capitalizing on its quality and differentiating it further from the offerings of competitors.Listening and mappingAs the manufacturers example implies, spotting weak signals is more likely when companies can marshal dispersed networks of people who have a deep understanding of the business and act as listening posts. One global beverage company is considering including social-media awareness in its hiring criteria for some managers, to build its network and free its management team from well-rehearsed habits.Weak signals are everywhere, of course, so deciding when and where to keep the antennae out is critical. One such situation involves a product, market, or service that doesnt yet existbut could. Consider the case of a global advertising company that was investigating (for one of its clients) a US growth opportunity related to child care. Because no one was offering the proposed service, keyword searches on social media (and on the web more broadly) wouldnt work. Instead, the company looked to social-media platforms where it might find weak signalsfinally discovering an online content service that allows users to create and share individualized newspapers.In the child-care arena, digital-content channels are often curated by mothers and fathers, who invite conversations about their experiences and concerns, as well as assemble relevant articles by experts or government sources. Analysts used semantic clues to follow hundreds of fine-grained conversations on these sites. The exercise produced a wealth of relevant information about the types of services available in individual markets, the specific levels of service that parents sought, the prices they were willing to pay, the child-care options companies already sponsored, the strength of local providers (potential competitors), and the people in various communities who might become ambassadors for a new service. This wasnt a number-crunching exercise; instead, it took an anthropological view of local child carea mosaic formed from shards of information found only on social media. In the end, the weak signals helped the company to define the parameters of a not-yet-existing service.Spotting visual cluesIts also useful to search for weak signals when customers start engaging with products or services in new, tech-enabled ways, often simply by sharing perceptions about a companys offerings and how they are using them. This can be hard for companies to relate to at first, as its quite removed from the usual practice of finding data patterns, clustering, and eliminating statistical noise. Spotting weak signals in such circumstances requires managers and employees to have the time and space to surf blogs or seek inspiration through services such as Tumblr or Instagram.As intangible as these techniques may sound, they can deliver tangible results. US retailer Nordstrom, for example, took an early interest in the possibilities of Pinterest, the digital-scrapbooking site where users pin images they like on virtual boards and share them with a larger community. Displayed on Pinterest, the retailers products generate significant interest: the company currently has more than four million followers on the site.Spotting an opportunity to share this online engagement with in-store shoppers, the company recently started displaying popular Pinterest items in two of its Seattle-area stores. When early results were encouraging, Nordstrom began