Getting Close To The Customer.

In Gary Vaynerchuk's talk that I mentioned in the last post, he recounted how officials of the NHL had resisted his idea that they should respond to every tweet and social media message. They felt it would be costly in terms of time and staff even though he pointed out that he personally got more than they did and he responded to all of them himself.

I'd go further. I'd insist that every senior executive regularly spent a day with the people employed to do that job. It's a much better way of understanding your customers than an orchestrated focus group and shows more internal commitment than that gimmicky policy of working on the shop-floor at Christmas.