photo by motionblur

The speed of business and life has sped up dramatically over the past few years. As someone who has grown up in the digital age, attached to everything from beepers to cell phones and now laptops and smartphones, the connection between people is almost instant.

I have been working with some businesses and their process for lead generation. Boy has this world changed, especially in the B2B markets.

Here is a real world example. A company that provides advertising has set up searches within Tweetdeck for local occurrences of search terms that could lead to prospecting. Every few minutes each individual rep hears a little Tweetdeck (Star Treck style) beep and in comes someone who has posted a message in real time about their needs in this market.

The sales rep calls the prospect literally seconds after the Tweet is posted and is able to provide a solution.

The first time we had this office attempt this tactic it was magical and unreal. The alert came in and we went to the profile of the person we were going to contact. Low and behold on this person’s Twitter Profile he had his office line in the graphic. How convenient?

The person was shocked to know that anyone was even reading his Tweets and since we were so attentive and engaging this sales rep got a new contract.

It doesn’t always happen this way. Sometimes the quickness is too quick.

Where and when do we draw the line?

Chris Brogan often talks about how quickly he gets to emails and that some people are turned off if they don’t get a response in less than a few hours. He calls this the “assault on anywhen.” Here is some of what he had to say:

None of us are performing surgery (unless you are). You’re not calling me for the antidote to a poison. We MUST police ourselves about our sense of urgency. What happens, and I can be guilty, is that when WE need something, we push for it, not really taking into consideration the other side of the equation. So instead of just ticking something off our list, we come off as insistent and insensitive to other people’s situations.

Then The Technology Changes Fast As Well

Take the case of the iPad. While the Kindle and the Nook have been on the market for some time, it is Apple that is making things change fast. Media delivery, subscriptions to movie,s, newspapers, magazine, music, games and more.

All of these developers need to shift their approach when a new media sells close to half a million copies its first day in the real world with much more to come as they stock up for the summer and the ever growing holiday season (its not that far away in retail planning).

So…Fast Is Good and Fast Is Bad?

If fast is good, we can get to our customers and give service on the fly, but it can also be bad – scaling the need for immediacy and ever changing technology (I have companies that are still scared to make an iPhone app, nonetheless are not ever thinking about an iPad), what can we do about it?

Honestly I am not the guy with all the answers (I’m too busy returning @ replies and emails to create a solution – God forbid that my late reply loses me business).

What I do want to do is talk about this problem. Whether you are a social media person or a small/large business, what are you doing to work with the speed of today’s world?

This post was written by Greg Rollett, a social media marketer working in the music industry.