Communications, both with clients and internally with staff and other stakeholders, is critical to successful completion of work, a feeling of comraderie and of accomplishment. When communications break down, it is more difficult to acheive goals, and stakeholders may feel less valued or less a part of the team. As such, undertaking a regular audit of communications can help to shed light on potential issues, and can surface grassroots solutions to any challenges uncovered.

Business questions are typically phrased like “Who would be interested in our new product?”, “How satisfied are our customers with our service?”, or “Who is likely to recommend our brand?” Survey research is often done to answer these questions and is typically reported out as showing the percent of people who fit into a particular category. Unless a census is completed, there will be some error in the results obtained. One very important question is, how large is this error?

There are four things that affect the margin of error:

Technological innovations; emerging values and behaviors; changing economic, environmental and political conditions… All can lead to significant impact and potential disruption of an industry.

Is your company prepared to face the future, no matter what it brings? Would you be ready to respond to threats of disruption? Would you be able to anticipate emerging customer needs and address them ahead of your competition? Are you prepared to continuously innovate and avoid obsolescence?

The number of ways to advertise spans the gamut from very expensive Super Bowl TV ads to simple tweets. Clearly both of these extremes will be seen by vastly different audiences. However, even inexpensive advertising has the potential to go viral if the right conditions exist. By extension, monitoring and improving ad awareness and effectiveness may help small organizations reach large number of potential customers.