"Listen or thy tongue will keep thee deaf.”

 ~Native American Proverb

Perhaps you heard: Tropicana just scrapped its limp new “store-brand” packaging and scrambled back to the time-honored and, apparently, beloved straw-pierced orange. A small number of rattled consumers had cried out – in writing, on the phone and online – and the company listened.

Good move, because we learn a lot more by listening than talking (otherwise, kindergartners would teach seventh grade). But listening is still an undervalued practice, especially in communications, branding and PR, where the focus is more on the message going out than the feedback coming in. Craft your message. Get your message out. Stay on message, etc., etc.

Listening, however, is perhaps the more important part of the communication equation. Your message can’t resonate with customers or opinion leaders if you miss the target completely no matter how clever your words. Better to hit the target squarely with a tepid message. Best Buy epitomized this with its holiday 2008 tagline, “You, Happier.” Two vanilla words that do their job with surprising impact.

There’s only one way to hit the target like that: listen and listen closely. My clients and colleagues have taught me a lot about the value of effective listening over the past decade and come up with some great ways to do it. For example:

• Survey customers. Lots of them. Find out what they want. Speak to these needs and let them inform product development. 
• Create customer communities. In a variation on the customer survey, one client recently created a Web site where any customer can propose an improvement to the product. Other visitors vote on the suggested improvements, and the tallies drive the proposals up and down the list. This, too, helps set the clients’ product development agenda.
• Visit customers. Let them do the talking. Everyone says they do this. Do you?
• When you visit customers, probe them for their opinion on your product’s biggest weakness. If you hear it again, go to work on a tangible improvement.
• Form a product advisory board. Make members tell you what you least want to hear.
• Join social networks where your customers, media and analysts are likely to congregate. Listen. Post enough to prove you are listening. Have a sense of humor, be authentic, and don’t shout down critics if they’re being reasonable.
• Listen until you detect your industry’s Achilles’ heel. Interoperability problems? Data spread far and wide? Functionality holes? Launch an initiative to address it, with altruistic overtones.
• Heed the media’s demand for plain talk. Really.
• Blog. While this involves talking, it’s really about starting conversations in which you will be a good listener.
• Systematically monitor conversations in the sprawling social media landscape with tools like Radian6.

Listening has always been a noble idea, but it’s more important than ever to actually do it. Outbound public statements don’t pack the punch they used to, and too many are brimming with doubletalk. Meanwhile, bloggers, Twitterers, commenters, user groups and other segments of the masses are dominating conversations about your brand.

Whether you listen or not, customers will make themselves heard, especially the ones with a juicy story to tell. You might as well step up and hear ’em out. Better they complain to you than the world first so you can do something about it. After all, your competitors are always listening.

Let's borrow a page from the Best Picture winner and inject some positivism.

While Slumdog was racking up the awards at Sunday's Oscars, it occurred to me that government, media, and most of us for that matter, might want to consider borrowing a page from its success.

At one point, Slumdog was going straight to video. Hard to imagine, isn’t it?

There was no money behind it; unknown actors, the book it was based on wasn’t a bestseller; and it was made in Bollywood, not Hollywood.   

So what happened?

Slumdog is centered on a negative, violent backdrop in squalor-filled Mumbai. People were tortured, eyes were gouged, lives were crushed, bullets were embedded and a little kid was covered in excrement. And that’s just the stuff I remember off the top of my head.

And yet… the movie somehow emanated optimism, not pessimism. 

Today’s economic climate is a lot like Slumdog, but with a Trillionaire vs. Millionaire moniker. But unlike Slumdog, there’s no optimistic undercurrent.   

I don’t think the world is coming to an end and I don’t appreciate so-called ‘experts’ predicting the economy will be lousy through 2010. These guys couldn’t even identify that we were in a recession until one year into it.

Sun Life Financial just surveyed 1, 226 working people in North America and discovered Canadians are more optimistic than Americans about the economy, health, personal finances, employer and government benefits. Same continent, relatively same dynamics (except health care), and yet a markedly different disposition, eh?

I agree with Bill Clinton when he said last week that while Obama’s done a good job, “I just would like him to end by saying that he is hopeful and completely convinced we’re gonna come through this.”

Negativism breeds negativism. We’ve talked about the Great Depression enough. It’s time to add some Rooseveltian optimism.

It’s a bizarre time, I admit. People are confused, on-edge, scared.
 
Evidently, so is the animal kingdom.
 
But whereas human beings are stymied by a confounding economy the likes of which hasn’t been seen in 80 years, a certain chimpanzee named Travis decided enough was enough and it was time to let his inner beast, out. Maybe he was just incredibly frustrated. After all, this particular chimp:

• Drank wine
• Bathed himself
• Wiped his bottom on the toilet
• Brushed his teeth with a Water Pik
• Channel surfed
• Ate lobster tails & filet mignon
• Knew how to take the keys and drive his owner’s car 

It’s a shame Travis went berserk and hurt another human being. I feel bad his owner had to stab her “son.”
 
I’m no animal expert, not by a long stretch. But I can’t help but wonder:

1. Does it ever make sense to forget that a chimp – even though it has a DNA structure closest to you and me – isn’t human? “These creatures are wild, and the violence that was exhibited by this chimpanzee is not unknown to wild chimpanzee society,” said Jeff Corwin, biologist and Animal Planet TV host. “What we should examine is, ‘Should people be keeping chimpanzees at home?’”
2. Is it a good idea to give your pet – in this case, a 200-lb. wild animal suffering from Lyme disease - some tea with Xanax in it to calm him down?
3. When you own an animal that’s five to seven times stronger than a human being, doesn’t it make sense to heed the old Boy Scout mission statement, “Be Prepared?” Shouldn’t you anticipate the day may eventually come when Travis figures he’s had enough of seeing his finger paintings on the refrigerator? Rather than grabbing a shovel and pounding the animal’s head, and then stabbing it, do you think his owner should have invested $300 on a taser and kept it in the kitchen drawer… just in case? 

At the time of this writing, there were 243,000 Google “Travis the Chimp” stories, 977,000 Google “chimpanzee attack” stories and 91 blogs. Are we so tired of recession/stimulus doom and gloom that the media (and we) are resorting to giving Travis the Chimp so much media attention? Well, maybe … after all he did drink wine and channel surfed…

• SIRIS Radio and XM took too long to merge and are now on the brink of bankruptcy.
• Newspapers across the country, including The New York Times, took too long to adapt their business model to the realities of the Internet and are now in peril of extinction.
• Circuit City fired a majority of its higher-paid staff and replaced them with lower-paid employees; customer service took a serious nose dive; they didn’t act fast enough to rectify the mistake.
• Electric-car maker Tesla failed to get its electric car into mass production on schedule and is now praying for a government bailout to stay afloat.
• Apple hesitated to offer a DRM-free music option on iTunes, enabling Amazon to jump in with its own DRM-free offering and take away serious market share.
• The FDA didn’t move quickly enough in the peanut butter paste crisis, causing 1,000+ products to be recalled, 600+ people sickened by salmonella and nine deaths.
• The government didn’t act swiftly to penalize corporate excess and demand precise accountability for tax payer loans to corporations.

• An organization’s relationship with consumers
• The steadfastness of its brand
• The top and bottom line
• Institutional reputation