Found: the lost art of listening

"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.