When Ideas Disrupt the Status Quo | Trevor Merriden | 370

How do great thought leaders successfully connect their content to their business objectives in a way that causes real impact? It's all about strategy. Strategy is the most overlooked piece of thought leadership. Even with compelling stories, brilliant insights, and a drive to share with their audience, some thought leaders fail simply because they didn't know how to craft a winning strategy to deploy their content. Our guest today is Trevor Merriden, Founder and CEO of Merriborn Media Ltd, a company that puts businesses on the fast track to content competency. Trevor started his thought leadership journey as an economist, finding the stories in numerical data. He took those insights and became a business journalist, helping Human Resources (or, in UK terms, the Personnel Department) find more strategic approaches to telling those stories - and delivering them with impact. After taking the role of editor as far as he could, Trevor started his own company. Now, he helps business clients deploy their thought leadership content with comprehensive, successful strategies. Trevor discusses the future of thought leadership, and how the field might grow and change as it evolves. Trevor also shares the three C's: Curiosity, Clarity, and Collaboration; when used effectively as a strategy, these can give your insights the impact and reach necessary for success. In addition, we discuss how the pandemic has had an impact on thought leadership, encouraging people to make better use of time and technology and allowing ideas to move faster than ever before. We also discuss the pitfalls of the virtual world, and how quiet voices can be lost amid the noise - unless they possess a strategy to help draw attention to their insights. Our conversation covers how a thought leader can grow from any role where a passion for curiosity and storytelling exists. Three Key Takeaways:

• If you have a driving curiosity to find answers and share insights, you need to be part of an organization that will support your creation of thought leadership content.
• Organizational thought leadership content needs to keep the strategic goals of the company in mind.
• Thought Leadership doesn't have to be a solo mission. The world's largest problems will require collaborative efforts.