Page 76 - The Content Code: Six essential strategies to ignite your content, your marketing, and your business - PDFDrive.com

Audience is approximately 5 percent of their total site visitors. Facebook also
provided research that shows people considered to be consistent “sharers” of
content totaled about 5 percent of a company’s total Facebook audience.

So let me introduce you to one of those elite members of my Alpha
Audience, Shonali Burke. Shonali is one of the most respected PR professionals
in the country and President and CEO of Shonali Burke Consulting. She also
teaches at Johns Hopkins University, blogs, speaks, and is an expert in the field
of PR measurement.

Shonali and I first became aware of each other through mutual Twitter
connections and slowly turned this weak connection into a strong one when we
met face to face at a marketing conference. Over the years we collaborated on
several projects, she wrote a guest post for my blog, and Shonali hired me for a
speaking engagement for one of her client events in New York City.

Shonali also reliably shares my content every single day. In fact, she has
become such a fan that she shares the content blindly, setting my content up to
share before she even reads it. Consider this for a minute: As a PR professional,
she is literally staking her personal reputation on my content with an almost
religious sort of faith.

That, my friends, is Alpha. The audience who believes in you at the deepest
level. The audience who will be with you to the end. How does an incredibly
deep connection like that develop? In her own words:

One thing I’ve realized is that if one's business is PR and marketing,
then a certain level of social activity is necessary. It’s the basic litmus
test for service providers in our industry; if prospects don’t see us as
being social, they are far less likely to consider us as business partners
or vendors. So I had to put in place for myself some system of curation
similar to what I recommend to clients, or teach about.

One service I use offers the ability to automatically share people’s
content. Now, I did not choose to do this for a long time, because not
everyone’s content is consistent. That’s fine; we all have our bad days.
But when you are between a rock and a hard place, trying to ensure
you curate at least a minimum level of reliable content, you need it to
be consistent! That means you have to absolutely trust the quality of
content coming from those people.

That’s where your content comes in. You are one of the few people
whose content I always share, because I trust you. I’ve read your blog
for so long now, yet I’m regularly amazed at the smart content you