Page 152 - The Content Code: Six essential strategies to ignite your content, your marketing, and your business - PDFDrive.com
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I knew there was some group out there sharing links to my blog in an
environment behind a firewall. This is “dark social media” … but there
was also a clue for me to know they were out there.
I did some sleuthing to check if any agencies I knew in the city used
this tool. I came up empty until after several weeks, one of them said
through a LinkedIn message that they used it.
It turned out this was a group of marketers who are my exact target
audience — loving my content! I would have never known unless I
had seen this small signal and dug in to investigate. Now that I knew
who they were, I was able to form a business relationship with them.
Is it possible to organize “small signal sleuthing” to discover a whole new
category of passionate customers? Consider:
Somebody I didn’t know left me an endorsement for “digital marketing” on
LinkedIn. This might be the one and only time I hear from this person, their
lone small signal to me that they’re a fan. What if I could determine that
this was no idle act — this person only gives out two endorsements per
year. Wouldn’t that be meaningful to know?
What if a woman among your followers only tweets a few times a month.
Her level of tweeting is so obscure that she’s invisible on the social
analytics radar. But what if you could determine that 25 percent of her
tweets were about your company? Isn’t that a “gray signal” that this person
cares about your content in an extraordinary way?
What if you knew that there is a person who ONLY comments on your
blog? That means something, even if they only comment twice a year.
Chances are, these “gray” messages are not weak signals at all. These may be
the equivalent of the vast, shy, silent majority virtually screaming their love for
you! These signals from our quiet, yet essential, Gray Social Media audience are
beaming to us all the time, but we’re missing them because there’s no easy
process to track, quantify, and develop these subtle leads. Quiet is not irrelevant!
Certainly CRM and marketing automation software are evolving in a way
that can help us begin to discover these quiet voices, but there are still a lot of
limits. Wouldn’t it provide a competitive advantage if you could sift through the
babble on the web better than your competitors to find the important Alpha
Audience engaging in the gray area of the social web?
