Thought leadership programs that run efficiently and deliver impact for their firms have conquered the 4 pillars of successful thought leadership.

Successful thought leadership programs depend on four pillars:

• Author-Centric Publication
• Clear Governance
• Create Once, Publish Everywhere Distribution
• Relevant Feedback

In this post, we dive deep into the first of these pillars, Author-Centric Publication, to analyse why it is critical, how to get it right and where firms struggle.

What is Author-Centric Publication?

Author Centric Publication means building the processes, policies and tools of your thought leadership program with the motivation and empowerment of authors first in mind.

With a few exceptions, content marketing programs struggle to engage their busy thought leaders.

Thought leadership programs are firstly about demonstrating the firm's expertise. To do that requires firms make it easy for busy thought leaders to publish content.

A content marketing program needs to empower and motivate professionals while providing an efficient, straightforward way to demonstrate value and knowledge to the market. 

How to adopt Author-Centric Publication

To be author-centric and have the highest chance of engaging authors effectively, a thought leadership program should deliver most, if not all of the following checklist. Use this as a way of assessing your firm's program.

The difference Author-Centricity makes

"Our professionals won't engage in thought leadership"

 We hear that time and time again from content marketing program managers at firms across all professional services sectors and at firms of all sizes.

For most thought leadership programs this is true, and it is unsurprising. Most thought leadership programs are not author-centric, they make little to no provision for empowering and motivating their authors.

Adopting an author-centric approach to thought leadership offers perhaps the most potential upside for programs. The good news is that it can take as little as a week or two to roll out changes and see powerful impact.

In 2019, Passle began working with a 1500-person international law firm. This firm had struggled for years with thought leadership and author engagement. 

In just 5 weeks, a small pilot group of authors, most of whom were considered "difficult to engage" were able to produce over 6x of the content they had before the pilot.