Thought leadership—a term that gets thrown around a lot in science communication. But what does it actually mean? And how do you become recognized as a thought leader in your field?
To explore these questions, I turned to someone who’s mastered the art of thought leadership by helping countless science organizations craft and share their ideas through compelling content.
Meet Kat Arney, founder and chief creative officer of First Create the Media, a multi-award-winning science communications agency specializing in life sciences and health tech. Kat brings two decades of experience as an expert science communicator, science writer, public speaker, broadcaster, and author of the popular genetics books, Herding Hemingway's Cat, How to Code a Human and Rebel Cell.
Kat generously joined me on my podcast to share her insights, and in our conversation, she dives into what it really takes to stand out as a thought leader in today’s science-driven world.
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– Thought leadership works best when tied to an individual rather than a corporate voice, with a focus on authenticity, especially on platforms like LinkedIn.
– Consistency in content output is one of the keys to becoming a thought leader.
– The biggest hurdles to thought leadership are budget, bandwidth, and building confidence as a public voice.
Understanding thought leadership in science communication
Could you explain what thought leadership means to you?
Kat Arney: It's very hard to pin an exact definition. If you look at the two words of it, you have thought. So you need to have thoughts and these thoughts should be original and insightful. And then you have leadership, which means you have to put yourself out there.
The organizations that we work with, they're using really cutting-edge technologies. So how do you get that out there, communicate their insights, their science, or their expertise, and communicate that in a way that people will notice, ideally share, and then come to that organization for their expertise, their science, their insights?
Exactly what form that takes may depend on many things like your budget, the channels you have, and who you're trying to reach. With all communications, it starts with the audience. So you start with that and then figure out how you're going to reach that audience with what you want to say.
Would you say that content is always a core component of thought leadership?
K.A.: Exactly. And I think it's moving away from technical content. These are not app notes, tech notes, or even white papers, which are often more like a brochure. I think thought leadership should be tied to a person. So it's someone having a thought rather than a corporate communication.
There's a lot of thought leadership on LinkedIn, for example. And so our clients often ask, “Can you just do our LinkedIn”? That's fine but we try to encourage them to put their personalities a bit more forward.
LinkedIn likes people so you need to be prepared to put yourself into that thought leadership role. Some of them are like, where do I sign? And some of them are not so sure about that or think they don’t have the time for that. So there's a negotiation about what people feel comfortable with, particularly on LinkedIn, where your thought leadership has to be tied to your personal account, and you shouldn't be letting someone else do that. It does need to be you to be authentic, as opposed to things like articles you might put out on a company's blog or other outlets that are bylined by someone else.
The process for getting started with thought leadership
Where do you start when working with a new client on thought leadership?
K.A.: The first thing really is stepping back and asking what are you trying to achieve as an organization? For that first strategic bit, we ask the following question:
- Who are you trying to reach and why?
- What do they need to know about you?
- How are you going to reach them?
- What do you want them to do about it?
So we work through those questions and ask, do you actually have something worth saying that's worth going out with a thought leadership program, as opposed to perhaps a more technical company where it's okay if you really just need a program of assets that explain your technology rather than building that thought leadership.
So we start with the strategic goals, who you're trying to talk to, what you're trying to say to them, and as part of that, is there a place for this more personality-led content?
Once you have identified the strategic goals, what are the next steps?
K.A.: If our client doesn’t have the time or the bandwidth to write the content, or if they're not a hugely gifted writer, we would sit down, usually for a half-hour call with that person, and ask them to share their thoughts on a topic like their vision for the next year or where they think their technology is heading. And it should be their thoughts.
I often say we're not mind readers, so you need to tell us what you think! Often, all those thoughts will come tumbling out with a whole lot more besides, and then we try to make sense of that, turn that into a coherent piece of writing that has a structure, and check whether we've got references if we need those. So it usually all just starts with a conversation and then we turn that into coherent words to support them.
I just love sitting down with leaders, people who think deeply about their company, their place in the world, where this technology is heading. We start a conversation for one piece, but often, it leads to four other ideas of what we should be talking about in the future! So, I've always got my “story antennae” tuned.
How to overcome the challenges of thought leadership
What are the biggest challenges these companies face as they begin to implement thought leadership?
K.A.: I don't think it's a lack of thought. So that's always a good start. I remember back in the day I started a blog, and you sit down at the beginning and go, well, I've got like one idea, but then you get going and then have a million ideas, and there's not enough time in the world to talk about everything. There's never a lack of thoughts once you start getting people to think about it because people have thoughts all the time.
I think the biggest challenge is getting them to see that the thoughts that they're having could be useful. Once that gets going, it does help. It’s building people's confidence, especially if you're asking people to put their names on it or start sharing their own thoughts on their LinkedIn.
And then the other two big ones, as always, are budget and bandwidth. If you're going to hire people to help you with it, you need some budget. If you're not going to hire people to help you with it, you need bandwidth. You can buy bandwidth, or you have to provide it. Because I think the important thing is being consistent.
Whatever cadence it is—whether it's daily, weekly, fortnightly, monthly—you need to commit to that cadence because it makes you think, and it makes you do that on a regular basis. With content, one-and-done is not enough. You do need to be building up this narrative about your organization, your expertise, your thoughts, and how you fit into the world.
How do you build this kind of commitment in the organizations you work with?
K.A.: Signing a long-term contract helps! It's like you're paying for it, you've got to do it now. We work with a lot of our clients on an ongoing basis. We have what we call “editorial calls” every two weeks. We view this as a publication.
My background is in journalism and content production so it's like an editorial call where we are going to sit down and say, right, what are we doing? What's on the docket? What's coming next? What ideas do we have? Let's discuss.
That's the fortnightly cadence job to do. We use a project management system with our clients, so you are then just getting into this cadence of content production, there's never something that you don't know is coming next. It's just turning it into a really effective process and then project managing it. And we pride ourselves on project management and pushing things through.
I think it can be hard if you're trying to do that in-house without someone whose responsibility it is to keep track of what you said you would do and keep to that cadence. If someone's doing it in-house, you definitely need to commit the bandwidth and commit someone to be in charge of it. Even if they're not the person writing it all, it needs project management for sure.
Do you think thought leadership in life sciences is different from other sectors?
K.A.: I think in the life sciences, we should really encourage people to not shirk from drilling into the science stuff but then make sure they're communicating that with clarity. I don't think we should dumb down science.
Let's really get into as much as you can say publicly about what you are actually doing and what you see as the real challenges. Make sure that you're communicating that clearly and appropriately to the audiences you're trying to reach and really drill it down to an engaging hook. Get to the point that you can grab someone's attention, and then back it up with evidence, data, and explanation.
For example, I interviewed the CEO of Biognosys, one of our clients. They're a mass spectrometry service and product provider. They're right on the cutting edge of biomarker analysis and discovery and all sorts of cool things.
The hook was, “You've heard of the $1 genome, are we ready for the one-cent proteome”? That is a hook. Now, let's explain what we mean by that and how we're actually going to get to that.
The hook is the why, you need to ask why someone should care about this and then work backward from there.
Measuring success in thought leadership
How do you measure the success of thought leadership with your customers?
K.A.: You have to define the metrics that are important to you and what you do with these pieces of thought leadership. I really think it's not enough to just publish it. You need to kind of sweat your assets. Can you keep recycling it or use it in a different way? For example, if you're making something like a podcast or a bigger report, you can slice and dice that up into different bits of content to make that content live longer.
It is generally going beyond the clicks and the metrics. This is brand awareness, this is establishing your expertise, it's the very top-of-funnel, where it's really hard to determine ROI. I think you need to be really clear about what you're trying to achieve as a business. And then asking, is this helping you get closer to it?
You can't have a big PR story every month because you're not going to get people interested in a story unless it's actually a good story. Thought leadership is a way of getting yourself out there, generating things that people could respond to, could talk to, building the territory of your expertise and what you want to be known for. I think it all contributes to that. You're almost staking out your turf in terms of the technology, the ideas, your philosophy, your manifesto.
For a company just starting to produce content, what is a realistic timeframe for seeing results?
K.A.: I think it again depends on what you're doing. So if you're just starting on LinkedIn, it's going to take quite a while just to even get to a critical mass of people just seeing your company account. It depends on where you're starting from, but content marketing as a lead generation strategy does take time to manifest.
If you want really, really quick results, just do outbound, work your way through a list and phone up people until they tell you to go away. But the more sustainable way is building that base of expertise and content. That will reap benefits in the long run because it is all building your brand up, and sometimes it's really hard to pin a particular lead down to a specific article.
Case study: ERS Genomics and the CRISPR space
You’ve helped the company ERS Genomics to become a thought leader in the CRISPR space, and according to your case studies, they saved £55,000 in the process. Can you tell us more about that?
K.A.: We were approached by ERS genomics a couple of years ago. They are the license holders for the CRISPR-Cas9 technology that was invented by Charpentier and Doudna. So a lot of what they have is the really fundamental enabling patents for CRISPR and if you want to commercialize CRISPR, you need to license this technology.
But there was a lot of confusion about their role, a lot of confusion about who needed to have a license and why and when. There's a big patent battle with the Broad Institute in Massachusetts and people who got the license from the Broad think they don’t need a license from ERS, but actually, the ERS ones are more fundamental, so the Broad ones kind of build on top of it. Wherever you're going to start from, you need to start with this license.
There were two things we wanted to do for them. One was to make them really known as people who really cared about CRISPR being used and all the applications of it. So getting their name into the biotechnology spaces where people were reading articles about this kind of stuff. So it's kind of saying, hey, there's these cool things you can do with CRISPR, by the way, it is a licensed technology, so make sure you get licensed.
We were also doing some articles aimed, for example, at more technical things like the difference between Cas-9 and Cas-13 or what you need to know about the patent battle.
They weren't specifically trying to generate leads, so it wasn't really aggressively PR. They just wanted to get their name out there and keep getting themselves associated with the domains where people talk about this technology. So we had a strategy of writing articles that we then got placed for free in a whole range of different outlets, and because they weren't too spammy, we got them all placed for free because they were really well written.
We had an incredible hit rate. I think we placed 11 out of 12 articles for free for them. If you compare how much you would have to pay, it's about four or five grand to place an advertorial in a decent outlet. And so we think we saved them quite a lot of money there.
The use of AI in thought leadership
Do you see any new trends in thought leadership?
K.A.: The big trend that people are talking about is generative AI. Can you be a thought leader because you just get gen AI to write your content for you? All right, good luck with that!
I think it has to get a lot better. I don't think you can rely on it to completely do the job for you because you still have to have these thoughts. They should be interesting, original, and authentic. I do see a lot of slop out there that's passing for thought leadership, and you can clearly see it's been written by AI because it's not original, it's very generic, it doesn't quite make sense, and it doesn't seem authentic and specific to the person who's writing it. So yeah, don't do that.
Kat's recommended science communication books
Do you have any recommendations for books on science communication?
K.A.: There's a couple of books that are not about science communication, but I think are very well-communicated science books that I've read lately.
One is a book called Daughter of Family G: A Memoir of Cancer Genes, Love and Fate by Ami McKay. It's just a really beautifully written biography with a lot of deep science in it. She has a hereditary genetic mutation that increases her risk of various types of cancer and it's all about how her family is connected to discovering that mutation. That's just like a lovely scientific detective story and a family story.
Another book that just blew my socks off when I read it, and everyone knows the story now, is Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by John Carreyrou. It's about the Theranos scandal. It's a great sector story, and the book is really good.
If you want books about science communication itself, there are two authors that I like.
There's a guy called Randy Olson, who wrote a book called Houston, We Have a Narrative: Why Science Needs Story, and it's a classic book in science communication. He teaches a framework for storytelling called “And, But, Therefore,” about how you structure a story.
And then, on the corporate storytelling side of things, there's a book called Storynomics: Story-Driven Marketing in the Post-Advertising World by Robert Mckee and Tom Gerace. This book is more about corporate storytelling and how you construct narratives about businesses and ideas. I teach storytelling for startups in a lot of accelerators, and this book completely changed how I teach it.
This brings my interview with Kat to a close. This discussion confirmed many of the insights I have already shared about content marketing, namely that consistency of output is the key to success, that choosing a niche carefully leads to better results, and that thought leadership is a game of patience in which results slowly compound over time.
What stood out most to me was how Kat outlined a simple, actionable process for kickstarting thought leadership: sit down with your leaders, get them talking about topics they’re passionate about, and transform those ideas into engaging content. All it takes is time—or a bit of budget.
