It's the time of year where regular gym goers dread going to the gym. It's typically more crowded than average with all the New Years Resolutions to workout more. Whether you made a resolution to work out more in 2012, consider adopting a new regimen to collect feedback and improve your organization's agility.

As discussed in our most resent eBook, Harness The Conversation: Business in Today's Social World, we define Business Agility as the ability to react quickly and intelligently to the marketplace. With over a million links shared on Facebook every 20 minutes and and just under 7,000 tweets happening every second, being agile is critical to business success. It's the difference between Amazon.com's success and Border's bankruptcy filing. So as you put on your sneakers to head to the gym for a quick workout during your lunch break, think about putting this three step workout plan into place at your company.

Step 1 : Establish a Feedback Regieme

The key to getting rich feedback is the ability to design and deploy a robust feedback program. Social media plays a key role here, but it's not the only player. Other more traditional feedback methods are equally important. Social media is a great place to start identifying trends and sentiment early, but it's still critical to verify those insights with more proven methods. The Motrin Mom advertising example from a few years ago comes to mind here. Motrin created an ad suggesting mom's use their pain reliever to alieviate the pain that comes from carying a baby in a sling. Immediately, Motrin faced backlash from Mommy Bloggers and Motrin faced a PR nightmare. Later research showed that 45% of moms who saw the ad liked it, and 41% had no feelings about it. The inital social media researching findings pointed to it being an advertisement in bad taste, the rest of the market didn't agree. As we've been saying for almost two years, there is a difference between those who are active on social media and those who are not. A good survey enables you to:

1. Tune out the noise and zero in on the opinions and comments that are directly applicable to your most pressing questions, and
2. Validate trends and shifts in preference that you may have suspected, but weren’t certain about. 

The same way you do not want to work the same muscle groups every day, you need to vary your feedback collection methods as well. Go ahead and go for your run, while running instead of listening to music, think about the different sources your organization is currently collecting data (some may be formalized while others may not). Start to formulate a plan for how you could capture this information for analysis, and what information is still missing and what methods may be appropriate to collect that feedback.

Make sure to come back tomorrow to get the skinny on Step 2 : Benchmark don't Benchpress or download our eBook for the complete workout plan as well as additional tips for succeeding at business in today's social world.