LinkedIn Letter, click to enlarge

I have a habit of saving and forwarding many of the ridiculous voicemails that salespeople leave in my inbox, but it isn’t too often I receive a letter of this quality, pointing to the problems that salespeople face when introduced to social networking.

The beauty of social networking is that I can typically gain value from the people I am connected to, before I am asked to buy something..  The danger comes when we decide to sell before providing any real value. Gary Vanerchuk said at Big Omaha, “we are like 18 year old boys trying to close too fast.” –This is why salespeople ruin social media.

In sales, people are told that they can reach a broad audience through social media and think they can reach this audience without working at it. To provide real value to the people you connect with takes real work. Social media doesn’t eliminate working hard, in magnifies it. We now have more messages and more people, but each person seeks information. Our messages are read much quicker and distributed to a larger audience, making it more important to respond.

I’m waiting for the realtor who wants to answer my questions online and tell me about market conditions, helping me to learn their expertise.  Teach me about how I can use my home and rental property better.  If I met you at a social gathering, you probably wouldn’t ask me to list my house immediately, you would probably find out my needs and I would describe my situation.

Finally, to this realtor’s credit, I do admire his personal touch in a handwritten letter but I think his effectiveness will improve if he provides content to his network and improves his penmanship.

After 9 seasons of the Biggest Loser, NBC continues to attract a steady audience of couch-dwellers intrigued by the success of obese contestants training as though they were professional athletes. I will admit to being a fan of this phenomenon, but find myself wondering why?

I look into the IT industry and realize we wage a similar war to each of these contestants. in order to take control of the health of IT networks we must understand the affect of small methodical issues. It doesn’t take eating one greasy meal to become morbidly obese, but eating a little extra at every meal has huge implications. The worst networks I see were overlooked daily over time; patches were missed, upgrades were delayed, hardware sits in boxes and software is left un-deployed.

Very few of us operate like Jillian Michaels to motivate ourselves proactively when we are already in good health. But we know that’s what we want.

So what changes?

What we know is that each network environment we manage requires a level of discipline. If you are a manager of IT professionals, you know this all too well. Each component needs to be prioritized and scheduled for ongoing maintenance and checks and balances need to be in place to insure the reliability of these actions, even when automated.

If you are a single IT professional, you face the most difficult of self-disciplined tasks; ensuring the health of your network where there are no professionals around. That is, there are no doctors observing the missteps or checking cholesterol, the only observers are looking for dramatic symptoms, not habits.

Now is the time to get off the couch and weigh-in on your environment and be honest with yourself about what needs to be done each day. And if you want to hear about massive transformations, I have a few stories that would keep Jillian awake at night.

-Ben Pankonin