Rediscovering the Art of Listening
Tuesday, April 15, 2008
Sometimes it seems like there are little sound proof bubbles around different departments in an organization. We’re all guilty of it…we get so swept up in what we’re talking about that we forget to stop talking long enough to hear what our colleagues are saying. Listening, it seems, is an art—just look at all the books dedicated to it.
Translate those office dynamics to the work of marketing. We marketers get frustrated because we feel like we’re shouting from the rooftops and no one is listening. We hit our audience in every way—direct mail, e-mail, online, telemarketing. Whatever the newest, hottest widget is, we’re talking through it.
We get so swept up in what we’re trying to communicate that we forget to listen.
Could it be that our audience feels like they’re shouting from the rooftops and no one is listening? Could they be just as frustrated as we are?
Brian Solis talks about listening in his PR2.0 blog post Will The Real Social Media Expert Please Stand Up?
"We’re realizing that we would never speak to our friends and family through messages, so why should we speak 'at' the very people we want to reach and befriend. We’re opening our ears and our minds to acknowledge that we can no longer push our thoughts at people in order to earn resonance; we have to listen, talk, listen, assess, and contribute value."
Listen-talk-listen-assess-contribute. Sounds like a good relationship. It goes back to the question I asked in my last post...what kind of friendship does your association forge with members? At the end of his post, Brian lists several social media tools where it's worthwhile to "listen." In her post, Keeping up with the social media fire hose from the Church of the Customer Blog, Jackie Huba points to a tool Saleforce.com uses to aggregate the noise from all the different social media hubs. Imagine being able to participate in so many ongoing conversations at the same time.
In college, I took a course called “ear training” as part of the music theory requirement for my oboe degree. We’d sit in a room and try to notate music all by ear exactly as the instructor played it. I don’t have perfect pitch—the ability to hear any note and identify the exact pitch without any other clues. But I found the more I practiced and the better I understood music theory, the closer I could come to writing down exactly what the teacher played. More importantly, I came ever closer to being able to play music and match the style of an ensemble.
Listening is a discipline that needs to be practiced.
There is a lot of noise out there. More noise than ever before. It’s cacophony. The best among us will figure out a way to turn the noise into a symphony…translating the noise into a coherent conversation that everyone in the association—members and staff alike—can hear, understand and join in.
2 comments:
Older generations had the ability to 'connect' with members/customers because they listened to them and had conversations that went further than just business and into personal lifes. They built relationships on trust because they listened and members/customers never thought twice about where they would turn if they needed something.
With the broad reach we are give through new technological advances in social networking, it is much more easier to trust the technology than the person using the technology. Time is not spent on listening to the problems, concerns, what's working, what's not, etc from the members/customers. It is seen as a waste of time - time that could have been spent talking to three other people. We need to use the Listen-talk-listen-assess-contribute relationship that the previous generations knew so well of and, in turn, saw greater results.
Most of us were told as a child, 'hearing and listening are two, totally different things.' I think that this is something that many people have forgotten. As you mentioned, people need to rediscover the art of listening if they want to see results. And, it the association world where members are not only another customer, but owners/partners/stakeholders, what have you, listening suddenly becomes all the more important of a task to master.
Thanks for the post.
Chris
p.s. On another note, I have often found that if we as marketers were to put the same amount of effort into listening to our members as we do into trying to put our message out there, then we might just find out that our message we are trying to communicate may not actually benefit the members at all. Listening to our constituents would give us a more directed marketing approach than what we would see by 'shooting from the hip.'
