I've been hearing the term "thought leadership" bandied about a bit lately -- often in relation to content curation. This morning, I read an article on FeldThoughts that set thought leadership in a slightly different light for me.

Brad Feld shared an email he'd received from Chris Moody saying:

When I think about FG [Foundry Group] itself I see tons of "marketing activity" but most of it could also be just be labeled: thought leadership. You sponsor conferences around topics that you care about. Your blog post are rich with "here's why did it and why it matters" instead of "here's what we did". In fact, your whole theme based approach is really about thought leadership focused in a few areas. Foundry Group clearly believes that startups have the power to change the world. You guys spend countless time and effort expressing your opinions on this topic. You write books to support your beliefs.

Thought leadership isn't just picking out the most interesting content on a topic and sharing it all in one place. And it's not just the comments, context, and interpretation you offer for the content you curate.

It's also helping others to feel why it matters by talking about why it matters, and also by showing how much it matters. How do you do that? By letting your love for the topic show through in what you do.

A little over a year ago, Blog Riffing converted me from twice-a-month blogger to daily blogger. That's a big deal to me, and I believe it can be a big deal to other struggling bloggers too, as you may have gathered from the fact that I made up a name for it, created a website for it, and am sponsoring regular Blog Riffing contests (that's a link to the contest that's running till tomorrow).

Is it marketing? Sure. It's partly designed to sell SEO Content Factory. It's partly designed to help me build more relationships with other bloggers.

But the point I'm getting at today is that this kind of marketing through thought leadership is natural, and thus a lot easier, when you're "in love" with the core idea.

Is there an idea that you are in love with, that you could build some thought leadership around, which would synergize well with your marketing?