I sat down with Mitchell Levy, http://AHAthat.com, for a Q&A session about thought leadership and rationale behind his current Kickstarter campaign.
Q: You have been helping individuals and companies share their thought leadership for as long as I’ve known you (over a decade). What do you see as the next stage for thought leadership?
A: Thought leadership used to be about the person standing on a platform spouting wisdom and their flock following them. This is becoming less and less true today and certainly will not be the case in the future. There has always been a lot of bright, talented people in a specific area, we just didn’t know about them. The Internet and social sharing tools are a great equalizer.
Now anyone who wants to learn just has to google or search on Youtube (or other platforms) for answers to their questions. There is just so much info out there, how do we know what to focus on? Experts are becoming more focused and have become not just the originators of content, but curators of other people’s content. We want to hear and learn from those that we like, trust and respect who can tell us what’s happening in the marketplace and share with us a solution that they think will work for our situation. In essence, we want our own personal curators … or as I call them AHAleaders. The future of thought leadership are AHAleaders who stay informed with what’s going on in their marketplace and have a closer relationship with their audience.
Q: Does AHAthat support this new thought leadership direction?
A: Yes, absolutely. AHAthat does two things really well today. The platform allows anyone to SHARE and AUTHOR quickly and easily. For sharing, there are over 30,000 quotes that anyone can share on social media in seconds for free.
Yes, free!
In terms of authoring, it typically takes someone 8-10 hours to follow our time-tested proven writing methodology to write their social media enabled eBook. It’s crazily easy and provides most of the same benefits of writing a traditional book, plus more.
Q: What’s the Kickstarter for?
A: We want to make it even easier to share content vs. today’s process of curating quotes one at a time. The kickstarter will fund a scheduling tool that will allow anyone to schedule the sharing of 140 quotes (an AHAbook) in less than a minute. For many, 140 quotes represent more than a quarters worth of content to share. Imagine taking a minute to schedule the sharing of a quarter’s worth of content. Check out http://aha.pub/kickstarter
Q: Is there a gem in the prizes?
A: There are a couple. Not only can one grab an AHAkey that is used to schedule an AHAbook (or a package of 100) at a significantly discounted price, but they can grab a prize of submitting an AHAbook at a discount or the biggest prize costing $5k to get over $10k worth of services. We will not be offering those prices in the future. This last prize is a great for someone wanting to increase their thought leadership (e.g. AHAleadership).
Q: For those reading this post, what do you recommend?
A: It’s hard not to say, please go to http://aha.pub/kickstarter and please back us, even for a small amount like a thank you card or a t-shirt. That said, picking up a discounted rate on submitting your AHAbook or something more is a great deal. So act now.
Regardless of your participation in the Kickstarter, I truly recommend going to AHAthat, registering for an account (this is free) and start growing your network by sharing other people’s content. It truly is an amazing experience. So much so, that pretty soon you’ll want to write your own AHAbook and you’ll be saying to your friends, “Hey, did you AHAthat?”