Listening to the groundswell: what it means to you???

Listening is perhaps the most essential neglected skill in business. Whether you choose to start a private community, engage a company for bran monitoring, or just use the available tools to do rudimentary listening on you own, your organization must get started. Here are six reasons why:

• Find out what your brand stands for. You know the message you're trying to get across. How is that different from what people are talking about
• Understand how buzz is shifting. Start listening, and you have a baseline. Keep listening, and you understand changes.
• Save research money; increase research responsiveness. If you do a survey once in a whale, listening is more expensive. But if your company has a regular research budget, some of it should go to listening.
• Find the sources or influence in your market. Who's talking about your product? Are the bloggers more influential, or are the discussion  forums? Are thousands of people watching videos about it on YouTube? Once you find the influencers, you can cultivate them.
• Manage PR crises. If your company is going to suffer an assault from the groundswell - a negative YouTube video, a rapidly spreading blog, bad buzz on forums - you'll hear about it earlier if you're listening.
• Generate new product and marketing ideas. Your customers use your products and services all the time. They generate lots of intelligent ideas about those products and services, and they will offer those ideas to you-for free.