Lessons on listening

Katya's Non-Profit Marketing Blog has five good lessons for professional communicators or marketers. They come from Alan Andeasen, and they all center on the notion that listening is the first part of communicating. To whet your appetite, here are the first two (but go read the rest!):

1. You’re in trouble if you see your product (or your cause) as inherently desireable. It’s not.
2. You’re in trouble if you see lack of success as the target audience’s fault. It’s your fault.

I see these mistakes all the time when I'm talking to people about how they want to communicate for their organizations. Their first priority is to identify their agenda and start pushing it. But that's exactly backwards. You must first identify the agenda of the people you want to communicate with. What are they looking for? What kind of information do they need? What do they care about? Only after you've identified that (by listening to them) can you hope to communicate successfully.

photo courtesy niclindh at flickr