Lately, I've been engaged in a number of dialogues about how to improve the way companies listen. I've written about it here a fair amount, as well. While learning how to listen is essential to everything from marketing to being part of your community, it's also important to listen to the right or "key" voices.
Here are five steps to ensure that you’re finding, and keeping, your key voices. I'll post five more steps tomorrow:
1. Identify cultural cornerstones – It’s always easier to find the right people in the right places. Would you expect to find a fashion diva at a football game? Context is everything. Instead of just thinking about those people who you believe to be your brand’s key voices, think about who they really are. Where do they hang out? What do they do? Are they online, in the mall or hanging out with friends at someone’s home? Get out of your office and spend time in your key customers’ environments. By understanding the cultural cornerstones and understanding the context of people’s lives, you can go a long way in finding and understanding them.
2. Identify the key voices – Once you understand your key customers’ environment on a firsthand basis, start to look around and listen. Who is talking? What are they saying? We always ask people who influences them in their thoughts about a certain subject or product. By always asking people this question, you can quickly understand who the opinion leaders are.
3. Make them a part of the team – If you want people to be honest with you, you have to be honest with them. One of the big problems with focus groups is that they are rarely honest – they exist apart from reality. How would you feel, and act, if someone was behind a one-way mirror in your office, watching your every move? In order to get people to open up you’ve got to get into their environment, be human and do more than just let them talk. Let them lead.
4. Create a community space – When I was publishing special interest magazines, I realized that in order to be successful it was my job to set a community table and invite all of the members of the community to it. At the time, this included employees, advertisers, readers, writers and photographers. I figured if I was able to make one of our magazines into a community space, where everyone in the community would come to find out what was going on and would actively participate in an ongoing dialogue, I’d be successful. In its essence, a special interest magazine doesn’t attract everyone in the market. It only attracts trendsetters and translators. For instance, when I published Inline Magazine, the biggest magazine in the inline skating market, our circulation was 40,000. That’s a drop in the bucket compared to the 30,000,000 active inline skaters at the time. Yet, creating a community space for this relatively small number of participants had a very large influence on the rest of the market. The community space not only provided a place for the company to connect with the key voices, but it also became a place for key voices to connect with each other.
5. Create a dialogue with each trend translator – If you really want to understand the subtleties of the marketplace, it is essential for each person you engage in a dialogue to feel that they are important and honored as an individual. Today, having an individual conversation with each and every translator is much easier with the power of the Internet. Include them in every corner of your business.
