I stumbled upon a great article this weekend written in 2006 that tells the story of a man, John Francis, PhD, who "gave up speaking" and realized how much he hadn't been listening.
When I read this article it really made me think about where we are in the era of Social Media. Like any rush to be a part of something new, the push has been to PARTICIPATE, but I don't think there has been an equal push to honestly LISTEN. We are in an age of processing information, sending out information that can be syndicated to multiple sources, pushing "our words" out to the masses.
There's communication that spins off of that, even tremendous action, which can influence local and even global groundswells.
But, yesterday, on a quiet Sunday afternoon, as I read this article, the message for Social Media has been to PARTICIPATE, CONVERSE, INTERACT, ENGAGE, but it strikes me that the passive notion of LISTENING has been under-valued.
Francis, author of Planetwalker, said - "sometimes we forget that the listener is as important as the person sending the message. Communication is a shared responsibility."
In 2009, three years later, when there are so many ways to communicate via post, tweet, status, DM, text message and feed - we may need to take a step back and LISTEN.
In social media it is important to PARTICIPATE, but it is also our "shared responsibility" to LISTEN.
How can you LISTEN better on Twitter, on Facebook in your blog circles? You'll be surprised what you hear and how much clearer your response is when you really can really see what's being said.
"It's not so much that we get to where we're going, it's that we're on our way there." - John Francis
