All About Timing

In every aspect of your life – online and off.

Call it serendipity, kismet, fate or whatever you’d like. Whether you believe this is crafted by a higher power or otherwise, it’s out there and constantly affecting you and your business. Good timing is quite difficult to manipulate in the real world, but online can be a much more simplified process and may be just what puts you in front of your competition.

Get involved first. There is a reason that practically every social networking, media, forum or blog includes the date you joined: the longer someone’s been involved, the more credibility they appear to have. Of course, this doesn’t apply to those who signed up in 2002 and not logged in since then, but in general getting involved in things early and staying at least loosely involved pays dividends later. Except when it doesn’t (exceptions to every rule, remember?).

Where do you stand? Artists and writers are given this advice all the time: where does your work stand in the grand scheme of things? Who have you drawn inspiration from, what is your final product reminiscent of, and why should you bother adding your work to the top of that distinguished pile? It is important that you know what came before you, even if you are going to repeat the information/style anyway – it’s about context. A word to the wise, however: history is written by those who win the wars.

What time is it – and where? Social media/networking is a multi-faceted, time-sensitive beast. Most people know that Digg requires the ultimate in timing necessity, for example. But while you may be happily at the beginning of your Friday morning, others may be enjoying Friday late night festivities – Web 2.0 kryptonite – leaving your content limp, lonely, and weak. Make sure you evaluate, comment, and spend some time with any community sites before you start submitting items, especially your own content. It will give you the best shot at being successful, giving your profile time to be noticed before you start looking for votes to come your way.

There’s business beyond blogging, too. Whether you are working to start a company, expand your service offerings, or launch a new product – you need to make sure everything fits and has been accounted for, before the decision to move forward is made (the italicized portion being the crucial piece of advice). Too many companies have gone down in flames for trying to rush to the market too soon.

Strike while the audience is hot. We all know most people don’t get more than the obligatory 15 minutes of fame, so be ready to milk all you can out of that quarter hour. If you have the good fortune of hitting the front page of Digg, make sure you have Digg effect protection and plan in place, for example. Again, another word to the wise: Evaluate quickly, but completely – you don’t want to rush into something you don’t want to have to make good on, even if it has a snowball’s chance in hell of happening.

News is not news if it isn’t prompt. What you are reading right now? Not news. In fact, you’ve probably heard much of this advice before. Don’t push things that aren’t new onto people like it’s the best thing since sliced bread: it may be to you, but to everyone else it’s annoying. This applies to anything from blogging to swag promotions to date ideas.

Whether you think about the Titanic speeding to reach New York, or the famously horrid ET Atari video game which was coded in a mere 6 weeks so it could be released in time for Christmas, there are tons of products that have met their end because they were rushing. Consider the auto industry, which “coughed up $14.5 billion to cover the cost of warranty and recall work in 2004″ alone! Or what about the websites that often get added to the TechCrunch DeadPool, many victims of jumping on the bandwagon too late?

In short, getting your timing wrong can have disastrous effects, and should always be considered during the product/marketing development – not as an afterthought. But don’t let me take up too much of your time…