a room at Davos.  Even tickets for one of the proliferation of TEDx events can be expensive and hard to obtain.  

So are these events worth the money?  Well if your objective is not just personal content consumption; but thought-leadership sharing, then we think so.  If you need an opportunity to collate and share smarts back with the leadership team at HQ, then some are better than others.  One of our favourites in the UK is Wired.  One of the reasons it works is that many in the audience had to do much more than clear space in the diary to attend.  At £2,000 a ticket for a two day conference, the attendees have either had to personally dig very very deep, or play a blinder with their line-manager to get the ticket cost picked up by their employer.  But because of that, you get a rather extraordinary audience of people in the room.  Nor just presenting, but in the audience.  Wired also get the genius of sharing content and ideas better than most.  In 2015 they invited Jacob Whitesides [no, I had not heard of him either...] to sing a song or two - not just for the benefit of those in the room but because a small percentage of his 1.3 million 24/7 Instagram followers would share that he was singing for them “@Wired 2015".  Forget thought-leadership kudos; your teenage daughter would think that you're cooler than cool.    

The real reason for the growing popularity of live thought-leadership events is that they are immeasurably more fun and engaging (even the bad ones) than staying at home and plugging into iTunes U for three hours and snacking on popcorn.  Because of this, brands need to think about how they share content, not via a lonely digital marketer back in the office, but through the very many, in real-time, attending a live event.  It is so much more impactful to syndicate content through the endorsement of real attendees, not distant web browsers.

While the importance of digital channels is clearly vital, investment in thought-leadership programmes and events, if produced professionally and imaginatively, can also be a powerful content tool for the marketer.  When a large number of attendees sharing content are your customers as well as positive advocates for your brand, then the value of bringing them together in a room - can take on a whole new dimension.