He applied the same type of approach to other areas of his life toward reading, and writing while on his way to becoming a successful author and self-improvement authority.
Get hooked on the GOYBASMA drug that is advocated by the esteemed wellness coordinator, health strategist, and my dear friend, Bruce Colton. The letters in that miracle drug stand for: Get Off Your Butt and Start Moving Around! Game designer Jane McGonigal found herself bedridden and suicidal after an accident. She became consumed with the science behind movement and exercise, coupled with the allure of gaming. From her research, she created the healing game that promotes resilience adding life to one’s years and years to one’s life. Her TED talk is entitled, The game that can give you 10 extra years of life. I highly recommend you listen to her inspirational story and unique numerical case for movement within an enjoyable game-like monitored activity.
Holistic health is founded on movement and the expenditure of energy.
Movement is an unbeatable method of energy expenditure that can be meditative, therapeutic, rhythmic, positively addicting, and genuinely fun to monitor. My sincerest wishes to all of you for happy trekking and tracking!
About Joe
Joe Moriarty has been a public educator for 35 years. His experiences have included: classroom instruction as a math, science, and social studies teacher, coaching of numerous sports and extra-curricular activities, and serving as an assistant principal. His administrative responsibilities consisted of instructional leadership, student behavioral support, staff management, supervision and evaluation. He has worked with students of all ages with a special passion for middle school students.
Over the last six years, Joe has been an educational consultant with the Montana Office of Public Instruction. He is part of the Montana Behavioral Initiative which promotes positive school climate through universal expectations, common language, collection and use of data to make school-wide and individual student decisions, positive interventions, and the reinforcement of best classroom practices. Working directly with a number of schools, Joe administers fidelity checks, guides action planning, facilitates student focus groups, advocates for student voice, and conducts school assemblies in a variety of settings. He trains teachers in the MBI process, school climate and multi-tiered systems of support throughout the state of Montana.
One of Joe’s greatest passions is in the area of student leadership. He has been one of the lead facilitators and presenters at MBI Youth Days for the past five years. This student conference cultivates student leadership through networking and service learning. Students are challenged to return home and continue working on developing their leadership abilities, work at enhancing the positive climate of their school, and make contributions to their community through service. Joe has also been an Adjunct Professor with the Northern Plains Transition to Teaching program at Montana State University. Within this online program, he taught non-traditional students general educational pedagogy, classroom management, and school law.
Joe is a certified speaker with the John Maxwell team whose mission is the development of leaders at all levels. Again, his experience and genuine interest with young people makes him a natural fit to be delivering the Youth Max and Youth Max Plus material to schools and youth organizations. His speaking, training, writing and coaching work is adaptable to individuals, schools and the corporate world.
In addition to his work in public education, Joe is actively engaged in the wellness arena. He recently worked as a health strategist with Two Medicine Health and Wellness and is now an owner of an emerging national company called Peak Health and Performance (PHP). The company mission includes: targeting the national obesity epidemic through coordination of medical services and nutrition, exercise, personal training, health coaching, and peak performance and character development for youth and adolescents. Joe has multiple roles within PHP from strategist and educator to personal health coach. His diverse background and holistic approach to living naturally connects his passions for wellness and education.
Joe currently lives with his wife Marcy in Bozeman, Montana. They are both public educators, active consultants, and lifelong exercise enthusiasts. Marcy and Joe have raised three healthy and dynamic boys, all of whom value wellness.
You can connect with Joe at:
• email: [email protected]
For Wellness Company Information, contact:
• Peak Health and Performance
02 Pine Val ey Rd.
Billings, MT 58101
Tel: 406-698-5472
• Website: peakhealthus.com
CHAPTER 10
YOU … THE THOUGHTLEADER® IN YOUR FIELD!
BY JW DICKS, ESQ.
Ten years ago, Nick Nanton and I founded The Dicks+Nanton Celebrity Branding Agency focused on the concept of Celebrity Branding You …
How to become the Leading Expert in Your Field!
We brought to business owners and professionals, concepts like, “People Buy People” and taught how to get prospects to buy you over your competitor by getting them to know, like and trust you. The fastest, easiest way to do that was to become the expert in your field, no matter what field you were in. We taught our clients that the way to establish yourself as the expert was to write articles in your field, becoming a BestSelling Author® on your topic, get on TV and be interviewed, and in general, provide good valuable content to your targeted customer.
This methodology of building a business based around expert status wasn’t being talked about much back then, but times have changed.
Today, more than ever, people want good, authoritative content from someone they recognize as the ThoughtLeader® in the field.
We launched the Agency with our book, (following our own advice on producing content), Celebrity Branding You , followed over the years by StorySelling, Mission-Driven, (all BestSellers) and soon our forthcoming book, Impact . The information in the books were supplemented by articles, websites, emails, seminars, and Facebook, and with each new media available we tried to incorporate the latest strategies in them to reach our audience.
Along the way, we attracted 3,021 clients in 33 countries, while helping clients to become BestSelling Authors®, TV Guests, make magazine guest appearances, and producing major Emmy award-winning documentaries about successful people sharing their knowledge, and nonprofits changing people’s lives in other ways.
As fun and exciting as these last ten years have been, the next ten years will offer us new opportunities to have a bigger impact on people’s lives and their business. Many of our early teaching concepts have become mainstream. The world is moving much faster and the thirst for new ideas has moved from desire to desperation in many cases.
Information and technology have blended together and the pace today is faster. For example, while once thought a novelty, IBM’s Watson is more than just a Jeopardy winner. Watson has evolved into the AI of the future in categories from medicine to financial technology, and is the platform on which IBM has rebuilt its huge, successful consulting practice.
Still, on a more foundational level, there is an even greater need for the next level expert to lead his/her field with new ideas and applications.
Yes, this decade is already seeing the rise of the ThoughtLeader® – the next generation of Expert that people in every field of endeavor look for to provide a faster road for their own success.
❖ But what exactly is a ThoughtLeader®?
❖ How do you become one?
❖ Do you even want to be one?
These are the questions we will address while showing you the way to become a ThoughtLeader® yourself.
CONTENT MARKETING VS. THOUGHTLEADER®
In many ways, content marketing and Thought Leadership work together.
Content marketing has become a leading way to reach your prospect or customer. It is different from traditional advertising methods. Instead of brash ads yelling how good you are, content marketing is a methodology of attracting your marke
t’s attention with good solid information that your customers are seeking from a reliable source, that saves them time, money and effort required to find answers themselves.
By providing good, reliable content, people seek out the provider of this information as the Expert they could believe in to provide this information, and this creates a stronger bond of trust between the consumer and the provider of the desired content.
A ThoughtLeader® often provides original content of this type to a certain market, but he is also known for providing changing ideas, and unique insights about the direction of the topic or the field of endeavor. In many ways, the ThoughtLeader® looks beyond the surface, and “sees” new ways of using traditional ideas in a field, and may also borrow ideas from other fields adapting them to the current field they are in, or morphing into something new and different.
Elon Musk for example, is clearly a ThoughtLeader® in multiple fields.
From automotive (Tesla), to solar (Solar City), to space travel (SpaceX), Musk’s mind moves in and out from seemingly different worlds and he joins them in sort of a cross pollination, where the answers to the needs of Tesla may be borrowed from something learned in Solar Cities energy farms or SpaceX rocket launches.
Peter Diamandis, one of today’s leading edge ThoughtLeaders® in multiple fields, was the subject of one of our documentaries entitled
“Visioneer.” The movie told of Peter’s creation of The XPrize, a nonprofit organization Peter founded to fund the answers to some of the world greatest problems. In a few short years, Peter has attracted funding for the XPrizes by leading philanthropists and major corporations offering multimillion-dollar prizes to teams of engineers and adventures racing each other competitively – to be the first to solve for the answers and win the prizes. Along the way, Peter has founded or co-founded other multimillion-dollar ventures in human longevity, asteroid mining, AI, and Singularity University, all dedicated to bold ventures for the good of mankind.
And as great as these ThoughtLeaders® are, they are only “super examples” that everyone knows, yet no more important in idea development than the young man in Orlando, Florida who created a low-priced robotic arm and 3-D printed them for a fraction of their previous cost, making them available to an entirely new and different market.
Or take 23andMe, the genetics testing company that battled the FDA for years to let them bring genetic testing to the masses for a fraction of the prices previously charged. Just recently (March 2017), they finally got FDA approval, and home-genetic test kits are on their way to a home near you. Now you can, in the comfort and convenience of your own home, find out if you have the genetic markers for certain diseases you may fear; but with this information, you are armed to look for solutions to remission or even cure.
The ThoughtLeader® today can be an Expert in any field, or as we just noted, in multiple fields. In many cases, the ThoughtLeaders® can’t help themselves to provide information and ideas to others . . . “it’s just what they do.”
The ThoughtLeader® becomes the source of knowledge in a field and helps people sort through the content to determine truth or fiction, and to help consumers find answers to their questions from an authoritative source they are confident in and trust. Once that ThoughtLeader® status is formally or informally bestowed on someone, it is a very powerful element of trust that is hard to break up. The bond created encourages the customer to shift to the ThoughtLeaders® for other products or services provided as an exchange of value to each other.
ThoughtLeadership is also more than just providing information. It also is a smart business strategy to develop at any level of business. Just as IBM uses its computer, Watson, to grow its Cognitive Business strategy, it also uses it as a method of bringing IBM into large businesses that want information on cloud computing and data analytics. By being the Thoughtleader® in these fields through its Watson technologies, IBM is always in conversations when companies talk about them and look for someone to provide high-level services.
IBM may not always get every contract in these fields, but a company would be making a mistake not to at least consider them when looking for this type of service. “After all, a buyer would tell his board of directors … IBM ‘is’ the leader in this field.”
What does this business lesson teach you about using Thought Leadership as a strategic advantage in your field?
Forester’s Laura Ramos says, “ThoughtLeadership impacts business at each and every stage of the buying journey, “we have found companies benefit from it in the early stage … through more inbound inquiries and short listing for contracts, in the middle stage … through faster sales cycles, higher close rates, and bigger deal sizes; and in the late stage … through increased customer loyalty and higher lifetime value!”
In our own business with thousands of clients, we have seen various levels of embracement of Thought Leadership as a business strategy.
Clearly, the clients who “get it” and continue to position themselves in this ThoughtLeader® role, supplying a continuing flow of authoritative content to their customer base, are rewarded by more business from their existing customer base. Additionally, the business process becomes a new marketing strategy that brings in new customers who are looking for answers from authoritative figures who freely provide answers to their questions.
This new relationship between customer and ThoughtLeader® must, like all business relationships, be continually reinforced or others will take the ThoughLeaders® place in this highly competitive marketplace.
From a strategic standpoint, the ThoughtLeader® must continue to maintain a position in the minds of their customer, through a never-ending stream of top-level information in their field. This is certainly done through email but it also must be done thorough other avenues of delivery – such as blogs, articles, newsletters, books, and videos. It is not a one-and-done strategy. It is work to maintain any relationship, and the same is true with customers who are busy with their own lives while you are popping in and out with information they want.
The difference between ThoughtLeader® strategy and hit-and-run advertising and marketing is that the strategy is long-term. Each month you follow the strategy, you are building on the previous month and your relationship with the customer is stronger. They begin to rely on you for the information they need and that begins to create a level of trust.
WHAT TYPE OF INFORMATION DO YOU PROVIDE AS A THOUGHTLEADER®?
As you might guess, this is a very important question that many people don’t get.
A ThoughtLeader® provides information that their customers want: IT’S ALL ABOUT THE CUSTOMER!
Forget that message and you are lost. I don’t care how good your content is, if it isn’t the type of content your customers want, they will lose interest and you will lose a customer. It is very important for you to understand this. The more you vary from the message that brought you the customer, the greater the chance you have of losing them.
If you are a financial planner and your customer was attracted to you because you talked about boomer retirement strategies, you continue to make that your message. The moment you start talking about the financial programs good for millennials, the faster you will lose the attention of the boomer. Yes, you can create a separate educational track and segment markets, but that is very difficult to do and requires double everything content-wise including another targeted web site.
Think about Dave Ramsey. Dave is known for his debt free, financial planning approach to your finances. He has talked about the same approach for years and doesn’t vary his message. He continues to keep his listeners who were first attracted by this message and he gets new listeners who are attracted for the first time.
Does Dave’s message get tiring sometimes? Maybe, just as we tire sometimes of a favorite song. But then when we hear it again, it awakens a sense that had paused for a moment and the good feeling comes back again. So it is in your business market and every market. The art is to try and keep the informa
tion timely but consistent, and all the great ones do it no matter what the industry. It is even true in politics, and you only have to look at Donald Trump and see the lesson applied to politics. Like him or not, the President stays on message. His buyers (his voters), never 1 The Sophisticated Marketers Guide to Thought Leadership , LinkedIn, Jason Miller, Group Manager, Global Content and Social Media Marketing, LinkedIn Marketing Solutions tire of what he has to say and they keep tuned in to the same message.
So will your customers.
BUILDING YOUR THOUGHTLEADER® PLATFORM
To be a successful ThoughtLeader®, you must have a platform. It is your home base where you operate. Dave Ramsey’s main platform is his nationally-syndicated radio show. He does have a website, books he has written and other platforms such as a Facebook page, but his main platform is his radio show. Without the radio show, he would not have the recognition that he has today.
Unfortunately, reality sets in when I tell you that at first it is very unlikely you will have a national radio show as your platform when you first start out, and neither did Dave Ramsey. In most cases, your platform will be your website as you build your reputation as a ThoughtLeader in your field.
The good news is that good, productive websites have fallen in cost the past couple of years and they tend to be less complex. All of this really depends on your budget, but if you don’t have a website your business will be severely handicapped.
Your website should convey very quickly who you are, what you do, and how you can help. Remember, earlier we talked about your content being more about the customer and less about you. This is also true about your platform website. It needs to be more customer driven and less “you” driven.
Ready, Set, Go! (Special Edition) Page 9