Trendwatching to Learn How to Communicate With Customers

Educating clients and prospects is critical to collecting valuable customer intuition and behavior analysis that can boost sales and build business. When conceiving ways to educate customers it's important to understand your customers and the learning and information gathering systems and techniques they are most accustomed to and comfortable with. Knowing which communication tool to use and which not to use based on who you want to reach is becoming more complex as the options expand.

You need to be a bit of a cultural anthropologist to build a sense of what channels and techniques work with different target audiences. I try to do this wherever I go. I watch people on the train trying to understand how they use their commute time. I watch people in airports, malls, grocery stores, seminars, movie theaters, offices, cars, etc. to attempt to understand how people use technology to find information and communicate with others.

If you are targeting young business people and/or entrepreneurs you would do well to watch communication and learning trends in colleges and universities. Tools and techniques learned in school will translate directly to the business world as graduates move into the workplace.

Students are using cellphones in record numbers. So much so that schools are removing their expensive yet revenue producing land line systems from dorms.

SMS(text messaging) while huge in other parts of the world has been slow to catch on in America. Cultural phenomenon like interactive TV programs i.e. American Idol have driven adoption and now even universities are building systems to use SMS to aid professors-student communications. If somebody uses SMS for years in school they are certainly open to it when they graduate and become your potential client.

Time to crack that manual and learn how to send and receive text messages on your cell phone.