Mind Readings: Beware Blanket Trust of Thought Leaders

In today's episode, let's talk a little bit about trust. At this year's Marketing Professor B2B4, Ashley Faust from Atlassian was giving a talk about influencers and subject matter experts and thought leadership and how to know whether you're a thought leader or not. And one of the characteristics of thought leadership that she talked about was authority. Authority in the sense of how much do people look to you as an authority versus how much do people press you for your credibility, your credentials. And one of the things she said was you are a thought leader when people cite you as a source.

You are not a thought leader when people require you to cite your sources, which I thought was a very handy, compact aphorism, a good way to benchmark your authority. When people cite you and they don't require you to cite where you got your information, yeah, you're you're an origination of ideas, you're an origination of thought. You are a thought leader. And I like that definition a whole lot. However, there is a risk, there's a danger to this.

And that danger is the halo effect. What I mean by that is just because somebody trusts you and sees you as an authority in one area does not necessarily mean that the same level of trust should be extended to you across multiple domains of expertise. Unless you actually have that domain expertise. And the same thing is true for anyone else we consider a thought leader. We should be looking at those thought leaders and saying, what is your domain of expertise?

And if if it's true that that person is a thought leader, then when that person ventures out of their domain expertise, we should be cautious about extending them the same level of trust. Now, there are aspects to a person's personality trustworthiness, honesty, openness, transparency. Those probably are going to cross domains. So if a person is trustworthy and honest and transparent in one domain, probably they're going to be in other domains. So from a, I guess you would call that a soft skills perspective, that would carry over.

But the domain expertise itself might not. Let me give you a very practical example. In January of 2020, I posted my first update about what at the time was called NCOV 2019, which we later know uh now know as COVID 19. And I started saying, hey, I think this is a thing. I cited the authorities that I was reading because to me, I'm a marketer, I'm a data guy, I'm a scientist, but I'm not an epidemiologist, I am not a virologist, I am not an MD, I have no medical experience to speak of.

And so from my own perspective, I'm like, okay, I'm going to cite my sources for everything. A, because misinformation and disinformation is so bad on the internet. And this was keep in mind the beginning of the pandemic. Um, and B, because I held myself accountable to say I'm not going to, you know, randomly and wildly speculate about things that are not my area of expertise. So I started publishing these updates and eventually turned them into a newsletter.

And what was interesting was a lot of people started citing me. And that makes me real nervous because I am not the authority. Like I said, I'm not a virologist. I did not go to medical school. In fact, I washed out of pre-med in college.

Um, I didn't make it through organic chemistry, too. I am not qualified as a medical practitioner to be speaking about uh things without somebody saying, hey, what are your sources on that? Right? I can talk about it, but I should be and still do to this day, cite my sources. I still publish my pandemic newsletter, the newsletter that I wish would go away, because I wish the pandemic would go away, but it hasn't, and so here we are.

Um every single newsletter, I still cite my sources because I know myself that I am not an authority, even if other people think I am. I know that I am I do not have the academic credentials, I do not have the lived experience to be able to offer any kind of legitimate medical advice to anybody. I can tell you what I'm doing and I can give you suggestions based on other people I've read, but I'm gonna cite those as much as possible. And so this idea of trust is one that again, we have to be careful with someone who is good at something in one domain outside of their domain. We should probably still be thinking about asking them for citations, right?

If you uh if you look at my martial arts teacher, I would not hesitate to to cite him blanket citation uh uh for his expertise. I won't I don't even have to ask him where he gets his information and stuff. I know where you know his I know his teacher and his teacher, he's an authority on the martial arts and our martial art in specific. For something like fitness advice, a little bit less so. Um, for something like medical advice, I should be asking that person for uh cite.

Um, like what legitimate paper did you read that in? Uh, what uh peer-reviewed paper did you read that piece of advice in? Because there's a lot of stuff that requires expertise that a person may not have. So the takeaway here is give thought to who you consider to be a thought leader in whatever field or industry you're in. Give thought to how much trust you extend to that person, how much you see them in his authority, how much you cite them, and then think about how much trust, if any, you extend to that person outside of their domain of expertise and whether that trust is earned.

Again, that person may have multiple domains of expertise, in which case is totally safe to trust them in in their areas where they are experts. Um, every now and again it might not hurt to ask, where did you get that information from? Is there something that I can take a look at? Is there source material? I'm in the midst of uh as I record this dealing with um you know uh some hate speech on Twitter.

And again, I'm citing myself. I'm I'm not gonna make a claim, I'm gonna say, here's the raw data that I pulled, because even though even in and in this area, even though data is my area of expertise, hate speech and stuff is not. So I'm still going to cite my sources. And if you are creating content with the intent of being a thought leader, um, make sure that you hold yourself accountable, hold yourself accountable, know where you are an expert, know where you are not, and take the initiative proactively to cite your sources for any situation where you think you might not have earned enough trust or where you want to build trust over time by showing that yeah, you are dealing with accredited, validated, reviewed sources. That's today's thoughts.

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