ROI: the Holy Grail of thought leadership

By Fiona Czerniawska

In Raiders of the Lost Ark, Indiana Jones has to pick the real Grail from a fantastical collection of goblets.  While the bad guy chooses the biggest and gaudiest number and promptly dissolves into skeletal dust, the resourceful Indy rightly selects the humblest, wooden cup and lives to fight another day.

I’m starting to wonder if that same lesson shouldn’t be applied to the various attempts we see to work out the return on investment consulting firms earn from the hundreds of millions of dollars they pour into thought leadership.  I’ve long thought that, for the wise firm, this is more a question of faith: we know that clients simply expect firms of a certain class to produce this material.  Moreover, most attempts to evaluate its effectiveness have ended up in tying people up in costly and pretty pointless knots which may have done more harm than good, the equivalent of the bling-est of the fake grails.

So when I heard that the Institute of Business Value at IBM is doing something much simpler, I was inevitably intrigued.  One way the IBV tracks effectiveness is in terms of numbers of downloads. Whoa, I hear you say, hardly original. Some of you would even point out that that metric can be misleading: how do you know that your content isn’t being downloaded by spotty grads and would-be recruits?  Hardly the market most thought leadership is aimed at.

'But the IBV isn’t measuring only external downloads, but downloads by IBMers. Even worse, I hear you shriek, who cares whether your colleagues read this stuff?  Well, you should care: our research shows that clients think that thought leadership which is personally delivered to them by a consultant they know (either in person or via email) is the single most effective way to market to them.  Material sent to them in this way has been pre-edited so that it’s relevant to them personally by someone who really knows what concerns them - something even the most targeted mailings can’t achieve. In that context, it makes perfect sense to measure how many of your colleagues download material: even if only a fraction of them actually pass it onto their clients, a piece of thought leadership which gets 10,000 downloads is more likely to make it to the outside world than one which gets only ten.

Internal downloads have also been incorporated into a balanced scorecard that's used to provide frequent feedback and to evaluate the effectiveness of team members an ongoing basis.  The result is that people are working closely with the marketing and PR teams, with the web developers; they're blogging and tweeting in unprecedented numbers, while they are working with each other to find new and novel ways of generating interest from its internal audience.

If all that sounds a bit simplistic, let’s not forget that it’s the humble Grail which saves the day.