Over the last few days I have been reading a lot of posts about small business engagement and even though they are seemingly coming from different angles, they are all looking for someone else to either accept blame for the way things are or the way things should be.

We now intentionally interrupt the jackass act that is Vladville to discuss a serious topic in a slightly lighthearted way. I hope you are not offended as its not written with intent to insult or offend.

Are you happy with yourself, professionally? Really, truly? All the time? Of course not, everyone faces a challenge in their professional life every now and then. I’m a workaholic. Mostly because I’m very impulsive and tend to plan my personal agendas poorly. This leads to weeks of 20+ hour days, 7 day weeks, working nonstop. So I tend to take a lot of breaks, come to work late, etc.

Now, that sounds very ugly put in writing like that. I think it would make me feel beet if I just blamed it on my staff, clients and suppliers. While I’m certainly and clearly the one to blame, it gives people ease in dealing with their shortcomings.

Try it: What if all your issues are caused by someone else?

Sales not doing well? I’m sure it’s the sales guys fault who would likely complain about the quality of leads that marketing obtains. They would likely blame software shipment times for inability to put together a very competitive message and its clear that software developers are the smartest people in the company so there is nothing pretty at the end of that blame trail. But man, it sure would be easy to deal with if it were someone else’s fault, right?

I have a buddy who in the entire time I’ve known him professionally hasn’t moved his business forward an inch. He travels more than most people I know, takes more vacations and fun trips a year than I have in a decade, is everywhere with everyone – but he’s always coming home to fire someone. He wonders why he is not making any headway while he blames his staff, his clients, his suppliers and virtually everyone else but himself. There is only so much bad hiring process can account for, and there is only so much fault that can be passed around before that long stare in the mirror comes down to “How am I leading this business and its people?”

It really all comes down to leadership. We all do entirely too little of it.

People are not dogs and they should not be lead in such a way. Staff should not be given a treat (bonus) every time they do good and yanked by a chain or thrown out in the rain (demotions, firing, cuts) every time they do bad. Yes we are forced to look at black and white and manage by the numbers at times – both by the government and by our organizational structure – but when you lead people it can’t all be that way.

Business owners responsibility is to lead. But leadership responsibility does not stop with the owners and management. I had written countless posts about work ethic, delivery, professionalism and standards. All of those extend from the top to the bottom. Everyone leads. Everyone has to lead. Lead people, lead with ideas, lead with solutions or lead with results. Leadership goes far beyond the battleground general. Fail at that and you’ll be the next one gone.

This week’s high (or low) topic of conversation has been about the lack of women in the IT field. Women are notoriously easy to pick on because it’s a comfortable topic that sells a rather ugly concept relatively well. But try substituting another minority in place of women and see how comfortable people get about taking a side in the debate. How about: How come there are so few black people in IT? Say that one out loud and see people start to backtrack. Sorry, I meant African Americans. Well, you know, minorities in general. Backtrack, backtrack, until you fall into a place of not trying to blame anyone and actually just lead. The best response on this topic, of few women in IT leadership, came from an actual IT leader and entrepreneur: Leah Culver. Her response? “I could keep writing about the lack of women in tech, but starting a new company sounds like a lot more fun.”

Similar topic came from Jason Beal on mspmentor.net site. It questions the responsibility of the company owner – rainmaker – continuing in building the business. What’s wrong with that question? In a nutshell it reinforces the same argument that leadership is a responsibility few people have.

Look at your star employees.

What’s the single best quality they have? I bet it’s the fact that when they take something, you can trust them to see it through.

That, in a big part has been the success behind OWN. For over a decade we’ve successfully gotten people to let us take care of their IT. We were not fired every time we had an issue. We have not raised prices either. But every day we go to work to add new features, new solutions and we’re constantly pushing forward. Yes, its bumpy at times but from the top down the mission at OWN is clear to every employee, every management layer and every product: we need to do more. How do we make this better?

Leadership is not a corporate superpower. Its not a seminar. It’s not a personality profile score. It’s a responsibility! Everyone has a part in it.

So quit your bitching, stop whining and face the fact that if you’re willing to lead, you get to pick the outcome.

Think of it this way: if you are not leading anywhere, you’re not going anywhere. And in the end, its all your fault for where you’ve ended up if you’ve just followed them there. Where would you like to go?

Google finally released their long awaited Priority Inbox. You can get the details here:

http://mail.google.com/mail/help/priority-inbox.html

In a nutshell, it’s a set of workflows that determines what gets placed at the top of your inbox – instead time, priority or alphabetical listing that you’ve gotten used to, Gmail uses sender reputation of sorts to determine whether the message should be read now, seen later or followed up at all. It does this through both an automated system (likely to track bulk mail senders) and user feedback that escalates certain senders up.

On the surface, and in my opinion only, great idea.

Underneath it, the algorithms and the tuning process leave a lot to be desired and probably not something you’d ever implement as a business solution.

For example, under this setup an unsolicited contact from someone you’ve met at a conference or a business gathering would be treated as an unknown contact and shot way to the bottom of your email. Ditto for newsletters and other bulk mail – because bacn (stuff that is sort of SPAM but you really asked for it) takes various forms of padding all the useful stuff you really want with the crap you’d rather not see, you’re likely to miss out on both important and irrelevant information.

Great Vlad, what’s your solution then?

Don’t get me wrong, this might be great for non-professional users of email. If you use email for business, there are better ways.

One thing that absolutely infuriates me is when my staff filters my mail into a Vlad folder. If I’m sending you an email and paying you to read it, I expect it to be the first thing read, even if the next message is “Hey, does anyone smell that, I think a little kitten is on fire.”

I can only imagine my clients feel similarly about how their concerns should be prioritized. So, here is my top list of dealing with the overload.

0. Always be pimping. Your mission-critical work email should be going into a process automation solution like Shockey Monkey. If it needs a response and an SLA, it should not be waiting for you to get to your email. Pimpin’ aside, here is how I manage my stuff:

1. Unsubscribe from everything you don’t always read.

2. Manage your subscriptions. If you’re an ExchangeDefender customer you can use a disposable address just by appending something to the email, ie: vlad.newsletters@ownwebnow.com will always get to me but I can filter by address and send it straight to newsletters. Send me a newsletter without my permission and you’re done for life. You can create unlimited aliases just by appending a dot at the end of it. If you’re not on ExchangeDefender, this feature is native in virtually every mail system – for Gmail it’s a + instead of a dot.

3. Avoid chain replies. I cannot stress this enough. Sometimes a 1 minute phone call will save you from wasting half an hour going back and forth over something in an email or chat. It will also make it easier to locate stuff.

4. Sort, sort, sort, sort. It only takes a second to find out how important something is. Resist the temptation to leave stuff hanging in your inbox. I have a filing system under a folder called Active with subfolders Today, Tomorrow, End of week, Next week, Next month. When I receive something that’s urgent, I don’t reply to it immediately. I move mail into the Today folder. If it’s not urgent but the client needs a response, I move it into tomorrow. If there is a deadline this week, it gets into a proper bucket.

5. Turn off all alerts, turn off email ADD. Email is not instant messaging. It does not get an immediate attention or immediate response. Resist the urge to deal with email the moment it gets there. The notion of “email overload” is in your head only. If you’re used to dealing with stuff as it comes then certainly seeing 3 pages of new messages will make you freak out. Relax. Focus. Ah, almost Karl Look at the list. Highlight the junk you should be unsubscribing to, drag it to Unsubscribe folder. Next – what’s urgent – scan and move.

Just like some generations cannot understand the cloud because they have grown with the technology they are dependant on, some of us cannot let go of responding to email as it comes in because that is how we’re conditioned. Unfortunately, the days when email was acted on immediately also used to have phones, faxes, interoffice memos and letters. These days the only letters that come in carry either cash, ad or a lawsuit. Everything else – including those three – gets an email.

You don’t need a technical solution to this and trust me, the computer is worse at prioritizing you than you are. You need a personal management solution to this and the first step is taking a deep breath and getting a handle of your information.

Every now and then I get emails that are so well thought through and written (unlike Vladville) that it’s a damn shame to keep them to myself. So with permission (and removing their company / name) I am reprinting the email to offer everyone additional perspective. No, this will not be the subject of a vartruth video and no, I’m not him.

I wonder where you stand. When you finish reading the post, vote here.

Vlad,

Just read your latest blog entry about “Have MSPs jumped the shark?” I have also read many of your earlier articles and you keep alluding to the fact that the MSP model is going to self-destruct in a few months and we are all going to be standing on the street corner with a tattered cardboard sign saying “Will remove spyware for food”

I respect your success and the fact that you have been able to pimp your products to hundreds of my peers (including me.) I further respect your release of S-M (was the acronym a mistake?) as a free service. Unfortunately, I am earlobe deep with Arnie, so it doesn’t make sense to change at this point.

What I don’t understand (and thus the request for the decoder ring) is what in the hell are you implying that we all should move to, but aren’t smart enough to move away from the oncoming light in order to get to?

Even in this shitty economy, I had my most profitable year last year and this year looks to be even better (in spite of (or because of) losing two $7k/mo clients. Am I a classic MSP? I don’t know. Every single solitary person I speak to in New Orleans or Atlanta or Orlando or Vegas or Philly or Nashville or any other conference I go to do things differently. Way differently in most cases. Different pricing model, different limits, different services… on and on.

XXXX is my own mix. I use Connectwise and Kaseya. Yep, drank the Kool-Aid. I have even started using Kaseya IT Services to do monitoring of some of my servers. My techs are good, and we can fix just about anything, but we really stick to the basics. We don’t do custom programming, strange server systems, thin verticals, etc. and we stay very busy.  We are not experts with Exchange but we can fix it. Same with SQL. I guess you could say we are General Practitioners.

Today I came up with these three things to describe our business:

Over the past year or two, we have pushed out to third parties things like email filtering, anti-virus, backup, server monitoring to the point where most of our day is devoted to problems that are either a pain in the ass, someone’s hair is on fire, or we are doing projects.

I am doing my VCIO function based on my experience. Clients are calling about dumb things that mean the world to them (accounts locked out, mouse is moving around on its own, popups galore, printer won’t print, fax won’t fax, email won’t email), crashes (Exchange edb shit the bed, RAID failure [ironic isn’t it?], capacitors blowing out on motherboards, etc.) or we are upgrading and installing stuff.

But what is wrong with that? Should we be making reservations for dinner and a show for clients? Honestly, I think that the way we are working on the extremes of the spectrum is the way it will be for a while until the whole shooting match can be replaced by some Japanese robotic humanoid.  There are enough f’ed up people out there for the foreseeable future that will need help, that I don’t see the need changing significantly. One day, I will start getting people that want to spend $10/mailbox/month in perpetuity and also don’t mind running their business with programs scattered about the internet. I am not naïve enough to think it won’t happen, but this will probably be the people in your age cohort (or younger) that implement the business model.

So, yeah, change is coming and I am all for it, but maybe that light you see is really others with a flashlight searching for a clue…

XXXX

PS I still want to know what you think MSPs should be doing… cut to the chase and fill me in.

Vlad: So where is most of the marketplace at? Click here and let me know, I’ll publish results in a week: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/8CW77CH

Everywhere you turn today, the focus is away from managed services and towards the cloud and mobility. Consider the biggest news this week: Google allows VoIP calls from Gmail, Apple’s new TV and rental model, and a bunch of stories about location services across multiple vendors and devices.

Hardware not even on the front page – somewhere half way through the newspaper (the model of irrelevance) there is a scribble about some bidding over 3PAR, a company 99% of you have never heard of and 99.9999% never used a product from. 

No, the MSPs haven’t jumped the shark.

We (the entire ecosystem) are more relevant and profitable than we’ve ever been.

It’s just that we’re not exciting to write about because the industry is mature and for the most part dealing with legacy issues – servers, workstations, uptime and other “junk” that rarely sees the front page.

What concerns me… is that the question is being posed to me, repeatedly, by service providers around the globe. Which leads me to the logical conclusion that many of you are also seeing the light at the end of the tunnel – and it’s the locomotive of the train heading right for you. We can certainly match it up with our numbers: the “recovery” hasn’t happened everywhere and in some places it’s only getting worse.

Tip: It’s only there if you choose to look for it. I’m not championing ignorance here – but if you’re only going to stand by doing what you’ve been doing and eat a donut while the great big cloud shark is swimming up from under you.. we all know how the story ends. Microsoft didn’t save anyone with Windows 7, put the koolade down, Aurora / SBS 7 won’t either. You don’t need to change your products, you need to change your business model. It really is as simple as that. And if you won’t – there are new MSPs rolling up their sleeves and getting into it every day. Give me a call, I’ll show you how.

Aside from a hat tip to one of the greatest historical ironies, nothing really “new” happened yesterday when I posted about the Next to the last chapter of Vladville. While I wholeheartedly appreciate the notion that my blog posts would be missed, it’s not the blog that’s going away:

What is gone is the argument and the era of small business technology centered on building and managing a computer network. Check out the book The Big Switch or the last few years of the Vladville blog.

With the most complex and complicated aspect of delivering IT services to the masses solved, what is the next wave of simplicity that will wash over the IT industry, and even more importantly – what does a profitable IT business look like in a world where IT is a reference to something as inherent as flipping the light switch or opening a can of tuna?

As far as my opinion is concerned.. you’ll find out in a few days. After design, redesign, draft, redraft and release delays that would make Duke Nukem cry, I believe that I have the foundation for what is possible next.

My general thesis is as follows:

If the realm of IT Services is so easy to figure out that even a CPA could do it, then the profitability and business growth of an IT service provider is not based on our ability to deliver a high end solution that our potential clients can figure out on their own given a little bit of time (if you like to argue with “the cloud” go check out how much brains you need to setup Google Apps and get 80% of the features your $30K a year for a 10 person office solution delivers) — then the future isn’t in pretending it’s a solution to a complex problem that requires expense and expertise – quite the opposite – it’s a simple solution that is cheap and it saves them time and money.

I know it looks like a paragraph, but it’s actually a 131 word sentence.

The book that Vladville wrote on the evolution of an IT problem solver into an IT service provider is being closed on the notion that the IT-as-a-Problem no longer exists: So what do we do with the IT now?

I get this pretty much every day. On Thursday I did a presentation at MSPU and I got a lot of people asking me about how to formulate a cloud strategy.

Being the pimp that I am, I told them I’d not just answer their question but all the ones they weren’t asking. “It’s not what you know, it’s what you don’t know.” Basically, I got a bunch of people to proof read a part of my book for free.

So here it is in a nutshell, the core of pimping the cloud and pretty much anything in any kind of a business:

All businesses have internal competition. Accounts receivable vs. Accounts payable. Payroll vs. Human Resources. The case for internal competition is that it efficiently allocates corporate resources (ie, cash, people) to make sure the company grows efficiently and responsibly. Without it, companies can burn out their cash or starve their innovation – both leading to doom.

Business growth in IT is similarly structured. You have to recruit and entice a new client base with one hand, while you smack some of it away with the other. Without a steady stream of new business, you cannot find remarkably profitable accounts consistently. Sure, you can spend a lot on marketing and referrals and get lucky every now and then, but long term success is founded on a long term strategy of cultivating your client base and serving their expanding business technology need as they grow.

If your response to the above is: “Well, yeah, no shit Vlad.” you’re on the right track. But I can tell you that at least 90% of the people I speak to don’t get it.

Most IT Solution Providers consider the cloud from what I like to call the blacksmith angle. Blacksmith is someone that looks backwards at previous success patterns and thinks that current and future innovation is a fad. Instead of chasing the fad, they focus on past success patterns. The truth is, success is somewhere in the middle.

As I told several executives that I’m pitching a solution to recently:

“You’re going to have a tougher and tougher time finding people that are going to go from managing their business with Excel & Notepad and dedicate themselves to automating business processes that don’t even exist.”

The same applies to the IT Solution Provider crowd. You’re going to have a tougher and tougher time trying to find a company that needs to build out a computer network, or a new server – if they even had IT in the first place. They are out there – but how much money will you spend to find them?

Is the case for a server or a network gone? Absolutely not. Have customers started putting their workstations on eBay in favor of working on their Internet enabled TV? Absolutely not.

But choosing not to build out a lead generation system based on a profitable and proven technology is insane. It’s dead easy to grow horizontally, especially when you have the right staff or the right partners.

The cloud is an opportunity to quickly and cost effectively build up a huge client base without building a huge support department or staff. It is a complement to a long term strategy of delivering professional services to customers that have chosen you as their platform. Microsoft and Google get this. They are cannibalizing themselves because they know that the platform is the marginalized good and what you help your clients accomplish with it is where the money really lies.

Seriously. How often do you get shot down in a business proposal over dollars and cents? And how often do people not even blink at the cost even if you’re the most expensive solution on the table?

Would you like to know why?

When you don’t understand or don’t appreciate something, you will only qualify and consider it at the factor you do understand: the economic one – how much is this going to cost me and which one is the cheapest? But as the business grows and technology needs pile up, it’s more cost effective to have the best solution because the cheapest one will require hidden costs or unravel a string productivity losses.

There. Now you know everything you need to know about the cloud, infrastructure, failed and winning business strategy. If you’d like to know more, sign up for one of our webcasts.

To be honest, it’s not really about what solution you pick (although I’m really, really, really biased) it’s important that you have and implement a lead generation and a prospect grooming / qualifying process in your marketplace.

Most of you may not know, but I’m 31.

And man, if you look at the archives of this blog, I’ve said some hella dumb stuff in the past 6 years of writing this thing.

One of my agendas for 2010 and beyond is to stop being petty and stop worrying about the little things. Because you know what, I don’t wake up each day trying to make sure every little light is on and that every little corner of my kingdom has fresh paint. I wake up each day because every day I help my partners move an inch forward towards what they want to accomplish. That’s why in 2010 I’m the one at OWN with the most miles traveled, most conference calls minutes killed, most webcasts pulled off and spending as much money as I can to push my partners. It really is all about you, because if you do well, we will continue our track record.

We’re kicking ass on all fronts and in all areas, and frankly the past year has been spent in the PSA business – if the process of getting paid and justifying our value isn’t met it doesn’t matter what we’ve done for the client – they need to realize the benefits and be aware of them too.

The Process

First, look at the big picture. Is the decision I’m about to make, or a comment I’m about to put out there really something that fits into my overall strategy?

Second, does it really make an impact? If what I’m about to do is not going to make a difference a year from now on, pass.

Third, self control. This one is a toughie. I’m a bit of an inconsiderate asshole. When you have a tunnel vision to your agenda you don’t happen to see all the people your train is running over. That’s both a gift and a curse. You can’t get to where you need to go without focus. You can’t just blindly plow forward. I’m trying to work myself towards that middle – where I don’t say the first thing that’s on my mind but also don’t let opportunities pass me by.

The Week

In the past 3 days I’ve watched four of my business partners engage in the most juvenile show of childish pettiness I’ve seen in a long time. They are all grown men and women, working in senior levels of multimillion dollar corporations. One was pissed off about the time he was speaking. Another was pissed off about a competitors presence and shirt color. Another was pissed off about voting fraud on a video site. The last one was just pissed off at being in the middle. Not kidding.

Now, that’s their problem and they have to live with it. I love them all dearly.

From my perspective, I realize that as these people piss off each other over petty shit, I may be doing the same to you. I hope that most of you that read this blog don’t mistake what I’m doing here. I hold Own Web Now Corp and everyone we work with to a higher degree. I don’t take people that drop their services with us back and I don’t hire employees back. I feel OWN owes a lot to the industry that developed it, and I also feel like I owe this industry to talk about things that are threatening us.

Sometimes we’re the biggest threat to ourselves. From our ignorance to our lost opportunities.

I just figured, watching the last few days unfold from a somewhat independent third party,  I owe all of you that are offended by what you read on Vladville a huge apology.

Please don’t misplace my sincerity – I could give two shits less if you disagree with me and I hope you do – that’s why I put stuff in the open so we can discuss it and find a better way to make money. Nobody is beyond making mistakes, learning from them, and benefiting from the lesson they learned. I just don’t want you all to think it’s coming from a petty angle because I sincerely love and appreciate all my partners.

You’re paying for the Ferrari’s. I’d like more. The better off you do, the more Ferrari’s I get. I don’t want you to think I do any of this for anything less than that.

As always, thank you for your business, and thank you for all your money.

Sick of it yet?

It’s about to get a whole lot worse.

Microsoft WPC, at least from the vendor standpoint, is all about the cloud. By my brief account while trying to locate the ExchangeDefender booth (#743) the cloud is bigger than Windows for Microsoft. That’s a bit ambitious. If you’re ignoring the cloud hoping it goes away, Microsoft is about to unleash a storm of very good reasons why your clients do not need you anymore. And for those of you that think Microsoft is too big and too slow to reimage itself and take on the market leaders – ask Sony about Xbox and Google about Bing. We’re still dealing with the dominant market player here, one that makes billions of dollars in the marketplace.

They are making a move in a different direction, my suggestion is you follow it for a profitable route.

Now, I mentioned I’m writing a book about this – now well over 1/3 done. Running a business on cloud solutions is not the same as running a technology solution provider – but it’s a lot cheaper and hence more profitable when done right. I’m taking my time from a very (again, thanks to many of you) very profitable business at Own Web Now to share what we’ve learned in over a decade of doing where Microsoft want’s to go.

And I want to help you get there first.

So if you’re in DC, track me down and talk to me. I promise not to try to sell you anything. If you have a concern, so do hundreds of other consultants and I want to make sure it’s addressed. Ignoring problems has never made them go away, taking advantage of opportunities always has a chance for a win. So let’s brain up.

Bottom line: If you’re in WPC, look for a guy wearing purple.

With first half of the year coming to a close it’s time to look at the agenda & numbers and figure out where we’re at and where we’re going. Everyone should do this as a part of their business because that’s the only way to know if you’re actually going somewhere – and the smaller you are the more critical it is because you don’t get to make many mistakes. The bigger you get, the more relevant this exercise becomes because it takes a while to steer the ship and change things up to stay on the right (profitable) track.

For us, 2010 has been awesome. The gamble on the cloud is still paying off with us growing like crazy on every continent except Europe. We’re still posting positive growth in EU (on the back of UK) but it’s clear that the financial crisis around Greece is no joke. On the positive side, it’s getting more affordable for us to do business there so we’re investing heavily in the new infrastructure in UK.

ExchangeDefender 5 has been phenomenal for us – it took us out of our funk with the previous generation of the product and the new features have been a competitive slam dunk. We keep on winning against all our competitors and now we’re even attracting some big time licensing deals again so I can’t say enough good stuff about that. Anyone @ UCF want a jquery gig? We’ve been looking for over a month!

Exchange + SharePoint has been absolutely insane. Last weekend we rolled out the gear for the new low-cost BPOS-like consumer alternative to our corporate partner-only products at OWN and this business keeps on growing beyond every imaginable metric. At this pace, our cloud business will be bigger than our ExchangeDefender business by 2011. Love it!

Offsite backups, dedicated servers, virtual servers – crapshoot. The era of steel is over. I’m pretty convinced we’re Dell’s only customer Love ya guys! We’ve gone from waiting a month (at times longer) for delivery and now we’re back to the same week shipment.

All the other stuff is doing great.

What’s really amazing is that we’re launching four new things this summer that I believe will be just amazing for us. We’re also changing our pricing and adding some of the features our partners have been begging for (a retail-brand offering for partners that don’t want to be in the billing & bidding war with Google & Microsoft but don’t want to sign up a client with them and lose them forever; a social media play; a book on a successful cloud business model; a PSA with the release track record that puts Duke Nukem to shame) soooooooo… Really looking forward to the next few months.

Towards 2011 and beyond, things don’t look good. The good news is that the bad stuff is largely fueled by economic uncertainty in Europe, the oil spill in the gulf, the death drop in housing sales in USA and the overall financial funk and uncertainty. So yeah, it’s going to get ugly. But much like the previous two catastrophe’s that I’ve had a joy of running this business through (.com bust in 2000, George Bush) it’s all about listening to what people want to buy and not really caring whether I’m right or wrong about what puts my butt in a Ferrari. And the same to you.

I get this question often..

My standard response is to just shrug and say that most people that are willing to put serious effort into something expect to be compensated.

For the rest, there is a significant penalty for being open – no matter what you say, someone will be offended.

So somewhere between the cost of time and lack of pay, there are a few popular blogs. Followed by half a billion whore blogs that spend half the time on self promotion and the other half pounding Google Analytics trying to figure out which comment spambot just landed there and if they can justify writing another blog post nobody will actually read

These days everyone is concerned with the eyeballs:

You know how I know if people read my blog? I ask if they know who I am. Yes? Have I offended you?

If I haven’t, you haven’t read this blog

There are three types of blog posts:

1. Bashing someone or something. Popular, everyone loves to watch a train wreck.
2. Top 10 list. Opinions are like assholes, everyone has one and they think they are right.
3. Boring crap nobody reads.

Most of your blogging fits in category #3: helpful posts, insightful thoughts, self-promotional posts and announcements, product reviews, etc. You know how I know I wasted an hour of my time? When someone comments with “That’s helpful, that’s insightful, that’s cool!” – it’s a packrat response – post bookmarked to be lost in a workstation reimage later.

You know how I know I’ve spent an hour on something useful? When someone who has never met me starts talking to me like they know me at a conference and I ask them what they use for spam filtering..

And you know what’s just friggin awesome? More people have read this post and clicked on that link than our own newsletter.

Always. Be. Pimpin.