Over the last few years, I've had the pleasure of working with experts from the worlds top professional services firms. We've been seeing firsthand the marketers and business development professionals from these firms that are constantly redefining best practice.

So it was our pleasure to kick off a community for these marketers, a place to share knowledge and insight and a place to challenge the perception of what's possible.

It was fitting that Rupert Winlaw (Head of Communications, Ropes & Gray) was able to lead our kickoff. Rupert has spent the last year building an exceptional thought leadership program within Ropes and Gray. A key strength and driver of this program is the way the team use data and deliver feedback. This is absolutely key to keeping content consistent and demonstrating the value to those in your business. 

The video below is from our workshop, it's packed with brilliant insight from Rupert and a must-watch if you are leading a thought leadership program. 

Here are some of my favourite takeaways from Rupert on how he is driving value through data at Ropes & Gray: 

• Rupert's aim is to always demonstrate the value of creating content in order to encourage as many people as possible to keep posting, others to start posting and everyone to share the content to relevant social media channels. 
• Rupert uses a wide range of data sources available to him for the feedback, including: Passle statistics, Lexology, LinkedIn and Google analytics.
• Rupert uses both quantitative and qualitative data. Headline numbers are important but the real value comes from pairing this with qualitative data such as which key firms have engaged with the content.
• Rupert doesn't just share this feedback with those in the content program but also around the firm to gain recognition and showcase value to those not involved yet.
• Rupert made time to build a report template he could use each quarter. Once the hard work is done and he knew what data to collect it all became very easy. Rupert used a great analogy for this: 

"Once you have got your boat set towards the wind, you can almost let it sail for itself and you're just doing minor tweaks here and there".