Conversations are happening all around us. From blogs to social networking sites to YouTube videos and podcasts, the Internet is making it ever so easy to communicate and talk to people from all over the world.
Back in the 80s, we lived in a time and place where we received communicated messages from businesses and advertisers. We were marketed at. We were passive recipients. All we did was get the message. Whether we had a response or not, were angry or not, were annoyed or not, it didn’t matter. It couldn’t matter because we could not tell them. Unless we wrote to the advertiser and complained. Even so, we were only one voice.
Now, now’s a totally different story. We’re being courted by businesses and advertisers and we can have all the conversations we want with them. The Internet has removed many of the traditional barriers which separated us, the consumers from them, the advertisers.
Now, we have CEOs of big companies coming down to the level of us plebein folks and ‘talking’ to us via his or her blog. Debbie Weil, the Mona Lisa of Blogging, even conducts blog writing seminars specially for CEOs. If you can’t attend her seminars, no worry. You can get her book, The Corporate Blogging Book to figure out how to get started and what sort of things to blog about. Heck, if CEOs can’t blog, they can’t be that hip or believable, can they? (*very wry smile*)
But what is fascinating about these new developments in ‘conversations’ on the web is that the desire to be heard or read, whichever you come across, is nothing more than a medium to get us closer and more personal to our customers. To listen to them as individuals instead of addressing the whole stadium of buyers.
Your efforts to get closer and listen up to your customers means that you appreciate the responses and feedback and in turn engage and act on what is needed.
Think about the conversations you are having (or not having) with your customers. How can you start a conversation with them?
One good example is a client of ours. Robert Raymer is a published author of Lovers and Strangers (a compilation of his short stories) and creative writing lecturer at Universiti Malaysia Sarawak. He will be soon be blogging on his website (we’ll incorporate a blog into his website instead of him having a separate blog). As we are ardent bloggers ourselves, somehow we must have passed the blogging bug to him too! For a writer like Robert, blogging is but a natural extension of writing.
It is also a great tool for Robert to communicate with his fans and garner feedback from those who have read his books which in turn help provide fodder for his upcoming novels and books! As it is, his short story “Neighbors” is a hot topic of discussion over at the Malaysian English Language Teaching Association. Having a blog will draw more people to participate in conversations with him on his blog.
So think about this: are you having conversations with your customers?
And if you’re not, isn’t it about time you started?