Listening > Talking

The value of a conversation is often greater for the person listening, because listening allows you to learn something new, whereas talking only gives you an opportunity to regurgitate the things you already know.

The trouble is that talking about ourselves and the things we enjoy makes us happy, which makes us crave the need to talk, and talk, and talk. Another way of looking at this is that by giving others the opportunity to talk about themselves we make them happy, whilst giving ourselves an opportunity to learn new information.

When we make someone happy, they often give us a smile. Smiling is highly contagious and releases the same amount of stimulating hormones in our bodies as picking up a wad of £20,000 according to research by Ron Gutman. What I'm saying is that if you make the person you're with happy, you both get a huge boost of feel-good hormones.

This isn't just the case in the real world.

Just like in real life, the benefit of entering the social web and participating in conversations as a brand or individual is as much about listening to what's being said as it is about talking.

Let me demonstrate with a few examples…

My favourite time of the year is approaching (Christmas), and naturally, lots of brands are trying to talk about their Christmas products on the social web in the hope that people will buy from them.



But who's listening to the tweets that tell us that people are happy to pay 4x as much money for handmade Christmas cards? Which brands are monitoring the hashtag #primaryschoolmemories which is currently trending and largely talking about Christmas cards? Which brands have social web trend monitoring in place to tell them that Christmas cards peak in number of searches on December 3rd-6th every year, but are a dying trend online, despite still being popular in Austrailia and South Africa?

I don't think there are too many brands doing this. A few searches on the social web back me up.

Surely, it's almost undisputable to say that for a company who sells Christmas cards, an hours worth of listening on the social web and creating actionable research around that product or market is more insightful and valuable than an hours worth of scheduling promotional tweets.

To sum this up, whether you're a brand or an individual, online or offline, listening is more valuable to you than talking. Sure, it's harder to measure and you're going to have to action the insights you find, but that's an opportunity to innovate and advance.