The Art of Listening

I posted this one over at Harold's Kids.

For those who missed it, yesterday’s Twebinar was all about the importance of listening in building, maintaining and further developing a brand. Which seems obvious, of course, but is certainly much harder to, well, do.

The Twebinar series has been great thus far. Once you get over some of the technical glitches and spotty audio/video, it’s refreshing to hear communications pros discuss the topics-at-hand. This week, the same general tenet was repackaged 70 different ways:

Yes, listening is important, and it’s something all companies, regardless of size, should be doing, what with the myriad new-media tools that are readily available to us (often for free, other times for a nominal fee, such as the one offered by Radian6, the organizer of the Twebinar series [shocker!]). Why? Well, for starters, considering all the avenues consumers have to voice their opinions online, it’s no longer a mystery what your customer thinks, feels, likes and dislikes about your brand, and it behooves you to monitor this dialogue that’s already happening, for it’s a dialogue that will continue to happen with or without you. So participate!

But it doesn’t end at listening. Nay, you should probably do something about all of this feedback, right? Wouldn’t want to look like you don’t care all that much about these folks, would you? So once you’ve monitored and processed the raw commentary that’s out there, take it to the marketing teams, take it to the product teams, take it to all of the decision makers and see what you can do to better provide what people want to buy! At the end of the day, people just want to feel like they’re being heard and valued in some way, shape or form anyway, so isn’t this your big chance? Your big break?! Unfettered access to all of this testimonial — it’s beautiful. After all, won’t that make your brand more successful, if you can provide exactly what your target buyer is looking for? Methinks.

But what do y’all think? I’m all ears…