Thought Leadership: How Fireman Creative Does Business

What is thought leadership anyway?

Thought leadership is a way of establishing oneself as an expert in their field by creating content that provides insight, advice, and other useful information about their area of expertise. It can be a means of marketing in that it gives the writer credibility, which hopefully brings more business. But it also benefits readers by providing insight and analysis that they might not find elsewhere.

At Fireman Creative, thought leadership isn’t just a digital marketing solution–it’s the way we do business.

Before we begin any project, we embark on a thorough discovery process with our clients that allows us to have in-depth conversations about the website’s goals and needs. This process enables us to get inside our clients’ heads and articulate our own thinking so that we can give them a website that fulfills their current goals and can grow to provide for future needs. After the discovery phase, we are able to provide insights and solutions that clients might not have considered before.

Through these conversations, we create the space for our clients to have an “Aha!” moment. We work through the process together and learn from each other so that we can provide the vision that will help our clients tell their stories better.

When Apostle NYC came to us with the goal of increasing Denis Leary’s social engagement in the months before his book of Tweets Suck On this Year came out, we started thinking about solutions. We created TweetRoast, a Twitter campaign that brought Denis Leary and 24 other comedians together to roast the Academy Awards. Viewers could follow TweetRoast or any of the individual comedians involved and Tweet their comments. The campaign engaged 50,000 people and today, Leary has 365,000 Twitter followers.

Thought leadership means that we are always looking for new solutions and that we love to learn about developments in digital advertising. It also means that we write about our experiences.

The Hydrant is our place to blog about our favorite projects and solutions, as well as trends that interest us. We use our blog to educate current and potential clients, so some articles provide insight into the process of building a website. Others talk about trends that we love, like crowdfunding community-based projects that benefit Pittsburgh’s neighborhoods. Still more explain basics in web design and development to explain what we do and how we do it.

In our office we have very specific ideas about what thought leadership means, and what we aim to accomplish with our blog. To us, thought leadership means responding to clients’ needs, anticipating their future needs, and creating solutions that add something new to the digital world. Then we digest and discuss those solutions on our blog.

Learning and teaching are in our DNA, so we love to inspire our clients and followers by pushing relevant, engaging content at full pressure. Tell us what you want to see–we’re always open to exploring new ideas.