Listening must come first

Businesses want social media. They want Facebook pages and Twitter accounts. They want blogs.

But why? Too often they don’t stop to think about that. Here’s a conversation from just last week:

Client: It would be very helpful if you could email decks for meetings more than an hour before we are to speak.

Sounds simple, right?

Business: We typically email decks for conference calls 30 minutes to an hour before we are to meet.

Well, duh. Client obviously knows that.

Client: Yes, but with many meetings per day, we don’t always have time to print those out in between [our meetings with other people].

So, the client has meetings back to back. Doesn’t always allow time for review. While I don’t know why they can’t just look at them on their computers, that’s my problem, not theirs.

Business: Yes, well, that’s what we do.

WTF just happened there? This business can’t even DIRECTLY respond to a client issue. How in the heck will these people be able to listen on a larger scale? This way of doing business is far too common. While I understand that most projects are handled by teams, clients don’t care. They just want the information to be presented in a way they can consume easily.

Without your clients, businesses wouldn’t make money. Try listening to them.