Lazy listening means equipping everybody in the business with the ears and voice of the business. It’s communication with intent.
There have never been more tools to get the pulse of what people think about a particular brand. There are tools to use ahead of launching something (one of the quickest is still seeing what Google would charge for keywords) and tools that highlight if your brand is getting positive or negative social chatter.
There are tools that analyze the digital airwaves to pick out drivers behind the language people are using about your brand. Of course there are the good old feedback forms & surveys.
But.
They’re time consuming and require focus. They distort how a business reacts to what’s being measured rather than be disciplined on what matters.
Lazy listening is about embedding listening into the everyday. Doing stuff and getting constant feedback. Lazy listening means equipping everybody in the business with both a voice and ears of the business. It’s listening with intent.
You will define a regular cadence encouraging friends, family, strangers to share what they think and you will make space to bring learnings into the organization. Not because there’s a presentation with data but because you are human and you will have the discipline to listen.
The exercises will help you & your team make a habit of that discipline with everybody understanding they have to represent the business by bringing learnings back into the business.
This only works if you understand how to accept, adopt and socialize those learnings. And a feedback culture has to be nurtured. If it isn’t defined, and feedback isn’t intentionally encouraged within an organization people don’t know how to contextualize what they’re hearing or how to work with it. So as an organization spend time focused on the value of feedback, and celebrating it.
Define the key moments you’ll celebrate the insight and show where that feedback came from.
Ensure everyone understand that as a business it is a priority. This matters as some organizations assume feedback is criticism and implies people don’t know what they’re doing.
Don’t be one of those organizations.
