Thought leadership. Two simple words, but a complex concept that’s misunderstood by many marketers. The big question is: what in the actual f*ck is thought leadership?

In this inaugural episode of The Notorious Thought Leader podcast, Ashley Faus, the Director of Integrated Product Marketing at Atlassian, joins Erin Balsa to: 

“At its most basic definition, thought leader is have thoughts, be a leader.” - Ashley Faus, Director of Integrated Product Marketing at Atlassian

Ashley is a marketer, writer, and speaker. Her writing has been published in TIME, Forbes, MarketingProfs, and HubSpot. She has spoken on various marketing topics — including thought leadership — at INBOUND, Content Marketing Conference, and Slack Frontiers. You can follow her on LinkedIn.



2:01-2:44 — Primary thought leadership attributes (Ashley): “If we map it back to my four pillars, thought leadership is about credibility, it's about having a profile, which is really around that external influence piece. It's about being prolific — so it's not just One time you had one smart idea, it's How are you shaping the conversation? How are you driving it forward? Then it's about strong depth of ideas … You have to be doing something in a new way, in a novel way. You have to be codifying those ideas in a way that other people can execute them.”

3:43-4:10 — Where most subject matter experts struggle (Ashley): “Most of the folks that I work with struggle to be prolific. I think that in large part, it's because I work with a lot of technical folks. They’re articulate. They're smart. They create a lot of internal content on Slack. At Atlassian, we have a very strong internal blogging culture. The stuff that I see internally in our Confluence instance is so smart, and numerous times I'm like, Can we share this externally?”

5:52-6:13 — Repurposing internal content for external use (Erin): “At my last job, I would look at these documents — things we were presenting at all company meetings — and think, This is brilliant. Somebody spent probably four to six hours putting this deck together. This is stuff that our audience would die for. I started taking it, blogging about it, turning it into open public templates because it wasn't proprietary stuff.”

7:15-7:42 — Record and repurpose unique insights as content (Ashley): “Record everything. If somebody gives a talk, whether that's internally or externally, record it, get the transcript of it. You can then start to turn that into a series of posts or one big long-form blog post or contributed article. If somebody does a podcast, great. Listen to the podcast, rip it, potentially see if there's any big quotes or bite-size sound bites that you could put into a slide deck. Then that turns into a carousel on LinkedIn … Break out of the mindset that each thing belongs in its original format.”

9:28-10:09 — The trouble with outsourcing thought leadership (Erin): “I have seen a lot of thought leaders who are clearly creating their own content for years. I follow them religiously. I know how they talk and think and act. And then you can tell immediately when they've started to clean their hands and outsource it … Ghostwriting can only be done with strong collaboration with your internal thought leaders, the people with these unique ideas. They don't have to write every single post, but you can't just sit down with them for five minutes once a month and come up with all these posts on behalf of them — if you don’t have that original fodder.”

21:00-21:14 — How to overcome low credibility due to job title (Ashley): “Some people are low in credibility, because they have a sales title, so they don't have a good title. Marketers don't have a good title for thought leadership. That's pretty easily solved by just changing the title in some cases.”