Thought Leadership In Action

It's been a great week at Avanade. In late July, I talked about "thought leadership" (A Word about Thought Leadership), and its role in creating competitive positioning for companies -- especially for companies like Avanade (an IT services company) that don't sell a product.

For the past two months we've been preparing for a major thought leadership campaign, which kicked off on Sept. 8. The campaign focused on the role and real benefits of social media in the enterprise, especially as it relates to customer relationships.

The campaign was supported with global research, which enabled the countries in which we operate to leverage the information for localized outreach. We timed the press release distribution for the first day of the Gartner CRM Summit, Sept. 8 in D.C. where Avanade was a major sponsor with Microsoft. We also developed a video with Gartner CRM analyst, Ed Thompson. The week prior to the event, our PR team pre-briefed several key journalists and bloggers and continued aggressively this week discussing the results of the survey and Avanade's point of view with influential reporters. In five days, we received more than 50 stories which are now spilling into other countries.

You can view a campaign micro-site here and watch the video, view the executive summary of the research results, read Avanade's point-of-view and read the press release.

The global outreach was synchronized so that Europe began its outreach efforts Sept. 9 -- the day after the U.S. and Canada announcements. Parts of Asia Pacific began discussions the week of Sept. 1, timed to a visit from Avanade's incoming CEO, Adam Warby.

I provide this background of the campaign to highlight the results -- not the press coverage per se but the business outcome we sought and the impact of thought leadership.

One, the CRM-social media campaign positioned Avanade as a business leader -- a company on the forefront of business and technology trends impacting the enterprise. The POV underscored that Avanade has answers to help companies navigate uncharted territory and achieve business results (a core thrust of the research findings which directly relate to Avanade's brand positioning).

Two, the topic resonated with journalists. The general response from press was that this was the first study they had seen that actually demonstrated real evidence regarding the benefits of social media in business.

Finally, the topic generated tremendous amount of conversation among bloggers, creating a viral effect across the blogosphere.

This, in my view, is the power of thought leadership communications.