citizen Evangelist

As usual, Seth Godin posts another great one. I highly encourage you to check out Before you buy your next ad… I won’t post the obvious spoiler here, but the point is incredibly valid.

On this topic, I would highly recommend picking Noise by Bart Kosko. The essence of the story is this: one person’s signal is another person’s noise. Let me see if I can make this a bit more clear. A pregnant woman is at the doctor’s office and the doctor needs to listen to the heartbeat of the mother. In this context, the baby’s heartbeat becomes noise that interferes with the doctor’s ability to determine the health of the mother. Inversely, if the doctor needs to listen to the heartbeat of the in utero child, then the mother’s heartbeat becomes noise.

If we aren’t ready to handle all of the information at our fingertips or don’t have the ability to filter out the information that is distracting (or noise) to the task at hand, it becomes very difficult to make use of any of the information. Thankfully, our brains are so well conditioned that we naturally filter out information that appears to be interference to our objective.

When we speak to customers and really listen to what they are saying, how they are speaking to us, and when they are speaking to us… how much are we really hearing? How much do we actually miss?

Make it a point to check yourself.

After all, the things you could miss could cost you that customer!

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Nokia is in the midst of an exciting new strategy: Getting their customers directly involved in the product development process. In an article published today, it is obvious that Nokia sees the value of customer collaboration in the product development life-cycle. In support of this strategy, Nokia leverages a Beta Labs site which invites users to provide unfiltered and direct feedback to the Research and Development teams inside Nokia.

According to Oliver Thyman, a participant in Nokia’s Idea Generation Workshop and active blogger:

Working with your customer is something where the world is going to. As a company you cannot close yourself off from the world anymore. If you’re locked in your ivory tower and there is discussion about you going on, it makes sense to get out there and take part in that conversation.

Tommi Vilkamo is the host and manager behind Nokia’s Beta Labs and has a wonderfully challenging opportunity in soliciting community feedback, engaging those participants, and keeping the process moving. With 1 Billion Nokia Customers, there is bound to be some interesting dynamics that emerge.

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