Are you listening?

A few weeks ago there was this story about a basketball team that intentionally I have waited to tell the story to protect the innocent. It sweems Team “A” is palying Team “B” and “A” has an NBA quality star player on their team. “B” as part of their strategy decided that this player was so good he deserved to be double teamed when his team was on offense. For a time the strategy worked very well.

Now here’s the part I want to empasize – “A” easily figured out the scheme so every time they went on offense this NBA quality player just went to one of the corners and stood there looking like he might become part of gthe play. He didn’t need to however because with a double team it left his team up  4 players to 3. “B” instead of changing the plan as the game wore on just kept with wha worked in the beginning.

After losing by 30 points the coach was very proud of the fact that his team was the only that had ever kept this player to zero points. HELLO – did you miss the point – your team lost by 30.

Do you have a process to listen to what is being said out there by your clients, your prospects, past clients?Have you tried puttin into the search engine the name of your firm, your name, etc and then put the word complaints after it to see if anything comes up? Do you regularly search for your own name to see what comes up?

An ongoing review for this kind of informtion is critical. If you are in a situation where you need to talk with someone about “reputation management” it is too late and let me tell from experience with a client – hard work. In the good old days we would lump this in with ongoiong market research but since the Internet makes it so easy to get informaiton much market research is in fact not really done effectively – my opinion.

And in case you were wondering – my “real” name is Richard Simmons so you can only imagine what comes up when I put my name into the search engines.

What has been your experiences with this?

Rick Simmons is a principal at Dinkum Interactive, a firm specializing in online marketing solutions for small and medium sized businesses around the globe. With more than 25 years of experience in advertising and marketing, Simmons has spent the last four years focused on search engine optimization, and other Internet marketing strategies. Reach him at 267-626-9094 or [email protected]