This very impressive study by Onalytica looks into the employees' online presence & influence from global consultancy firms. It is well worth diving into seeing the leaders, the key topics being shared and further analysing how they have achieved their results.
You can quite quickly see the organisations with the largest number of 'key opinion leaders' online through the analysis of Twitter and Linkedin. However I think a more important insight is on page 7 that finds only 27% of employees are driving commercial impact and 73% of employees are socially active but not connected to topical communities or c-suite professionals.
In my opinion content marketing has to be focused on creating client-relevant, tailored, expert, timely and value-added content that then reaches the right people. I am sure for each of the employees/opinion leaders in the firms cited in this report (Deloitte, PwC, AlixPartners, PA Consulting, EY etc) there are not 1000's of the right people but perhaps the 100s at most.
So whilst I would celebrate the success of some of these firms number of opinion leaders, content sharing I would most certainly now be focusing on increasing the engagement with the right people. I'd love to hear from the top employees ranked in page 25 whether they have examples of engagement that is driving business forward.
As David Ogilivy said 'Don't count the people you reach, reach the people that count'.