Sleepless in Social Media

At a conference on social media I attended earlier this year, one of the speakers asked the audience how many of us really had the time for social media. Proudly, albeit surprisingly, a large percentage of us raised our hands, thinking…of course, we had the time for social media. Blogs. Twitter. Facebook. A few minutes here, a few minutes there. Piece of cake.

But the speaker had actually thrown us a curve ball, going on to make his point that none of us really had the time it took to engage in social media. We made the time. Like our colleagues and peers, we couldn’t help but be busy with quotidian demands on our work lives, too – commutes, meetings, phone calls and the like. Never mind our family time. The truth is that to become as social media savvy and successful as each of us was in this space, we had put in extra hours. Lots of extra hours.  

And, yes, he was right.

It’s a myth that social media doesn’t take much time. It might only take a few minutes to write what you had for lunch in 140 characters in less, but if you expect to be blogging, tweeting and engaging in the conversation across the social web successfully, you had better be prepared to lose a little sleep.

As I recently wrote on the Internet Marketing Strategies and Secrets blog, “Like a physician on call, to be appreciated by your constituents in social media is to be open for business practically 24/7.”

Justin Levy, General Manager of New Marketing Labs and popular social media practitioner, even went so far as to entitle one of his recent blog posts, “Sleep is Forbidden,” borrowing a line from Diddy, the iconic record producer, rapper and entrepreneur extraordinaire. Wrote Justin about Diddy…

“He is known for telling his team that “sleep is forbidden” and it has been a quote that resonated with me since first hearing it.  If you go to Diddy and tell him that you’re tired, you know what he tells you? “What rhymes with ‘tired’…’fired’?

Okay, so that may be a little harsh, but it certainly gets the point across.

Then, of course, there’s the king of social media himself, Chris Brogan (with whom Justin works).  Wrote Chris in a post almost a year ago…

“I am asked about twice or three times a day about my sleep patterns. This comes up because I produce a lot of content, all the time, and because I’m quite active on sites like Twitter. The truth is, though, I don’t sleep as much as most people.”

You think?

Let’s face it. Outrageously talented and incredibly affable, Justin Levy and Chris Brogan are two tireless, indefatigable social media role models for the rest of us, guys who don’t hesitate to sacrifice more than a few hours of sleep for the sake of their faithful followers, for the sake of sharing as much information and insight with others as humanly possible. They’re a breed apart from the majority, outliers among the masses, superstars among a galaxy of countless other social media makers and marketers. 

I’m thinking, however, that the prodigious effort and output that’s required to be successful on the grid is not unlike what it takes to be at the top of your game practically anywhere else.  Medicine, pro sports, law, finance, even plain old marketing. To excel in anything means to go above and beyond. And besides, social media as a discipline is really in its infancy, so people like Justin and Chris – and, in fact, all of us early adopters of these new online communications platforms – have to work especially hard in order to blaze the right trails.

I’m thinking that when all is said and done, being sleepless in social media may not be unlike being sleepless in any other field of endeavor. If you want to be one of the best, you burn the candle at both ends.

What do you think?

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