Questions, anyone?

Questions. So many careers depend on them: sales people, doctors, nurses, teachers, journalists, attorneys — the list goes on and on. I’ve written before about the importance of asking questions.

As professional communicators, my team and I find that our work often depends on questions.

When speaking to a reporter who wants to contact a client for a story, our first question is: When is your deadline?

When writing a press release, we ask: Have we checked all the names, numbers, and facts before we distribute this? (This is in addition, of course, to checking spelling and punctuation.)

For social media posts and blogs, we ask: Does this content represent the client’s brand correctly? Are we linking to the right URLs and using the correct tags?

Your work probably depends on asking questions, too. With so many questions out there, it’s never been more important to get the right answers. But in a world that is filled with 1) people who are pressed for time and 2) so many sources of information, it’s too easy to skip the steps to verify that we have the correct information before we act.

Let’s all take a little more time to find the best answers before moving ahead. Our employees, customers and vendors will thank us.