Business Insight Zone

I’m thinking about this question because I’ve just been reading back through the comments on yesterday’s post about the failings of e-mail in the workplace.

Setting aside my own replies, it’s 900+ words of insight (plus one short zombie joke) from veteran businesspeople coming at the problem of e-mail inefficiency from several different angles. Worth a read.

But hey, I’m a blogger, so I’m spoiled — the comment box is always right there, and anyway that’s what blog readers are supposed to do when they have thoughts on a post.

But you’re in business, right? So you also have an audience, even if it’s not as obvious. It could be your customers, your partners, your bosses, your peers, your suppliers, your end-users. But it’s somebody, because no business deals exclusively with computers or robots on the other end of the line.

I got a mini-tutorial in e-mail handling, office communication, and Lean management techniques from yesterday’s comment thread. What kind of education could you be getting?

Do this:

• For starters, go to Chris Brogan’s blog and read “Grow Bigger Ears in 10 Minutes.” Implement what Chris suggests — you really will be done in ten minutes, start to finish.
• Tomorrow when you get to the office, make a list of five people inside your company and five people outside it who might be able to teach you something about how your company works and how you fit into that. Call or e-mail or tweet or IM or smoke-signal these people.
• When the results of Chris’s bigger-ears method start flowing in, seek out the people who are talking about you or your company or your product or your competitor’s products. Find out everything you can from what they say online. Write it down. Connect it to action items that you will do within a week. If it’s appropriate, reach out to the people doing the talking. See if they’re willing to talk even more — especially if they’re reporting bad news to you.
• If your company doesn’t have a blog or a Twitter account or a Facebook page or a suggestions-and-complaints inbox, consider implementing all of them within the month. At this point, the burden of proof is on whoever inside your organization thinks you don’t need them.
• Don’t interrupt and don’t “correct” what anyone says — absorb it and learn from it, even if it’s invalid. People think what they think for some reason.
• Follow up, follow up, follow up.

The audience is ready to start talking to you. Don’t merely let them — empower them.

What are you waiting for?

~

Photo by Adam Fletcher, used under a CC-No Derivative Works license.

Category: Customer service, The language of business