Can AI create thought leadership content?

Think. Write. Lead. - Issue #74. The answer may surprise you.

There are many ways to create thought leadership content.

• If you are an expert at something (or have access to SMEs), you can use your experience and knowledge to create content with unique insights.

• If you have customer or product data (or can do original research) you can leverage that data to create TL content.

• If you have a unique point of view, you can amplify your POV through an original framework.

What if you don’t have any of the above?

Well, you can still be intentional and become a thought leader.

That’s the thesis of my book, The Solo Thought Leader. Anyone can become the go-to expert in their niche if they follow the framework I lay out in the book.

Even the process of writing that book is a good illustration of how to create thought leadership content.

Basically, I found a problem—the existing books and resources about thought leadership assume you are already “someone” with a title or leadership position. Not one (that I could find) showed how the common person could become a thought leader.

So I set out to interview people who had become experts in their fields and asked them lots of questions about how they got there.

Then I transcribed those interviews and looked for common themes that I could use to create a framework.

A long process.

Now, everyone’s using AI to be more productive and complete tasks faster.

So, I decided to try ChatGPT to see if I could create thought leadership content.

With surprising results.

Curious? Let me show you the process.

Tactic #1: Question assumptions to develop a unique point of view

One tactic I’ve used before is to question dogmas and best practices to find a unique, provoking point of view.

So, I logged into my ChatGPT-4 account and used these two prompts.

Prompt 1: What are 5 best practices in [your field of expertise]?

Example:

Prompt 2: Please describe some scenarios or use cases where each of the above best practices should not be applied.

Example:

Nothing groundbreaking, but it’s a good start.

I could have picked one of those and prompted the AI to go deeper and see if I could find some gold.

But I decided to try a different approach.

Tactic #2: Transfer knowledge from other industries to create a new Framework

In my book, I list a few innovation exercises. One f them is to transfer solutions from one industry to another: conducting research about what is working in other industries and seeing how you can bring those practices into your business or category.

You can enlist ChatGPT to help you with that. Here’s how I did it:

Prompt 1:

You are a thought leader in [your field of expertise] and your goal is to innovate and improve [focus area]. Now, you are looking at other unrelated fields for best practices that you can transfer to [your field of expertise].

Please look at best practices in the field of [unrelated field] and draw some best practices and insights that can be applied to [your field of expertise].

Example:

NOTE: Before using “medicine,” I tried “Mechanical Engineering” and “Financial Management” with mixed results.

Out of the five lessons the AI provided, the first two were promising, as data-driven marketing and customer-led growth are trending topics.

Follow-up prompt to go deeper:

These are in fact good analogies I can work with, especially as I have a background as a medical writer and have some ideas.

So I decided to go deeper and explore other angles.

A good thought leadership framework must answer these questions:

• Why should people care?

• Why is this a real problem? (Frame the problem)

Hence, the next prompts.

Prompts 2a and 2b:

NOTE: In my experience, ChatGPT works better if you ask one thing at a time. That’s why I broke the prompt into two.

With the information above, I can start building a case for a new marketing framework inspired by medicine.

But what would be the name of the framework (gotta use Languaging!) and what would be the steps?

I thought about this for a while and decided to try a new prompt in two steps.

Prompt 3a:

That was step one. Now…

Prompt 3b:

Wow, that’s actually pretty cool.

Now I have the elements to create a framework called Evidence-Based Marketing.

All with the help of ChatGPT in less than an hour.

This is just the foundation, but a great starting point to create thought leadership content about Evidence-Based Marketing and begin testing it in public.

If it resonates, I’d keep developing it, seeking feedback from experts and finding examples and case studies.

THINK.

• Are you innovating with your content or do you feel you’re too busy to create thought leadership?

• Have you believed the myth that AI can’t create good content?

• Are you willing to explore new fields to find legendary ideas?

WRITE.

Write your own version of the prompts above and test them with ChatGPT.

Test your own prompts as well and start writing more thought leadership content.

LEAD.

It’s true that as of today, AI can’t create thought leadership content by itself.

Of course, as a LLM, ChatGPT simply predicts what words come next.

But you can feed questions and prompts that will generate the raw content and ideas for thought leadership frameworks (or even new categories).

As someone said, AI won’t take your job. Someone who knows how to use AI will.

Take the lead and leverage AI tools. Don’t be left behind.