Friday 9th July 2010 by Lawrence Clarke

Some of the best comic material comes from listening in to conversations on the local bus. A journalist’s best source is the trusted insider to conversations and events as they unfold before they become public. In business, having access to timely information, often gleaned from conversations round the water cooler, can profit the individual and potentially damage her company.

We all like to listen in to others’ conversations and sometimes join in. It’s the natural way not only to socialise but to learn from each other. So why, when we go online, do businesses not recognise and make the most of this innate behaviour?

Who’s listening?

SiftGroups works with a range of NfPs, membership organisations and publishers covering both business and consumer titles. With all of them, we ask whether they listen to what people – their clients, members, customers – are talking about. And whether they learn from listening,  and whether they act on what they learn. And we can confirm that, if you find it hard to get your business to really listen and learn from what you hear, then you may be somewhat reassured to know that you’re certainly not alone.

It doesn’t really matter, even, whether the conversations take place on your own site, or somewhere else in the external social media universe. But when we ask organisations who already have onsite forums how much revenue they would lose if they closed the forums down tomorrow, invariably the answer is ‘nothing’ – in fact it would probably save money.

Businesses like publishers or membership organisations who rely on the renewal of subscriptions probably hope that the closer engagement with their customers/members online brings both efficiency savings, and encourages retention by making people want to renew their membership. It certainly ought to – but does it really?  When we ask professional bodies if they encourage their members to discuss the products and services it provides, and to influence their future development, the answer we hear is that the organisation is not set up to ask the right questions or listen to the answers.

When we work with event companies, we ask if they know what the attendees to their events want, in as much detail as they know their exhibitors or sponsors. Usually, the answer we get is that the attendees are seen in terms of numbers not of individuals who may want to hold conversations with the sponsors. Certainly the events company doesn’t seem to want to listen to that conversation, or learn from it. 

It’s not just that organisations don’t listen to their customers as much as they could. Many of them don’t listen to and learn from conversations among the staff either.  If we ask businesses or organisations if they have an internal community supported by online social media tools, they  usually reference their intranets – which, if used at all, are repositories for information not conversation – and their IT policies, which may well not allow access to Facebook or Twitter or the use of equivalent technology internally.

In short, publishers do not listen to their readers, member organisations do not listen to their members, event companies do not listen to their visitors and businesses do not listen to their staff.

Who’s learning what?

Even if these businesses are not listening to their customers or staff, they may be interested in listening to their critics and competitors. The first use of online social media is as a listening channel for brand-threatening comments. Here there is the potential for the business to learn a lot about how it is seen by others.

How it responds to this learning is another challenge. But focusing just on listening for criticism, rather than the more neutral conversations, can be a mistake. For the most part, if anyone’s learning from such an online conversation, it’ll be the potential and current clients, customers or members, the critics and perhaps by the competitors – but not the business itself. That’s truly dangerous:  it threatens to put itself on the outside track, and render itself irrelevant.

If the business is not taking part in (listening to, as well as contributing to) the conversations, the learning it can do about its customers’ needs and circumstances is very limited. A publisher who is primarily dependent on its readers’ inertia in not cancelling their standing orders is vulnerable to changes in the financial circumstance of those readers (see Recession is a good cure for complacency). Listening and learning about their needs might have allowed a proactive response. Event companies who ignore the conversations between buyers and sellers are vulnerable to those conversations moving elsewhere. Member organisations who don’t listen to their members are vulnerable to those members re-grouping elsewhere. Businesses that turn a deaf ear to their staff are vulnerable to high staff turn-over and poor quality outputs.

Why do businesses have selective hearing?

So, even those organisations that create a space to create a ‘community’ often fail to show an interest in its members’ short- or long-term needs or in building relationships with them. There are good reasons why they are not. It’s all to do with what business they think they are in.

Is it possible not to know what business you’re in? It’s hardly surprising that most publishers think they are in the publishing business - which has always meant creating content and broadcasting it to a passive readership. Similarly event companies are in the event-management business - which is primarily about attracting viable sponsorship that will create an attractive event which people will want to attend - while member organisations are in the member-acquisition business, persuading individuals to buy their services and products.

Many of these have flourished for many years with little more feedback than renewal rates, letters pages (in magazines) and customer satisfaction surveys (for events or members), so why should they now take time out to listen and learn more carefully? Is it not a token gesture at best and an unnecessary overhead at worst?

It certainly might have been the case before the Internet. But the arrival of almost universal social media means that pre-Internet businesses urgently need to redefine what business they are in – though few have spotted that need.

Their new competitors, the online start-ups and the pure-plays, all know that to succeed online you need to acknowledge that – whatever the niche you’re apparently operating in - you are essentially in the relationship-building business. The Internet is the first medium ever to enable a two-way relationship between the business and each and every customer. I expect to be acknowledged and responded to as an individual online in a way that I don’t expect from any other channel. I expect to have a relationship with the organisations I do business with online;  if they are not prepared to listen to me and learn about my needs, then they are simply encouraging me to go elsewhere.

The first thing your business needs to do online is to build a relationship with each of your clients or customers. But that’s only the start. If you’re going to flourish, you also need to recognise that those customers have, or would like to have, many relationships with all kinds of other businesses in its niche. Most of those will be your partners, not your competitors: so if you can find a way to facilitate those relationships, then your value to all concerned will rise to a quite different level. This is what we call being the ‘first-port-of-call’.

How learning from listening translates into new revenue streams is covered in the blog Link and Leverage.