The word “listening” gets thrown around a lot in my world.  From the musicians, there are listening parties, spiritual

image provided by e-magic

experiences from listening to a great piece of music, listening to dubplates, listening for the meaning behind the music – the list goes on.

From the marketing side, I hear about listening to the marketplace, listening to your consumers, or listening for your brand across the web.

Listening is great, and it’s absolutely necessary. The challenge though, is to separate listening from merely hearing.

Listening is hearing with purpose.

In the examples above, “hearing” can be substituted for every instance of “listening”.  The challenge, is to not get stuck in that comfort zone of “yeah, I’m listening”.

The trick is, to never be able to say “Yeah, I hear you” as a throwaway.

Do you?

Are you listening to that dubplate, or merely hearing what you think should be there?

Are you listening to the new album at that listening party, or just waiting for the tracks to finish so you can weigh in with your support and comments?

Are you really listening to what the marketplace is saying, or are you sorting out the comments by “stuff we want to hear” and “stuff we know comes through, but we’ll qualify as unimportant and ignore”?

When you hear a piece of music, are you listening to it, or letting it pass you by?

Listening is a great skill, and a skill that takes a lot of work and patience. Just like learning to pay an instrument, listening takes practice. Listening is not passive.

For you musicians wondering how to listen as marketers, here are a few ideas to get you started:

• Subscribe to blogs of bands/artists similar to you via Google Reader
• Set up Google Alerts for your name and the name of your band
• Set up Google Alerts for acts similar to you
• Search on Twitter (search.twitter.com) for your name, as well as the names of your songs or albums
• Subscribe to the RSS feed of that Twitter search, and pull it into Google Reader
• Search for your name, the names of acts similar to you, or other terms on socialmention.com
• Subscribe to that RSS feed and pull it into Google Reader

What you end up with is a Google Reader (or any RSS reader of your choice) full of information about what’s being said. That’s step 1.

The value comes from going back through that information and absorbing it. Read the blog posts. Comment if appropriate. Go see who’s talking about you on Twitter, reply or send them a Direct Message (DM) if it makes sense.

Look for feedback, look for trends, look for opportunities to connect.

Turn the data that gets fed to you into information by listening.