Does this sound familiar?
Parent: Honey, please take out the trash.
Child: (no response)
Parent: DEARRR, I said take out the trash.
Child: (no response)
Parent: I asked you to take out the trash. Now go take out that trash!
Child looks up but doesn’t move.
Parent: I said go take out that trash!!! Didn’t you hear me?
Child: I did. I just didn’t feel like doing it.
If you are “listening” in social channels or in your online community but not using that information to customize your offerings, you may as well not be listening. It doesn’t matter if you “hear” the issue at hand being discussed by your members, if you do nothing about it they realize you either care very little for them or you’re not involved enough to know what’s going on. Neither is good.
Whether you are a member-centric organization or a corporation, listening is not enough. Social intelligence on your stakeholders is out there and strategies should be put in place on how to use this intelligence to help your members and advance your mission. The Forrester blog addressed this issue recently.
Listening is good. There are many tools that can help you. Action is better. Action is the hard part (particularly when we don’t like what we’ve heard). Action requires something of you, an investment of your time on behalf of your members. Maybe you’ll have to revamp your offerings or implementation process. But the investment is worth it. Without action, your constituents will assume you just “didn’t feel like doing it.”
