Last week I wrote an article about who should write your online content. It was an expansion of the Six Types of Online Content section of my book.

The gist of the article was a that each type of content is different, and therefore should be written by different people. Not exactly groundbreaking. One thing that I said, though, which I guess not everyone agrees with, is that people should blog in their own voice, for themselves.

I got an e-mail from a professional copywriter who said that she often blogs and writes speeches for busy CEOs, and that they often are very happy because she can say things better than they can.

This was my response to her in my e-mail:

I understand your point about busy CEOs and such. My strong belief, though, is that (barring a gross inability to communicate [which is rare among successful leaders]) those busy people, from fortune 500 CEOs to small business owners, should find some of their other work to outsource before they give up expressing their own opinions/ideas/etc on their blogs and Social Media accounts-especially if Thought Leadership is an important goal. These are not press releases I’m talking about, or sales copy. This is not “Here’s how great the company is doing” PR blogging. I’m talking about giving the public a glimpse into the insight and inspiration that is driving the company. If the CEO/Founder/Owner/Director doesn’t have some kind of magic secret sauce unto herself that no one else (even a good writer) can copy, then why is she in charge? And why should the rest of us care?

You could get a lot of different points out of this. Certainly this exchange covers a number of issues, from what leadership should be doing, to the quality all for authentic communication, to the economic benefit of outsourcing.

If you read my blog long enough, you will start to get a sense of what I think about all of those topics.

But the one thing that I want to specifically draw your attention to, is the “secret sauce.”

Thought leadership is not about social media. It is not about blogging. It is not about networking. It is not about using the latest technology, or having an iPhone, or any of that other stuff that the media likes to talk about.

Thought Leadership is about the secret sauce.

Nobody subscribes to your blog or seeks you out at a conference or twitters with you based on your well-written press releases that tell the world about how great your company is, or how innovative you are, or what benefits the new features of your new gizmo will be most beneficial, or any of the other crap that corporate blogs like to talk about. People will not recognize you or your company as a thought leader based on good sales copy, or well-crafted corporate communications material, or any of the other things that you should be hiring professional writers to do for you.

Those things are important. You should have well-crafted press releases, and precise sales copy in your brochures, and carefully worded corporate communications. You need all those things.

But they are not Thought Leadership.

You are a thought leader because of your secret sauce. You’re a thought leader because you have something unique to say, something unique to contribute, something unique that no one else has. It could be your method, it could be your ideas, it could be your source of inspiration, it could be the peculiar way that you string words together. Whatever it is, it’s the thing that makes you qualified to be a CEO or a founder or an entrepreneur or a what ever. It’s the thing that makes you qualified to be a thought leader. If you have that, then you should be writing in your own voice. If you really truly have it, then it should be obvious that a writer, no matter how good they are, cannot simply copy you.

And if you don’t have it, then you are not a thought leader.