Peter Winick says thought leaders create great content then abandon it for new projects instead of monetizing what they've built. He recommends treating content as a strategic asset, developing a leveraging strategy, and assigning someone other than the creator to handle marketing and distribution.
Peter Winick here with Thought Leadership Leverage, and today I have a business model for you to consider. An organization is consistently investing a vast amount of time, energy, effort, and money in developing new offerings and solutions. Once the offering and solutions are produced, a few clients use them for a short period of time, and the company shifts its focus back to developing more solutions. Feedback from the clients are fantastic, yet the organization prefers to create new stuff as opposed to leveraging what it has already invested in. Sounds like a silly model, right? Well, it depends. I see brilliant thought leaders and authors deploy this model all the time. It wasn't part of a plan. It's just typically how things have played out. If you think you fall into this pattern, then the question to consider is why. Why would smart folks implement dumb business practices? The answer is most thought leaders and authors thrive when they are creating content, researching, tweaking, revising their models, and tackling new problems. In short, thought leaders enjoy thinking. It's critical that you see content as an asset, and leveraging your assets requires an entirely different skill set: branding, marketing, Business development, sales, PR, product development, social media, and the like aren't usually the activities that thought leaders enjoy and quite frankly aren't very good at. Sure, everyone dabbles a bit in this and that, and many actually do a decent job at some of these critical functions, but it isn't their primary focus and it doesn't engage them at the same level that creating content does. Thought leaders tend to make their living primarily because they are great at and enjoy what they do. Those same people are very good at knowing what they aren't good at and intentionally avoiding those type of things. The gap that needs to be filled is the one where the thought leader is able to continually create content and leverage their assets across as many modalities as is possible in their area of expertise. In order to do that, a strategy needs to be developed and someone needs to be responsible for leveraging those assets. That someone, in most cases, isn't the thought leader. They need to be involved at some level, even own some specific task, but a process needs to be put in place and a focused, disciplined approach to effectively monetizing the body of work needs to be launched. Thank you. Thank you.
