Marketoonist: "Thought Leadership" cartoon

Weekly hand-drawn business cartoon from Marketoonist Tom Fishburne

Author

Tom Fishburne
August 12, 2024

Welcome to Marketoonist, the cartoon I’ve been hand-drawing to poke fun at marketing and business nearly every week since 2002. Was this email forwarded to you? Please subscribe here.

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Thought Leadership

In 2008, I brought my team to see Seth Godin speak at an event in London. There was a Q&A at the end, and someone asked Seth how he found time to do all the things he did — write so many books, keep a daily blog, and personally respond to every email he receives.

Seth’s answer left an impression on me. He replied something along the lines, “I don’t go to meetings and I’m not on Twitter.”

At the time, Twitter was just a year or two old, and it seemed like anyone with aspirations to build and connect with an audience was on Twitter, incessantly.

Seth was the most well-known thinker in marketing How could he eschew such an emerging platform?

But he described Twitter as a distraction. And instead he decided to focus on a few things that made Seth uniquely Seth — including his daily blog he started in 2002. That’s a rare feat of continuity, made possible to choosing not to do other things that it seemed like everyone else was doing.

I think of that exchange whenever I see cookie-cutter advice on how to be a thought leader. Or how to build and grow an audience. The advice often focuses primarily on the where and how (which platforms and what frequency of posting are essential) rather than the what (the message you’re actually trying to convey).

Some of the expectations for “feeding the beast” on content creation are super-human, as Mark Ritson described recently:

“What is a marketer to do in the face of such numbers? Spend the next 10 years in their underpants trying to come up with something – anything – to say across various platforms every few minutes, while adding inane comments to as many other posts as possible?”

This of course is where AI promises to help, And yet the content creation arms race is just part of what Mark Schaefer once described as “content shock”: “the emerging marketing epoch when exponentially increasing volumes of content intersect our limited human capacity to consume it.”

Or as Mark Ritson put it:

“The digital snake eats its own pixelated tail.”

Keynote speaking

Big thanks to Juan, Melissa, Luke and the whole Martech World Forum crew for hosting me to speak about “The Funny Side of MarTech” in Santa Clara last Thursday night. Please let me know if you’d ever like to talk about bringing levity to any events you’re planning.

And here are a few upcoming speaking events. Hope to see some of you there!

Cartoon from the archives

Here’s a related one from 2017.

Thank you for all of your support (and cartoon material)!

-Tom

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About Marketoonist

Marketoonist is the thought bubble of me, Tom Fishburne. I first started drawing cartoons as a student in the Harvard Business School newspaper (not quite as well-known for humor as the Lampoon) and later started this newsletter from a General Mills cubicle in 2002. The cartoons have followed my career ever since. I poke fun at the ever-changing world of marketing and business because I believe that laughing at ourselves can help us do our best work.