Audience Advocacy and Thought Leadership | Cristina Loughrey | 446
20 Nov 2022 · 40 min
In this Leveraging Thought Leadership podcast episode, host Bill Sherman interviews Cristina Loughrey, a master storyteller and content strategist formerly at LinkedIn, to explore how organizations can shift from one‑way, brand‑centric messaging to audience‑centric advocacy. Loughrey argues that thought leadership should make the audience the hero of the story, not the brand, and that authentic, individual storytellers (signed voices) resonate more than unsigned corporate messaging. She stresses the need to define a realistic target audience, avoid vanity metrics, and prioritize relevance over scale. The conversation covers how to craft the opening of content with a clear value offer, the importance of empathy, psychobehavioral cues, and data—both qualitative (conversation quality, attrition points, jump‑off moments) and quantitative (engagement depth, repeat visits, conversion over a 365‑day horizon). Loughrey shares practical tactics such as testing narratives with real audience panels, tailoring content for VIP versus broader audiences, and using a long‑term relationship lens rather than short‑term demand‑gen goals. The episode concludes with Loughrey’s career reflections: be more patient, listen harder, and advocate for audience details, balancing EQ with data to build trust that endures beyond speed‑dating‑style interactions.
Chapters
Thought leadership can't just be a one-way conversation from your organization to an audience. So how do you make sure that the voice of your audience is heard within your organization? To explore that question, I've invited Christina Lockrey to join me in today's discussion. She's a master storyteller and content strategist for thought leadership, and she's worked for a variety of large organizations, most recently LinkedIn. In today's conversation, we'll explore audience advocacy, we'll talk about narrative strategy itself, and we'll explore the signals an organization sends through the authenticity of its messenger and the relevancy of the message. I'm Bill Sherman, and you're listening to Leveraging Thought Leadership.
Ready?
Let's begin. Welcome to the show, Christina.
Thank you, Bill. It is so nice to be here. I really appreciate the time.
So I'm looking forward to having a conversation with you about making sure that the needs of the audience are heard within the organization. And I think it's very easy to get wrapped up in the message you're trying to push out. And so I want to ask you, What about audience advocacy? How do you make that work and where does it sit in the organization, especially from a content strategy and thought leadership perspective?
Yeah, I think it's really important. I think especially now we need to think a lot about who the audience is. We have so many ways of, of even starting that question. You know, what is the audience, the target audience you want, or are we getting wrapped up in just a bulk audience that you want for vanity metrics? So starting right down from the agenda you have in what the audience is, is going to be a question in what you determine is advocating for that audience and being realistic about those expectations. But one thing that's important, you know, it was years ago I was really excited to hear that we were introducing story to business messaging, to thought leadership, to the world of business. We're going to story. I mean, that, that speaks to my heart. And it should, because that's the great thing about stories. It actually can bring to life a brand in a way that normal old school messaging can't. It can, it can consider the audience. It can speak to the heart, mind, and get us engaged in a more dynamic way with audiences. But the problem is that when we introduced story, a lot of businesses heard my story, my brand story, my company story, my product story. And that is really hard to get away from. Even with all the discussion about EQ we've been doing, even using data to understand what audiences are telling us, we still forget that the brand story shouldn't be a story about the brand as a hero. The brand story, or any thought leaders, if it's your personal story, it should be something that the audience imagines themselves as the hero of. That it's their challenge that they're overcoming and their heroism ultimately, if we use storied concepts, that gets them to the win. You know, that's where we find the best idea of what it is to advocate for the audience. It's rooting for them to be the hero of the story and understanding who they are, that they'll feel, feel, not just think themselves relevant to what it is you're trying to say.
So you mentioned a couple things there that I want to underline. I think that the broader your audience, the harder it is to know how to connect with them in a deep and meaningful way, right? So when you're broadcasting and you're saying, okay, we're just going to go for as large of an audience as we can get, you lose that specificity, that ability to tell a story and make that audience member the hero, right?
I, I think that's 100% true. And the problem is, you know, we, we get down to ROI, and there's always going to be someone that says, well, but how much is it going to cost per person, and what is my return on investment in this? And I think when we get mired down in those metrics, we forget that without the kind of intimacy, that specificity that you're, you're talking about, it doesn't matter if we get those bodies to the table or not. We're relying on kind of gimmicks. And I think those gimmicks have gotten really big in the last couple of years, especially around experiential, where we're relying on the surprise and delight elements. We're relying on people showing up because there's a celebrity. We're relying on, you know, things that aren't really connecting the business messaging to the audience in a way that really puts them in the center of the journey you want to take them on. So there's some hard decisions there.
Oh, absolutely. And the other piece that I want to go back to in your first answer is the piece about that individuals don't want to hear stories about the organization. They want to hear stories about themselves. And I related to if you're trying to connect with someone and introducing yourself, saying to them early in the conversation, let me tell you a story about me. Is unlikely to go too far or be successful, right? You need to ask questions. You need to engage them in a different way before you have permission to tell that story about yourself.
I, I think that's 100% true. And I think even when we do tell the stories of ourselves, we want to do it in a way where the context sets us up to be relatable, that someone goes, oh my gosh, I had an experience just like that, and you feel that surge of feeling connected to someone and you trust them. And that is ultimately what a lot of our thought leadership work is doing, is building trust, not in some, you know, snake oil way, but in a genuine way that connects people for a longer-term relationship. If you think about it in terms of a dating analogy, we want our customers to want to marry us. We don't want them to just go home with us for an evening. We want like the whole package. And we want to respect who they are and their time and getting to know them enough to give them the content that's meaningful, that allows them to get to know us and to trust us in ways that have, you know, instead of a kind of life cycle that is defined by a funnel, a life cycle that's defined by trust and ongoing, you know, an ongoing retention that we make a mark. And I really think it is about those those right stories in the right way where we're inviting someone in to our commonality.
Well, and you imply here in telling those stories, a storyteller, right? Rather than an organizational voice, which is unsigned. And I think if we explore that, people are looking for either the signed piece or something that they can connect to an individual. Speaking and sharing a story or sharing an insight or an idea rather than something that's just going under the corporate logo. At least that's my perception of how people are responding in some way. When you talk about building trust and relationship, it's much harder through the logo.
It's an interesting question. I think it actually can go both ways. First, I think that a brand, a very successful brand, can, can have values they live enough that they become an entity in the minds of the people that follow them around. It's hard to do, but with consistency, with really continuing to nurture that relationship, a brand can do it. One of the most effective ways, though, I'll say with a caveat of doing that, is having your recognizable faces and people that humanize a brand story.
Exactly.
And those people are not necessarily your people with the biggest title because, you know, I mean, someone can tell me that they're very successful But if I look at them and I'm like, well, you, you had all of these privileges or you had these things that I don't have access to. So of course you're sitting up on high and you've done these things, but how do I get there? I don't relate to that. So we have to look off the center stage and off of this idea that if we throw the biggest title out there, the biggest celebrity, that's the story. That's not a story that someone can relate to. And sometimes that person may be a huge title. They may be an incredible celebrity. But is it about a story that the audience can relate to that expresses the brand or the business offering that you're trying to promote in a way that is consistent, real, and really relevant in a timely way to the audience? Because audiences— I think one of the problems we have is we look at audiences as this thing to earn, and we kind of think of them, I think, a little I think we dumb down audiences and we take them as things we have to trick into being at a thought leadership event of any sort or in thought leadership content, whether it's digital or written or wherever it is. We think about like, how do we get them there? And, you know, we, we think about incentivizing them with gifts and all these things which do work. I'm not gonna say get rid of those things. They're awesome. Who doesn't like someone that shows up with flowers? But The problem is that audiences also are in a constant barrage of digital input, of time requirements. We live in a world where we are always connected. And so we're really no-making machines, not because we hate people and things and identity and community. It's that we need to cancel some of the noise and determine what is of the highest value for our time. So to do that, we need to remember as thought leaders and as brands that we need to give them something that acknowledges their time in a meaningful way, in something that is about them, that they have taken away time and they might even give it to you because you've got a prize or an incentive. But is that image up on video is really huge during our pandemic era and it really gave false flags because people put those windows up to say they were doing something. Who were they watching? Were they engaging? Are they really there for life? Were they there for the gimmick? Were they there for the, for the meaning? What was, what was the value offer that really was presented? And so I think value offer is a big thing in terms of audience understanding, is looking deeply enough and getting the feedback through data and from customer feedback itself that says, this is what I need, um, and answering that in a really pithy way, not in, you know, not in a worn-out, diluted way.
Well, and we've moved to a world where people are evaluating value and relevance in thin slices in a matter of seconds, right? Do I read this email? Do I look at this post? If not, I scroll past, right? And so what used to be that sort of short attention span of the top of the house for B2B, if you're trying to reach an internal executive, let alone an external customer's executive team, you had to make things simple because you may have only had a few minutes of their time and attention. Now that's everybody, and that's even true B2C. And so how do you lead with something that's going to catch attention and create value in a short, pithy, punchy way? That's a tough challenge.
It's a tough challenge. And I think, you know, this is— there are so many things I could say about this, first of all. But on the top of it is that, that attention you're trying to grab, that everyone is looking to say no, is to say, why should I? And I think, so I always, when I'm going through content or strategies about engagement, you know, I think Everything I look at, I should think from my— a well-defined audience perspective, your target audience, that persona. And like you said, don't try and get everyone. Forget that vanity metric. Think about the person that you really want to fall in love with you and say, you know, how is this about me and why should I care? What is it that leaps out? Like, and it can be simple because we also need to look at the psychobehavioral cues, how people react in digital or in whatever medium, if it's live, What are they doing where their experience immediately speaks to them? And what that isn't is starting, for example, with a lot of name dropping of your company name, your thought leaders, the, oh, ho, ho, look at me, you should care about me because I'm so big and glorious. And I see this even in written copy, almost in a Freudian way where there'll be like, I'll look at copy and I'm like, wow, did you really say your brand name 10 times in a short paragraph? And why, if I am an emotional creature out there trying to clear space in my life because I have an onslaught of digital information coming at me, should I think that you care if all you're talking about is yourself?
So what goes in that lead? How do you signal that you care in short order?
Well, I think for me, what I look for is, is that kind of relevancy moment. And when you lead, you don't want to say, you know, Acme presents, you know, blah, blah, blah, and throw out a bunch of VP titles or whatever it is you want to do. You want to start with the problem you're solving for. What is the value offer? So if it starts there, you know, and you immediately go into the problem that you're solving for, the solution that you've provided, the offer, instead of going for the big name, like even if you have a picture of that awesome speaker, you just spent probably far too much money for, for the 10 minutes of time you're going to get, um, in the post-pandemic world where we pay a lot of money for people to show up for 10 minutes. Um, when you, when you're in that space, you still want to see that picture and then go, but what is this about? And if that isn't there in your first 2 or 3 lines, forget it. It also means don't waste time in traditional formats that don't work. They're for an older generation that was not as digitally native, that isn't as savvy. So don't start with, you know, presenting the VP of product, you know, start with the story. And we see this successful even before it was necessary that people pivot to digital. It's great practice. We saw it in the short attention span theater of commercials where you get a hook and then it's followed up by explaining why. And that relevancy. We see it in things like, you know, TED still does a great job of this. They give, you know, and those people are not intuitive thought leaders that go up there. These are people with stories that TED works very hard.
And so for a TED Talk, for example, those people are highly polished. They know their story, right?
Yes, very. And they're working with, again, the top-notch people to help them craft a story that is already interesting but that now has to center around the audience. And that, that's talent in, in a way that is groomed. You know, it isn't that we wake up one day and our stories are interesting. We have to know how to present them. We have to know how to rethink them from the point of view of someone else, not from the urge to tell our story, which is great, that's what gets us there, but from the idea of what it would be like to hear and be compelled by that story from another perspective. So a lot of empathy and a lot of data. Honestly, people think data is the least sexy part of, of doing content or doing thought leadership. And I actually think data is a gift. I, I had a lot of friends in a lot of different artistic endeavors over my life, and I used to be so jealous of people that could get on stage and perform with a musical act and get immediate feedback. You know if that audience loves you, you know if they hate you. As a lifelong writer, I always had to write what I called into the void. I have no idea whether or not people like me, relate to me, are going to read me. And I would just obsessively look at that little tick of people reading and how long and looking at all of these metrics, but I still got no feedback. And now we live in a world where when we put data out or when we put messaging out of any sort, when we put a story out, we have a lot of ways if we invest in it to get feedback and to hear what it was that people liked, how they related to us. You know, we don't have to any longer just be like, well, I believe in my story and it's real. And I'm going to be the best at my craft and hope that it works. Now we can still believe in our story, make sure it's real, be the best in our craft, and see how we can tailor it to audiences. And audiences expect that now. They need that to make room for it in their life.
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Sure.
First in data, what sort of metrics, since you have a love for it and tie it to storytelling, What do you look at from a perspective when you're putting out a story on behalf of the organization? Because I think the aggregate likes, for example, can be deceptive because you may or may not be reaching your audience. So what are you looking at?
Yeah, so it's interesting. I don't like the aggregate like thing and I hate— I may be the only person that hates the floating emoticons over speakers. I find it distracting. I am personally really put off when I'm trying to get a question into a speaker and I get hello from Brazil, hello from Argentina, hello from Boise, instead of a way to engage with a speaker that I've taken time out of my life to engage with. So I also look at like qualitative things. So I'll start there. I think qualitative is underrated in a world, especially the bigger the company, the more we want to look at quantitative data, and that makes us feel good about our ROI. We have 20,000 people that showed up and listened to whoever speak on widgets. That's great. But the thing to me is, you know, what was the conversation? Can we bring that up in a post-report? Can we learn? Can we ask the hard questions about where we failed? If people were asking really engaging questions, that were relevant to our business messaging. If, if the kernel that started our desire to do a thought leadership event or put out thought leadership content in any form, if that matches the questions that we're showing that people were hungry, I am super excited. I like that a lot better than the last person, you know, that's standing who decides to fill in a survey and say why they would recommend this to a friend. That's one of my least favorite. Metrics, you only get the people who love you. If I could get less of those fan, you know, fan people and more of the people who jumped off. So I like to look at things like attrition, jump-off points, where people interacted. If you have the software, you know, where their engagement was, what parts did they fall silent? Because that's when they took their silent coffee break and went away. You know, I want to know what their behavior is. So data is at one point. Engagement, the depth, the scroll, the interacting with the page, and whether they came back, not just once, but did they come back? That return that shows interest over time. Those are the things that I wanna build a picture out of because data is an— its own form of story. Mm-hmm. And we need to understand it not just in a few vanity metrics, but actually looking at what is the story that's being told of the customer journey or experience that happens around our thought leadership. You know, it's also why we need to make sure that while we might bookend it, we keep things that are evergreen out there. We, if we can, we want to show that like people behave in their own way. They're not going to show up at 11:00 on a Monday if they have a conflict with their, their daughter's pediatrician or a business meeting. And the high-value people definitely don't have time to show up when you want them to. So the digital content you put out there, how many times is it visited? Where did that traffic come from? Did it come from the original invitation and the no-show that didn't get there? Or does it come from your post, you know, your, your post comms that you take a highlight and you say, this is what you missed and someone goes back to it. There's so much that we can do with data and looking at how people engage if we are willing to critically look at it, not just look for, you know, the applause. If we are willing to test, you know, go to those client groups, get a panel. If you're doing— it's amazing to me how often we don't really provide due diligence. We're doing a sales thought leadership event, but we don't get any salespeople to look at our content before we put it out. So I had a great example of where we sometimes take for granted what our audience is and we don't use our resources to test, to kind of user test within our own domain with the resources we have at hand. So we had a thought leadership event for a sales organization, and it was a big deal. And I got a narrative that was coming through that someone else had worked on to kind of check what— give my thoughts on what we were doing here and how it was going to play out. And the main story relied on the assumption that because of the pandemic, everyone who had gone to digital selling wanted to be a better digital seller. And that just did not sit right with me. I know too many salespeople who really missed their client relationships, that wanted to go back to traveling, to seeing their clients, to touching base, to being assured of those connections in those ways. So, you know, to be political and kind and to check and not just you know, flap my mouth off about my intuition. I asked if we could put together a sales quorum, get a, get a little bit of our best sales executives that would give their time to this content, because this content's going out to their clients. They are invested. They will give us their time. What did they think about our thought leadership narrative and its points? And I asked a bunch of questions, including, do salespeople want to be better digital sellers in 2022? The amount— I mean, you would have thought I set off a Molotov cocktail in that room. It was amazing. The umbrage of even just the term digital selling caused such mixed emotions. And these are from people that know we're on their side. We're their colleagues. So I'm thinking, well, immediately, if an audience sees this, they'll know that we don't know them. They will know that we're not solving for them. And we fail that question of how is this about me and why should I care? That we needed to pivot our language and change it. And, you know, even if you have to run that up the flagpole and step on a few toes, I mean, no one likes, you know, for you to have a solid piece that you've presented and then say, by the way, we were wrong. But if you were a true audience advocate, you need to do that because sure, you'll still have people show up, but, you know, they'll probably be typing an email while while your speaker's on stage, and they'll probably be waiting for that moment where they get their free pair of socks or whatever it is that you incentivize them with. You're not really showing that you relate to them. So I think data overall is important in identifying the audience, but we also need the qualitative feedback. We need to use our resources and we need to interpret those stories because did we have real data that said salespeople have moved to digital selling? Absolutely. Of course we did, because they have, they have to. Is it something we want to say we're helping them do better? No. Helping them make time? Yes. Helping them identify ways to connect with their customers even from a distance? Absolutely. Becoming better digital sellers? That was definitely not something we needed to say. So we have to be careful when we're looking at data to run it by real people in real context and just test it before it goes out. Make sure it's relevant.
I love how this comes back to the concept of audience advocacy. And you've touched and woven a couple pieces into that empathy, and that gets you the first few steps, but you have to engage with your audience and you have to listen and sometimes ask the tough questions before you put a piece out. Otherwise, like you said, You can throw a grenade into a room and set off a wild debate that you never expected. Also love the concept of data collection by looking at the qualitative questions that are being asked, whether during a webinar or in a room, because you can look at who asked them. Is that really your target audience? And how aligned with the messaging were you? Were you 3 steps ahead of them and they were still trying to get the basics, or were they pushing for the next piece? Were they ready to go forward and were they seeing how it connected? Those questions, as you said, the process of thought leadership and analysis of thought leadership, you create its own story and you tell the story of how the piece came together and how you reach the audience.
It's true. You also need to adjust, I think, in keeping with that, for who the audience is and what their context wants to be. We had an interesting conversation, a former boss of mine and I, at one point, because we were working with very VIP people and they really wanted to penetrate C-levels better. And I've, I've worked with a lot of very important people on the global stage, and I understand them at this point fairly well. And, you know, one of the things was, well, we have these wonderful, important people that we're inviting and we're coming. How do we democratize that? And I said, well, if you want them to stay, you don't democratize it because the conversations that people have really depend on who they're around, where they're with, and how they feel comfortable. I mean, it's on a spectrum. So the higher-level conversations may not feel comfortable giving you real feedback or engaging in certain discussions. In a public setting, you know, when we have to talk about real things like, will there be layoffs? Is there a downturn coming? How do I adjust to, you know, a culture that, you know, is very much more complicated socially than it's ever been? What do I do to make myself more, you know, more aware? Like these conversations that are really high value and that really require thought leadership at a certain level, you need to make sure that the context that you're setting up, the room you're inviting them into, is specific to that audience. And that comes back to what you were saying about audience targeting and empathy, really looking at, well, what are the consequences if someone who is a CEO says the wrong thing? That can, that can lose their family, their house. So we have to be very sensitive to what it is. And it's not just on the high level. On the low level, there are a lot of vulnerable conversations that we wanna make sure that we're nurturing safe spaces for people to give feedback in, that we are able to approach, because we don't wanna put black boxes around conversations, especially, I think we saw all of that a couple years ago in the summer of 2021 when not having a conversation around Black Lives Matter and inclusion and DEI was as telling as, as having the wrong one. So we need to be very careful about how do we empathetically reach audiences in ways that are safe and comfortable for them. And it may not always be celebrating things as loudly as, as we want and taking as much public credit. It may be earning trust in smaller, more localized ways.
And it may even be, in your example of working with VIP targeted audiences, a one-to-one delivery method rather than a one-to-many, and especially in collecting feedback or engaging in conversation. And so that personalization of thought leadership, if it's done for the right audience that fits whether you're B2B or B2C, can be gold if done right.
Yeah, and I think looking for the immediate payoff is probably not the right way to look at it when you're looking at data. I think data should inform how we construct stories, and there's little faith and trust that has to happen within an org to know that it isn't that I'm going to have a one-to-few event or conversation with some important people and suddenly every enterprise client that was represented—
Rainbows and unicorns. Yeah.
I mean, that's great, but that's not how it works. What we're gonna have to know is that what we've created is, is a step in developing a relationship and that we now have an opportunity to follow up. So when you, you asked earlier about metrics that might be successful, well, within the next 6 months, not tomorrow, in the next 6 months, were we able to secure another event, another conversation, a relationship, an introduction? Did they not block our emails? Because That would be a good one. You know, what is the overall kind of— what is the overall? And this is why I like to say things should be looked at kind of in a, in a 365-day approach, the year to year end to year end. When we're looking at things instead of by our quarters, are we seeing people reengage? Are we seeing people shift the way they think or look to us when there's something that was relevant to what we say we're leading. And I mean, people forget that thought leadership is about leadership.
Yes.
And you need to give people time to catch up. Otherwise, you're trying to lead from the middle. And that's just confusing. That doesn't get you anywhere. You know, you're just kind of in a corral at that point, spinning in circles when what we really want is to be going into new ground and we have to wait for that to prove itself out.
And I think that patience can be very difficult because often we're measuring things on a week-to-week, month-to-month basis and a 90-day timeline can feel like an eternity, right?
Yeah. And I think this also comes down to being honest about where your business is at. You know, for what I do, I, I have had a lot of interviews with companies that want to contract me to do what I identify pretty quickly as demand gen. And I think you have to be really careful not to confuse thought leadership or content with demand gen. Content and thought leadership are long-term strategies that create incredible retention. I mean, it is a fact that people who have bought— and the larger the purchase, the more true this is— something like a car from a brand they trust. I buy a Toyota, it never breaks down. I'm going to buy a Toyota again. It will take work for a company to pull me off of that brand because I rely on it. I trust it. So it's a huge win when you can earn trust and you can earn retention and you can earn these moments. You have to keep it up. You can't just abandon them out there.
But you're not building trust on a speed dating pace.
Exactly. This isn't, this isn't your speed dating kind of forum. And I think that when we look at being honest about what you want to do with your thought leadership, you need to be really clear about what your goals are and what your scope is financially and in terms of personnel and what you can invest in it. A small business may not be able to compete if I've heard numerous people, you know, when I'm like, well, what are your goals? And like, I want like a mini Dreamforce. I had a client tell me that once and I said, I'm not sure that you understand how much goes into Dreamforce. Like that is, you can't mini it first of all. And secondly, even if you could, you'd be blowing a lot of your discretionary spending that might be better off expanding your sales team or, you know, working on your creative assets or, you know, figuring out the research you need on what your brand is being read like out there in the general public. When we talk about thought leadership, I think a lot of people think of it as a shortcut to getting attention. They want a byline, they want a newsfeed, they want people to love them. But even, even some of our biggest tech giants that seem like just iconic at this point were anonymous for a very long time.
Yes.
And it takes a long time to get to the point where you, you can invest properly in doing thought leadership for the right reasons in the right way.
So I think that's a good place for us to start wrapping up, and I want to ask you this question. What is it that you know now that you wish you knew earlier in your career?
Oh my gosh, everything. What I wish I knew earlier in my career was to be, I think, more patient with audiences and to listen a little better and advocate a little stronger for the details of what they're saying. Those those moments where you see something that's like a psychobehavioral hint and you're like, that just doesn't sit right with me. I feel that at this point in my career I've gotten better at hearing my gut, you know, when, when something makes sense to me, you know. I look at the— I had a very heavy sense of apprehension around 2021 or What was that, like May, when everything started, quote, pivoting to digital, end quote. And, you know, here I have a UX partner who's been working on digital events and digital content for 7 years. He's amazing at what he does. I, I've been in events and content for at least 15 years. I don't want to date myself too much. And looking at all of this, I said, well, but why? And that why is really important. Why is everyone suddenly willing to spend what had to be about 6 hours a day listening to other people speak on video? And why were the things that I was watching going, oh, this is just painful to watch. It's the driest presentation I've ever seen. It's a shambles of a presentation. And the reason that's important is not because you need to have a very glossy image, but because the the barrier between the audience and the speaker when they're not trying to focus on the face or because they can't see it or because the sound is weird or any of these things. When you have a high broadcast quality, we get someone to have a little more intimate experience. And yet I saw all this settling and all this hustle to just get anything out there. And the why of me just kept bothering me. And I'm seeing it play out now where people are like, oh my gosh, we've invested everything in digital and now all of a sudden there's a huge rate of attrition. And I was like, well, because people are going back to a state of security, or at least a state of needing to move forward in their lives. The best part of the last few years is that our IQ needs to be balanced with our EQ, and we have to have conversations that really look deeply at what it is we're solving for in audiences from an emotional and empathetic perspective? Are we being kind to their time? Are we being kind to, to what it is that they're enduring in their lives? Are we afraid to say negative things when they're thinking them themselves? What are we doing? And I think having a little more self-confidence around vocalizing the why would have been really good for me. When I was younger and feeling like you might ruffle feathers, but if you have the right team and you have people committed to the right quality, then it's better to ruffle a few feathers than to poison the nest. You know, like, that's really the essential thing. And so now I guess I'm happy that I'm less compromising than I was around the quality of content. When I was younger where I would just kind of roll my eyes and be like, I don't think that's going to work, but who knows, someone else says. We still have to be political, but—
Right, right. I think you and I could carry on a long conversation on audience advocacy and narrative strategy, but I want to thank you, and this has been wonderful as a conversation. Thank you, Christina.
Thank you so much for having me, Bill. I really appreciate it. So anytime.
If you're interested in organizational thought leadership, then I invite you to subscribe to the OrgTL newsletter. Each month we talk about the people who create, curate, and deploy thought leadership on behalf of their organizations. Go to the website orgtl.com and choose join our newsletter. I'll leave a link to the website as well as my LinkedIn profile in the show notes. Thanks for listening, and I look forward to hearing what you thought of the show.
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