Valuable lessons from ten established thought leaders

1. Mark Schaefer ~ @markwschaefer

Mark is a blogger and social media consultant, educator and author of four books – Return On Influence, Born to Blog, Tao of Twitter and Social Media Explained.  What I like about Mark is his sense of community and humanity when it comes to social media (and marketing generally).

LESSON: Be human; use social media to connect with people and build mutually beneficial relationships.

2. Greg Savage ~ @greg_savage

Greg is a 56-year-old former recruitment company CEO who over a period of five years has built a Twitter following of 36,500 and speaks internationally to a growing appreciative audience, thanks to his blog and social media. Greg has embraced Twitter more wholeheartedly than most business professionals and as a result it’s paying dividends for him and his business.

LESSON: Use Twitter in a smart and strategic way to build your platform and grow your personal brand.

 3. Dionne Kasian-Lew ~ @DionneLew

Dionne writes two blogs – The Social Executive and Be Your Whole Self – and has just released a new book through Wiley Publishing. Dionne is very community-minded when it comes to the social web; she’s a prolific curator of other people’s content in addition to her own.

LESSON: Use social media to connect like-minded people with each other and to curated content links.

4. Gini Dietrich ~ @ginidietrich

Gini is a thought leader in the PR and communications industry, the founder of the PR firm Arment Dietrich and the  popular blog Spin Sucks; she’s also an author of two books. What I like about Gini is that she’s active and accessible; she always shows up and interacts with people, whether on Twitter or the comments section of her blog.

LESSON: Relentlessly create and share content that educates, informs and empowers the community.

5.  Rachel Miller ~ @AllthingsIC

Rachel is a consultant, speaker and blogger specialising in internal communication and employee engagement. A former journalist, she publishes a monthly podcast on internal communication as part of the For Immediate Release network. Rachel stands out because she focuses on a sub-set of the broader communications field.

LESSON:  Differentiate yourself by identifying and then taking a thought leadership positioning within a smaller niche of a broader discipline.

6. Jay Baer ~ @jaybaer

Jay’s star has seriously been on the rise in recent years; he’s gone from being an emerging digital marketing blogger several years back to the point where he is now, a best-selling author, highly regarded marketing consultant and popular speaker. Jay turned the theme of one of his keynote topics into a major book called Youtility: Why Smart Marketing is About Help Not Hype.

LESSON: Create and ‘own’ a word that represents a particular philosophy or ethos or way of doing things e.g. ‘Youtility‘

7. Joanna Penn ~ @thecreativepenn

Joanna Penn is a London-based (but location-independent) New York Times best-selling author, speaker, blogger, podcaster and micro-publishing entrepreneur; she has written seven fiction and four non-fiction books that sell in 58 countries around the world. Joanna represents the new breed of creative entrepreneur!

LESSON: Carve out a unique thought leadership positioning by bringing together several passions, or disciplines.

8. Tom Peters ~ @tom_peters

Tom is a well-established thought leader; he’s a best-selling author (‘In Search of Excellence’) and speaker and a “professional agitator, labeled the Red Bull of management thinking”. At an age when many mega successful business professionals might be thinking of slowing down, Tom continues to provoke the corporate world with his progressive ideas around management theory.

LESSON: Stay true your personal brand over the journey.

9. Gary Vaynerchuk ~ @garyvee

Gary Vee, as he is commonly known, is a best-selling author, an in-demand speaker, angel investor and founder of digital branding agency, VaynerMedia. A larger-than-life character, Gary is a prolific content creator and has relentlessly leveraged the power of video to grow his profile and spread his views and ideas, firstly about wine (Wine Library TV) and now with his #AskGaryVee series.

LESSON: Use video to tell your story and spread your ideas.

10. David Meerman Scott ~ @dmscott

David is the author of social media ‘bible’ The New Rules of Marketing & PR as well as seven other books. His popular blog Web Ink Now is jam-packed with useful ideas and stories and provocative opinion pieces. David has the ability to weave experiences from his day-to-day life – e.g. music and travel – into the content he produces for his blog and books.

LESSON: Add a dimension to your content by incorporating stories (and lessons learned) from real-life experiences.

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