STAY HUMAN - How to Avoid Generic Thought Leadership Disease

Welcome to Attention Matters, the newsletter from Storythings which gives you practical insights and tools on how to tell better stories and grow your audiences’ attention.

In our last post we launched our STAY HUMAN campaign to encourage B2B Marketers to stand out from the crowd, and avoid the B2B zombie apocalypse. Well, the response was much stronger that we thought, with loads of replying to ask for the download, or joining us from our campaign landing page. So if you’re new here, welcome - we’re happy to add another human to our community!

The campaign is based around seven signs you might be about to become a B2B Zombie. Over the next seven posts we’re going to into each of these in detail, going beyond the insights and offering practical advice. Here’s what we’re going to cover:

1 - How to avoid Generic Thought Leadership Disease (that’s this post!)
2 - Escaping from Buzzword Dependency Syndrome
3 - Overcoming Algorithmic Addiction
4 - Curing your Corporate Voice Affliction
5 - Moving away from Template Dependence Disorder
6 - Breaking out of Risk Aversion Paralysis
7 - How to cure Engagement Entropy Rot

As we were developing this guide, we realised it would make a really fun, but practical, workshop. So if you want us to come in and help your teams STAY HUMAN, reply to this email and we’ll be in touch asap.

1 - What are the symptoms?

Thought Leadership is often used in B2B marketing, but surely it’s an oxymoron? If everyone is publishing Thought Leadership articles, how can all of them be Thought Leaders?

That’s because a lot of these articles are not actually thought leaders, but thought zombies. Wired recently reported that over 51% of LinkedIn posts show signs of using AI in their production. But even without AI, too many thought leadership articles suffer from these Generic Thought Leadership Disease symptoms:

• Every blog post starts with "In today's fast-paced digital landscape..."

• Regularly publishing "Top 10 Industry Trends" that everyone else has already covered

• Citing the same McKinsey/Gartner reports as everyone else

• Using stock photos of people pointing at screens or shaking hands

2 - Take The Test

The earliest signs of Generic Thought Leadership Disease are usually visual. If you’re over-relying on stock photos, or visual cliches of people at their desks pointing at things, that’s a good sign you’ve been infected. We’ve mocked up zombie versions of the worst offenders - on a scale of 0-10, how similar are these to images you’ve used in your own thought leadership pieces?

3 - Here’s the cure

If you’re finding yourself falling back on the same visual cliches to illustrate your thought leadership articles, it’s a sign of a deeper symptom - your articles have no humans or action in them. When you write thought leadership articles that are just platitudes recycling the latest reports from Big 4 consultancies, you are not a leader - you’re part of the crowd.

If you truly want to be a thought leader, you have to work harder to tell stories that could only be told by your company - this means focusing not on generic research, but actual people and events. Like the best movie or drama, you need protagonists and action - things need to happen in your stories to make them stand out from the crowd.

For example - in our work with ADP we wanted to tell stories that payroll professionals could use to share the impact of their work. So we recruited a network of global journalists to find people in cities around the world, to find out what pay and employment means to them. Because in the end, payroll professionals are responsible for the most crucial interface between companies and their employees - getting paid.

The resulting series - Real People Talk Pay - showed that ADP understands that payroll transformation is not just about technology, security and effectiveness, it’s about people and their lives.

4 - Our simple steps to success

If you want to avoid Generic Thought Leadership Disease, here’s a couple of things you can do that won’t cost a lot of time or money:

• Find the symptoms in your sector - some cliches are universal, but some are specific to a sector. Find a sample of 12 or so thought leadership articles from competitors, and look for the symptoms that are common amongst all of them.

• Don’t bore yourself - write your own list of cliches that you’re bored of seeing in thought leadership articles. Because if you’re bored writing them, the audience will be 10x more bored reading them.

• Make it more human - don’t write about reports or trends, write about people. If something is happening in your sector, who will it affect? How do they feel about it?

• Focus on the action - when you’re talking to real humans about how trends are affecting them, ask them to tell you a story about something that explains or illustrates the impact. What is happening to them, and how will they respond to it? We are hard-wired to find stories about people and action interesting, so ask people to tell you their story.

We’ve got decades of experience finding unique and compelling stories about everything from payroll to explaining the future of AI. If you’d like to work with Storythings and make your Thought Leadership content stand out, hit reply and we’ll book in a call.

And if you found this valuable, we’d love to hear from you! Please reply to this email to get in touch, or share the article on Linkedin tagging Storythings.

Matt