Vlad-Share

The other day we were recording the SPAM Show with Erick Simpson (MSPU), Bob Godgart (Autotask) and Mark Crall (Tech Care Team) and talking about the Web 2.0 of all things. Show will be published @OwnWebNow at some point this week as usual, if you’d like to hear about it please join our partner program.

This one is going to be funny. Or at least my opinion of that word.

First, I’ll admit, Web 2.0 means a lot of things to a lot of people.

However, when it comes to running a business, things have not changed a whole heck of a lot in the past 200+ years.

It’s all about how connected you are and how hard you work. Those two happen to be the complete opposites of one another. For example, I know a ton of people who do a remarkably good job but still make chump change because they refuse to be social. On the other hand, I know hordes upon hordes of remarkably useless people who seem to do nothing but party. To put it in even clearer terms: Some people spend too much time talking shit and not enough time doing anything valuable at all – tough luck, not all of us can be marketing people.

Somewhere along the Closet Sociopath – .COM Stalker graph is a happy middle that helps you extend your social footprint with the minimal effort while still being able to do your job.

This is what I use things like Twitter, Facebook, Yammer and a few others. It’s not a science or a best practice, it just works for me. So even if I explained it in full detail, it wouldn’t be very useful to you.

Vlad’s Guide To Becoming a Complete Sociopath

First, understand that there are 24 hours in a day. Come up with a list of your social objectives. Mine are knowing which events in the industry are hot, who is working on what and which problems are developing out there. So I can sit around the clock and listen to opinions of Bored In Office, Outspoken but Completely Worthless, Professor Indecision Loop as they write paragraph after paragraph, blog post after blog post, discussion after discussion. Hence why I nuked my v@vladville.com account and everything that came along with it. Now I follow people that I know and have met personally and I see what they find important, 140 chars max at a time. This reduces my time and personal involvement in matters that do not directly impact me in any way.

Second, understand that fewer rich relationships are more valuable than many worthless ones. Crudely put, you’re more likely to succeed in a small real estate office than as the Commander-in-Chief of Hobo Posse. Small, personal sentiments mean more than a ton of broad, less valuable ones. This is one of the many lessons I had to learn the hard way. Interpret this as you wish and need to, personally, these days I make more effort to work with the fewer people and let the benefits of that spread to the wider audience if possible.

Third, and perhaps most important – The beauty of Web 2.0 and all these mechanisms that are turning us into ADHD monkeys is that there is a clear value in being a scatter brained workaholic. If I gave everyone I worked with and everyone who wanted to talk to me my full and undivided attention, I would work 22 hours a day. You know, like I used to. The Jackass Years. Today, I’ve trained people I work with to only come to me if they need something specific that I can produce. I’ve started treating others in the same way as well. “I need exactly _______.” Fill in the blank or find someone that can.

Blueprint

Right now we live in the time of great uncertainty, as we do every four years during election cycles or every 2-3 years during financial panics (good and bad). People certainly have a heck of a lot less patience, want immediate response and things done that way.

You can ignore this demand, pretend that you’re Michelangelo and sit on the plank painting the friggin ceiling for years uncertain if you’re going to get paid for the painting…. Or you can take very small brush strokes, very quickly, and get adjusted along the way while collecting pennies.

What I mean, quite simply is:  This is the time to act quickly. There are tools to enable and facilitate that. If you can take advantage of that, you won’t get stuck and passed by everyone else.