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“You know, it’s amazing what you can learn when you listen” my mom said. I put down my Blackberry and looked up. “You just need to ask the right questions.”
“For example, the other day I was at the hairdresser. I asked the owner how the recession was impacting his business. I ask that question a lot. He told me that although yes, some clients were scheduling less frequent appointments, his business was actually growing. The reason? Many of the women who used to get their hair done in New York City, are now coming to his (New Providence, New Jersey) salon, since he is a lot more affordable than those places in New York. And they are good…”
My mom continued to tell me about her fantastic hairdresser, but I had stopped listening (and, yes, I see the irony). But I was stuck on that first line…”It’s amazing what you can learn when you listen… You just need to ask the right questions.”
BurrellesLuce clients understand the value of listening. They recognize the importance of understanding what is being said about them in the media. But with an ever expanding media landscape, it can be a challenge to get your arms around all the chatter and identify what coverage is important to you. As my mom said, in order to hear what’s important, you need to know the questions to ask. In the news monitoring business, we call it “setting up a profile” or “crafting the right search terms.”
We invest time, effort, and expertise, working with clients to make sure that they are able to “hear” all of the news coverage that’s meaningful to them. It’s a challenge: if your question is too broad, you’ll waste time and possibly even miss what’s really important. Of course, if you neglect to ask the right questions, you’ll miss important information as well. Asking the right questions that will generate meaningful responses is an art.
Have you thought lately about what news you are monitoring? Are you “asking the right questions” about your brand, your competitors, and the industry? What are your biggest challenges in learning about the media that matters?
Valerie — Determining the right questions is arguably the hardest part of developing strategy. That process is what leads to measurable objectives, but if you’re asking the wrong questions, you wind up with the wrong objectives. Case in point:
You know that social media is gaining influence because you read the stories in the Wall Street Journal and New York Times, but everyone quoted seems to be a consultant or small business person who solved an immediate crisis or problem. So you ask your team, “Should we be using those Twitter things, and the Facebook?”
Instead of asking about the tactics, you should be asking about the customers (or other stakeholders): “Are our customers/employees/competitors using social media tools? If so, how? What are the strengths and weaknesses of how they’re doing so? What problems are they solving or creating?”
This connects the tactics to the strategy — you haven’t even started examining your own organization’s use of the tools, you’re focusing on the pre-work that you have to do before you even consider whether or how you might use them.
In your (monitoring) business, your customers are probably past that initial question set — they’ve decided they need to listen (!) and need help doing so, and that’s great. Next, they need to connect that information with the context of their business — the real rubber on the measurement road.
Keep going with this thread!
Sean
@commamoo
[...] Are You Asking the Right Questions? by Valerie Simon — This seems like a simple concept, but are you really asking the right [...]
This does seem simple, but too often, particularly at agencies, we are really deep in the trenches with our clients and understanding the industry – that we forget to ask the right questions. There is no cookie cutter approach to the various programs we implement. Asking the right questions is a good start.