The Five Steps of Effective Communication on Blogs

by Simon Brown

Your customers are talking, your employees are talking, and your partners and suppliers are talking. With blogging, the conversation is potentially limitless. The challenge for most companies who engage in customer conversation isn't obtaining feedback; it's how best to deal with the feedback, both positive and negative. At the end of the day, you need to realize that these conversations include current customers, potential customers, employees, and partners. If you ignore these comments, you are ignoring valuable feedback, potential new marketing strategies, innovative new product ideas, and concepts that could completely transform your business. The conversation will go on either with or without you—and your competitors are most certainly listening.

The best way to engage in a real-world conversation is to go through the following five steps for effective communication: listen, understand, value, interpret, and contribute

Listen Listening is like being a sponge, and the best sponges hold water indefinitely

Until you are ready to contribute—to squeeze some knowledge from your sponge—you need to be taking in a lot more that you're putting out.

Understand By understanding what is actually being said, apart from any biases or agendas—especially your own—you begin to value feedback. You need to ensure that you keep that value. Value the conversation, the individual, and the feedback more than you value your own opinion. If you don't do this, when it comes time to contribute, your comments will be out of context and will hold much less value than they otherwise would.

Value Valuing everyone's contribution can be difficult in the best of times—some people in any large conversation don't listen, don't value others' contributions, and therefore simply don't deserve to be talking. However, when you're a business listening to feedback about your company, products, and industry, it's far too easy to discount certain contributions as unworthy of your attention. Don't fall into this trap. Before you can contribute and properly respond to what's going on in a conversation as big as the blog posting, you need to value everyone involved—after all, the one person you value one time could well be your next big customer evangelist.

Interpret Before you take the step in becoming involved in the global conversation happening on blogs, you need to interpret and evaluate what has already been said and determine whether you actually have any valuable and unique insight to offer. After all, if the only thing you have to say in a large conversation is "Yes, I agree!", it's probably best to live by the adage, "Even a fool is thought wise if he keeps silent.

Contribute The final step in effective communication is to contribute something of value to the group What valuable information can you offer? When the conversation centers on your area of expertise, you can offer authority, passion, and a unique perspective

Unlike most parties, where not everyone gets a chance to talk to everyone else, thousands of blog readers and writers are waiting eagerly to hear what you and your company have to say. Once you have properly prepared to contribute to the conversation, you can be sure that you will not only be heard, but that you will get feedback.

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