In 1901, Guglielmo Marconi received a faint Morse code “S” sent from Cornwall to Newfoundland, over 2,200 miles away

At the time, this shouldn’t have been possible

The scientific consensus was clear: radio waves travelled in straight lines, and the curvature of the Earth made transatlantic transmission impossible

Yet the signal arrived

What no one understood then was the role of the ionosphere

The signal had bounced, not travelled straight

It was weak, disputed, and controversial, but later experiments confirmed it

That single moment didn’t just prove a theory wrong, it rewrote the rules and gave birth to global wireless communication

There’s a lesson here, and it goes far beyond physics

What we know often becomes the very thing that limits us

Donald Rumsfeld captured this perfectly in his now-famous 2002 explanation of known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns

It’s the last category, the things we don’t know we don’t know, that cause the most disruption, and also create the greatest breakthroughs

And this shows up every day in my world of social selling

Many organisations are still operating with a straight-line mindset
They believe buyers follow linear journeys
That influence starts when the deal is “active”
That social is a channel, not an ecosystem

Those assumptions feel like known knowns

But buyers don’t move in straight lines anymore

They bounce. They observe silently

They build trust long before they engage

They form opinions in dark social, in comments, in communities, and in conversations you’ll never see in your CRM

Social selling works not because it’s louder, but because it reflects how influence actually travels today

Like Marconi’s signal, your impact may feel faint

Hard to measure. Easy to dismiss

But that doesn’t mean it isn’t travelling, or landing

Conclusion

The real risk in modern selling isn’t what we know we don’t know

It’s what we assume can’t be true

The biggest opportunities in social selling live in the unknown unknowns, the unseen conversations, the silent trust-building, the influence that doesn’t follow a straight line

Just because you can’t see the signal, doesn’t mean it isn’t getting through