Dark Social: What Is It, How Can It Be Measured and How Does It Work?

All right, welcome back to Agency Journey. I'm your host, Gray MacKenzie from Zen Pilot. And this week I've got the pleasure of bringing on Shema Heider, who is the CEO of Zen Media, which is an awesome PR and marketing firm for B2B companies. But she's also an author speaker, and I'm super excited to have you here, Shama. Welcome.

Thank you, Gray. Cheers. I'm addicted to tea these days. Yeah, like, it's not even just. It's not even these days. That's a lie. I just, like. I think I drank, like, eight cups a day.

What are you drinking right now?

This is chai. So this is, like, very. This is Indian tea. Closest thing would be, like, people who get chai lattes at Starbucks. But yeah, it's like black tea, milk and sugar. It's like very traditional Indian tea.

Do you drink coffee at all?

I don't.

I. Those were my. I've got a whole history of weird resolutions, but one of mine going into college was, I'm not going to get addicted to caffeine, so I was going to refuse to drink coffee. So I haven't had any coffee. Let's see, that would have been 2007 when I went to school. So however many years that is. 15 years. Zero.

Wow. Good for you.

But you'd be ashamed of my tea drinking habits. I'm like. I'm never like, here's a bag of peppermint from the store. Whatever's on the shelf. I have zero refined taste when it comes to tea.

Okay. If you like off the shelf stuff, I highly recommend Trader Joe's.

Okay.

They have a amazing, like, night tea. They call it, like, Dreamtime or something. And it's really great. It's got, like, lemongrass and chamomile and. And all the good stuff. So if you are gonna do, like, off the shelf, then, yeah. And it's. I don't. Hey, look, I'm a mom of two, so caffeine is. Is my friend. I don't want to say, but I think I didn't grow up in a household with coffee, right? So. So I grew up in a chai household. My parents drink a lot. Like, that's just what you drink. And. Thank you, Colonialism. Because we're like, tea time is always a big thing in our house. And so, yeah, I think that's kind of just what stuck is having tea.

That's amazing. Well, come for the agency content, stay for the tea recommendations.

Seriously, I will not steer you wrong.

I love it. Zen Media. So we Both share. We've got companies here. You're the first guest on the podcast who also has an eight letter domain name.com that starts with Z E N for Zen. Why Zen Media?

Yay. Okay, so. And I'd love to hear why Zen pilot, by the way, because I would. It cool. Yes. So, and you know, agency names are so interesting, right? You can go so many, so many ways with them. So my first book that I ever wrote was called the Zen of Social Media Marketing and it was one of the first books on social media. Like didn't. The topic didn't exist. The books didn't exist. So it's really one of the first books. I wrote the original one in 2009. Now, like me, the latest is the fourth edition. And my whole point of writing this book was I saw people trying to use social media, say, trying to use, I put that kind of in air quotes as if it was an old marketing channel or like an advertising channel. So it was like this is like a billboard, right? Or this is tv. So they treated the channel like digital, the same way they treated any type of older communication format that they may be familiar with. The problem was this was your first two way channel. This wasn't like a one week. This was not a broadcast channel. Right. That was one element of it. So the companies and brands I saw really struggle with this were the ones that kept clashing. Like they kept trying to force their norms and what they knew onto a platform that they didn't fully understand that they might not, you know, fully even appreciate. And they had a lot of conflict. So I was like, what's kind of the right way? And the Zen way really was, what if you understood this fully? What if you understood the landscape and what it was meant to and then you harness that power. So Zen wasn't like some of, you know, wasn't my take on like an enlightened. There's no Buddhist background there. It simply was, what if you marketed to your customers, your prospects in a way that aligns? Right. So you go with the flow. So that's really what Zen meant to me. It was like, go with the flow. And then. Yeah, and then that's, that's kind of how. So the book came first. We were called. We've had many iterations, you know, as I think all good agencies should. You have to evolve to serve your customers. And we were marketing Zen and then we grew really beyond that, right. To serving again our customers and the way they were changing. And then Zen media is where we landed.

Yeah. That's awesome. I found a video from you, by. With you from south by 2009. Just talking about social and talking about that was probably shortly either before or after the book had come out. But that, I mean, like, there's very few folks who were writing about social media obviously in 2009, so you're early to the curb there. And I think that that totally makes sense. With the Zen media side long evolution, you talked about the different, kind of, the different steps in the agency journey. Can you give everyone kind of the profile of what does Zen media look like today?

Yeah. Before I do that, you have to tell me, how did you land Zen Pilot? And by the way, I'm impressed, slash embarrassed that you found a video from 2009. I'm like, oh my goodness. I. I could have used. I could have used a better haircut.

Anyways, a few skill sets, but Internet sleuthing is, is one of the amazing. Do my research. The short version is since 2013, this is similar to your story. We've had multiple stages. We first tried to solve the agency operations and project management problem through a project management software that was called Do Inbound. So I talked about before we started recording our roots in the HubSpot and inbound ecosystem and wound up rebranding as we transitioned from a software company to basically helping folks get the team behaviors and processes and systems right on top of someone else's software. But the same mission has always been there, which is how do we take all the chaos that we think is just normal in agency life and create as much clarity for team members as possible. And so the idea of Zen Pilot was we want the calm and clarity of Zen. Again, same thing. No Buddhist roots or anything, but that Zen idea. And we want to empower agency leaders, agency operators to be the pilot to guide their team to that clarity and to a Zen state.

At the end of the day, I love it. And great, you did not pay me to see this, but our team has obviously worked with you guys. We talked about this before we went online and they had a really great experience. They're clamoring now to do more. So we're having those internal discussions as I shared with you, but clearly you guys have found a great niche and you've found a way to deliver on that value. So kudos to you on that because I think we all know how challenging that is. Right? There's like the marketing agency and like the deliverability side, and they're both such massive, massive undertakings. You asked me how you know where we are as an agency. And so I started the company by myself. A little background in 2009 was like one employee. We grew very quickly. We passed a million in revenue, I think in like our first two years or whatnot. I was 22 and knew nothing about starting a business. I only knew about marketing and social media and how passionate I was. Today we're 65 people and we do, you know, PR marketing for predominantly tech driven B2B companies across industries. Professional services, manufacturing, SAS, you name it. B2B generally requires a higher level of sophistication, as you all know. You're speaking to a more discerning audience. You know, it's a more sophisticated audience. The language has to be a little bit different, your strategies have to be slightly different. Generally a much bigger buyer pool. Like meaning you're not necessarily even selling to one person. There's multiple people decision making process. It's quite complex. Part of what I try to do is educate people on how the buying process has changed for buyers. Right. Um, and so yeah, I, we're, you know, if I was, to be really honest, I'd say we're like a share of voice agency because what we PR is part of it, but so is content social. It's really the overlap. Like if you were going to do concentric circles, it's kind of like that sweet spot in the middle. And the majority of our clients that come to us, they want more market share. That's kind of what it boils down to. Right? And so, so many times pr, especially I think pr, a little less marketing on, I think gets a bad rep, but focuses so much on placements or like the vanity metrics or whatever. And what we really try to look at is, okay, but how will this move the needle for our client's business? How does this get you more revenue, more sales, more like what is it that you're trying to. And in fact, when clients come to us and they're like, oh, I want more placements, we're like, you're not like, yeah, we can get you that, but that's not even an ideal client for us. Right. Similarly, I'm sure if someone comes to you and they're like, we just need you to do this one template. You're like, yeah, we could do it, but like, what's the goal? Like, what do you want this template for? Like, what are you actually trying to accomplish? So those are the conversations we have and we have an amazing team. We've been remote from the start. So Covid really didn't change how we do business. I what it has changed is people's acceptance of a distributed workforce. That's such a sexy term now. Distributed workforce. Right. When I started the company in 09, and we'd never Office people would be like, oh, where's your office? And I would, you know, jokingly say the cloud. And they would say, is that uptown? And I'd be like, yes, way uptown. You know, like one of those. Like one of those questions. So this idea that you could even be remote was such an anathema in the business world. So, yeah, we're remote. We work with clients around the world. A lot of our clients have global operations. We actually work with global clients who want, like, to grow in the US And US clients that want it. It's really kind of fascinating. So a lot of the work that we do has global implications. And boy, I mean, talk about the world is flat, right? Changing constantly. So I will say, as part of our agency evolution, you know, when you first start, you try to do everything right. I think that's like, people listening to this might be like, oh, yeah, you're like, we could do so much. Because I think you come from a place of wanting to help. So you're like, you need help with your website. Of course I want to help you. You need help. Like, I want to help you with everything. Right. Because I can or because we can and we're good at. And then as you grow, you're like, okay, but to scale and to make a business sustainable. And so now it's actually funny because we focus on the things we're really good at. We actually partner with a lot of other agencies, so we don't do web development, like E commerce. We don't touch any of that stuff. We have great referral partners for different things. And so, yeah, I think that's been kind of fascinating in our agency journey. And we're continuing to grow. I'm not slowing down anytime soon. We're looking at a few acquisitions right now, strategically to how we keep growing. And the goal is always the same, like, how do we better serve our customer base?

Yeah, that's amazing. So I want to make a hard turn here, but I want to come back to a couple of those things. And this is not a hard turn because you were talking about this in terms of what's the scope of services and what do people come to us looking for and what do they really need? Two separate things. I'd reached out to you after you put out a post about Dark Social, and it's kind of a buzzword that is getting a lot of. A lot of play right now thanks to you and a bunch of other people. But it's a. You know, I don't think the concept itself is new, but it's a new term. Can you share what. What dark social means and kind of how that. How that ties into the client engagements that you have or how you're advising brands based on the concept?

Yeah, great question. So here's the thing, right? Neither the concept nor the term are actually news. Like, this is 2012 13, when it was one of the writers for the Atlantic that actually coined the term dark social, and we wrote about it in 2014. Like, it's so funny. Sometimes you talk about things and you're so ahead of the time. They don't even, like, click for people and you're like, okay, all right, crickets, whatever. It's funny because it's very meta for how dark social actually works. But. But today you see it, right? You see it so much, so vividly. And a good example of also, this is like, AI. So, yeah, we've been talking about AI for a long time, and it's not. The concept isn't new. We talk about, like, there's movies and, you know, there's. There's so much we've. We've seen about, like, the future and futuristic things. But look at AI today in its current form. It's very different, right? You can see it, like, look at all the tools and apps and different ways that we're using artificial intelligence. So I think very similarly, that's dark social. Like, yes, the term's been coined, the concept has been there, but it's never been as vivid to see and experience as it is now. And part of that is just the speed of the Internet and how I think the pandemic really accelerated quite a few things as well. So just for people who don't know, like, okay, what is dark social? Very simply, it means that the majority of social media engagement, if you will, happens where you can't see it or track it. And we have. I call this other. It's called data delusion. I feel like we're so stuck on data and we want everything to be able to connect dots, right? We're obsessing over the tangible when so much of it happens in the intangible, and rather than understand it, and I don't know why, like, it's funny because, like, people say, well, how do I know it's working? I'm like, have you tried asking Your customers, right? It's like shocking. It's like, wait, wait, it can't be that simple. But what if it can? Right? So that the idea of Dark Social is. Is very simply how information gets shared and how people. It's not quite word of mouth, because this is like word of mouth on steroids. And it's. How do people engage with your content? Most of the time it's where you can't see it, you can't hear it. So, for example, I. This is. This is actually a perfect example. Gray. My team used Zenpilot. I did not know about this. Like, I didn't know about you guys. The team researched it on their own. They found you guys. Now, we've been having internal discussions. I've seen some of your posts. I've googled Zenpilot and gone to your website, whatnot. Right? Now, if you look at that from a strict perspective of like, hey, how did this person find us? What are you gonna see? Like, oh, direct search. Someone googled us and found us. But that's really misleading, isn't it? Because that's not how I found you. And like, it's the same of when you read something, how many times do you comment on it publicly? And you're like, this is a great article, Bob. You don't do that. Chances are you share it in Slack with your team or. Or you send like, how many times do you DM a funny reel right, to a friend or a buddy? Or you're like, this is so fun, but you're not commenting on it. You might not even like it. And so the idea of dark social is like, so much of your content is being consumed and you are influencing people. You're like, I wrote about this in Zen of social media marketing. That's how old this is. Consumption plus time equals customer or client. And that's the part that people are like. Just because someone's not engaging with your content doesn't mean they're not consuming it, doesn't mean these conversations are not happening. Like, it blows my mind why more people don't use LinkedIn or use it correctly. Because they'll spend millions if not billions on trade shows, right? It's a massive industry, yet LinkedIn is like a huge trade show every single day. All your buyers, your partners, your team, like they're there. Why would you not use that platform? Why would you not, you know, engage with it? So, yeah, so that's kind of dark social. That's why I'm so gung ho about it. And I think this should actually make anyone listening here feel better. Because if you're putting out content and you're like, oh, but we're not getting engagement, what does that really mean? And think about your own habits. Do you engage publicly? I talked about this actually even a few years ago about the generational differences. Gen Z is actually a lot more likely to comment and put emojis and certain things, whereas older millennials, Gen X being like, they're, they're the wallflower generation when it comes to digital. They're consuming, but they're not letting you know that they're there. Right. Think about all the decisions that you make in a day or a year and how much of that does the company get to track? So I think this obsession that we have of everything has to be trackable and is actually very much toward detriment and it convinces people that social doesn't work or whatnot. Just because they can't have. Like, I can't hand you a red thread, pull it to me and be like, oh, look, Gary, it's a straight line. Not like. Right. Not how. Not how decisions get made. So I think that's. Those are some of the key elements there that are sort of missed by people who think they can use social media and, uh, and then find. Find that. Oh my God, it's not working. Meanwhile, you look at their websites like you're not even asking people how they found you.

Yeah.

What are you depending on? How do you know? I just think it's amazing how we create marketing strategies in a silo. Just yesterday actually talked to a prospect and they were like, can you give us a 2023 plan? And I was like, yeah, but it's not going to do you any good. Like, we should focus on one quarter. And they've never done anything market. Right. Like, they're new to the market. Like, you should actually see what's working for your market. Try it, and then you'll have a much more strong basis to build on rather than let's throw some spaghetti at the wall. There is a time and place for that, sure. But coming up with these grand strategies and like, you know, my team knows I'm such a fan of execution. I'm like, execute, execute, execute. Doesn't have to be perfect. Get it out there. Because all that time we spent in like making something perfect and speed. Speed is your friend.

Yeah.

Anyway, so that might be actually more entrepreneurs than not, but I'm very speed driven. And. And yeah, so great that that is sort of a long answer to what you asked about in terms of.

I think it's great. So I was, I was going back through the notes as you were talking. So we asked when we got connected with, with your team, how'd you find out about us? And someone talked to our friend Carl Seikus and mentioned Zen Pilot as your team is transitioning to ClickUp. And, and so anyways that was what we've got. And so that, that's one approach. Obviously if you're in B2B sales you can have your team. That should be a standard part of your sales process. Hey, great to connect today. How'd you find out about us? Or how'd you hear about zenpilot? How'd you come across us? And you know there's going to be some, some people will say one thing and it was actually something else. So I find that people misremember and in E commerce, you know you can do post purchase surveys or you know, there's a million different ways that you could go try and get attribution but kind of high level like what are your recommendations for agencies who want it? Because it's very easy as an agency to say hey, it's hard to get perfect attribution so you should just trust us that we're doing a good job. How do you still present value as an agency? Do you need to go to farther down more meaningful business metrics? Do you need to implement some of these attribution techniques like what are the recommendations you have for other agencies who are struggling with this?

Yeah, great, great question. So I think here's the thing, like what you mentioned qualitative, especially for B2B because you're. Most of our clients sell big ticket items. Like you're not selling widgets, you're not selling pencils. Right. You're not like none of that. So, so it's actually quite easy to ask your prospects like where did you hear about us? And also understanding that it is a very complex process too. Like it's not going to be Carl who you mentioned, amazing guy. It's like a great community of folks who trust him but it's never, it's rarely even one thing. Like the business coach I work with right now, his name is Charlie, he's amazing. His company is called Predictable Profits. We've been working with Charlie for two years and, and the way I found Charlie was two of my fellow entrepreneur friends were like hey, have you heard of Charlie? Like he's, we're working with him and you know, it looks like he's, he's Got a really good pulse on agencies and how to help them grow. And I was like, okay, cool. Then we're part of another group. And Charlie's name kept coming up. So it's hard to say, like, hey, it was this one thing. So when Charlie asked me, like, hey, how'd you find me? I'm like, oh, our buddy Duran. But it wasn't our buddy Duran. It's really this. Like, I think that's important too, is the way people. Part of it. So to answer your question, part of it is helping clients understand that these decisions aren't made linearly. Like, doesn't matter what the answer that they want. Like, I'm not going to give them a magic number because it makes them feel better if it's fake, right? Like, but there are, there are KPIs that we look at. And so one of the things that we're so gung ho on and what I double down is share Voice. Because inevitably you. And that is something you can measure. Share Voice is how much do people talk about you over a competitor in your space? And the cool thing about Share Voice is we know, like, this is fact. Nielsen does tons of research and runs the ratings on it. Whoever has the greatest share of voice also has the greatest market share. This is true of Coca Cola. This is true of Tesla. This is true of, you know, IBM's. The old adage used to be like, you can't, you know, you can't go wrong with Big Blue. And so part of what I also try to help folks understand is in B2C, a customer's trying to avoid regret. Like, man, I don't want to buy those shoes and think, like, shouldn't have bought those shoes tomorrow, right? Like, am I going to feel happy with my purchase, post purchase? That's why I think post purchase, by the way, marketing is so important too, because so many people have that. And it's like, did I make the right decision in B2B? It's not regret, it's. They're trying to avoid blame. That's. That's really it, right? And even in the best of cultures, like, what is my team? Like, they're going with Zen Pilot. Like, no, look, Carl recommended it. It's a great platform. We've had these, like, what are they? They're trying not to be fired for. That's. And I'm speaking very bluntly here, but you get the idea. So when you are in an agency and you're selling to, let's say, other businesses, you're by and we work with agencies, we have agency clients. You're selling to other businesses. Very important to remember this because the more you are trusted, the more you are the go to. The easier sell, you're going to have the easier of a close it is. Right. Like it's way easier to close a deal if you're the go to. And the people that are buying can justify that to their boss. Think about Salesforce, HubSpot. We talked about these. Look, I'll go on record and say that Salesforce and HubSpot may not have the best product in the world. For some people they may. For some people, they may not. Are there other products that are potentially better? Sure. But do they have the highest share of voice? Yes. I mean, Salesforce has out marketed every competitor they have. Right. Their moat has been marketing. Good marketing is a moat. Like, that is the thing that defends you. Your product could be the same as everybody else. But good marketing, people trusting. Like, you go to your boss, you're like, hey, I want to develop, you know, I want to put in a new CRM system. And you have to pitch them Salesforce or Abracadabra, which is new to the market. And you're like, oh, I think we should go with Abracadabra. You're like, okay, tell me more. Oh, I want to go with Salesforce. Okay, what are they charging? Different conversation.

Right.

What I'm saying for sure. So I think these are the things that are so important to remember when you're selling. Also, again, in a B2B environment, that building that trust, building that share of voice, this is what gets you market share. This is what gets you to dominate your. Your marketplace. Is that always easily quantifiable? No. Do I want to sit here and pretend it is? No. Like, if you don't. This is the funny thing I learned early in my career, Gray. I. You know, when I first started, I would try to convince people how social media was useful because it was so new. People would say, what's tweeter? Right. Facebook is like for my kids. Remember Snapchat, TikTok, Instagram? None of this existed. This is, it's. It's not even that long ago, but none of this existed. Like 15 years ago when we, when I started the agency and I got into this world and then I realized, you know what? Spending so much energy trying to convince these people that this is the future is kind of pointless. Like, I. So I told my team, I said, we're not going to convince. We're just going to baptize Those who are ready, like, if you already believe in the great, like, let's work with you. And I think there are plenty of brands like that out there. So look, while we do education on a broad scale, like this podcast, or we talk about these things, or I talk about, you know, these things ad nauseam on LinkedIn or on stages, my keynotes, my books, when it comes to specific clients, I'm not chasing them around and being like, listen, buddy, like, do you understand how this, you know, it's like, do you want to be relevant in the future? Cool. Well, this is what you need.

Yeah, for sure. I think that's really good advice. The truth is always the easiest answer. It's not always the easiest thing to say in the moment, but always the easiest answer long term. So there's certainly tactics that you can take around how we do attribution. And I think Share Voice is a great recommendation and something that's measurable.

Now. Great. I want to say it's all measurable. I just want to add, like, it is measurable. It's just not measurable in a number. But it doesn't mean it's not. Like you could ask, like, how many prospects could you possibly have? Right, as a B2B company. A hundred? That's not that much data. You could literally put that in a spreadsheet and have an intern. Like, this isn't crazy data we're talking about. This isn't like hundreds and thousands of. No, not at all. Like, it's very easy to actually just ask your customers, how did you learn about us? Where do you spend your time? Rather than make assumptions and think like, oh, we're going to this trade show because we've done this for the last 10 years versus how do our customers consume information? Where do they spend their time? Oh, it's on LinkedIn. Imagine that.

Yeah, it's a great point. I've got a million other questions I can ask you. We have to say those for a part two because we are out of time. Zenmedia.com is the URL. Obviously, we'll have that in the show notes. You also have your personal website speaking website, shamahider.com which we can link up as well. Are there any other points, any other places we should point people to, to follow you?

Feel free to find me on the social network of your choice. Choose your poison. And if you put Zen Pilot or Gray's name in the message, then I'll be sure to accept.

Awesome. Cool. Well, Shomon, thanks so much for coming on and being willing to share today. This was a blast.

Yeah, my pleasure. Thanks for having me on.