I recently attended a speech by a well-known agency owner in Portland, Kent Lewis of Anvil Media (now Deksia.) He operated his agency for 25 years in Portland and sold it this spring. He stayed on as marketing director and presented on building a network through social media and using it to sell.
Kent has a LinkedIn network of over 22,000 people that he built over a ten year period. He did this through grinding, by sending personalized connection requests and commenting on others’ activity 5 – 10 times each day. He said that he was getting ready to go on vacation and it would be the first time in years that he wouldn’t check his social media.
A friend reached out to me yesterday about joining a local entrepreneur’s Slack channel. I declined. In theory, it sounds good. The problem is that I hate that mode of communicating. I’m a focus person. I have 0 Facebook, 0 Twitter, 0 everything presence. I don’t like being distracted by a continual stream of communication. Even if it’s fun business stuff.
I suspect that Kent enjoys connecting, that it’s a natural strength, and it’s clear that he’s developed it to a point of excellence. For someone like me, it would be operating in an area of weakness. If social was the channel we had to pursue, I’d have to approach it completely differently. Otherwise, I would pay a significant productivity cost for participation.
Kent’s business model is not that far off from ours. We’re climbing similar mountains. But his environmental context is unique enough and his strengths are unique enough that I’m not going to experience his success by copying him. That’s not to say I can’t learn from him- just that it’s unlikely that I would replicate his results using his tactics.
Though we might be climbing similar mountains, we all have to find our own way up.
Featured image is Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay. By Jamling Tenzing Norgay – http://www.tenzing-norgay-trekking.de, Used under CC BY-SA 3.0. Unaltered.