Fear and Loathing of Sharing in Web 2.0

It’s five minutes to five am where I am. I am supposed to be asleep so I’m writing in the dark. My problem is, if I get an idea into my head that I think may help someone, I can’t stop myself. I have to write, or more exactly today, I have to Dragon.

(Dragon Naturally Speaking does an awesome job of translating what I say to text, even out of the box, though for techie terms and words affected by my mish-mashed slightly Southern US accent, it has to be strictly trained.)

My fatal flaw is that I just can’t seem to keep my big mouth shut. Over the past four years I say it has cost me at least a quarter of a million dollars. I use that figure in comparison to the sales I could have made if only I had created ebooks, books or multimedia offerings from the ideas I have about what’s about to be hot in web site traffic and sold them instead of giving them away free on my site.

But my willingness to share has also made me at least that same amount in that same amount of time, so at worst it’s a wash. Sharing creates loyalty and brings tidings of good cheer. Not to mention that with the right web 2.0 tools, it can be networking on auto-pilot.

And that seems to be the opposite of the serious affliction that I’m seeing on the web. Nothing new, it’s the same old thing, misguided greed, and general icky feelings about getting too personal.

I work a lot with small to medium businesses, and occasionally with brand-name corporations. At some point, I also somehow became a favorite of the internet marketing crowd, the very niche I was attempting to maneuver away from in favor of less competition. It’s hard to explain to good business people, who have learned to thrive by smashing their rivals, that sharing knowledge is good marketing.

“What if someone takes the knowledge I gave away and sells it? “

Then your future client may be quite upset when they find out that you could have told them the same thing for free, and that the products you actually sell are of a higher caliber.

Or nothing will happen and you’ll take that hit in your stride, because you know that somehow, some way, whatever you give is going to come back to you.

If you’re in business to make some cash, that is probably going to sound a little soft to you. You want cold hard numbers about how participating in all this fuzzy, warm web 2.0 gooey goodness is going to help you increase sales by x percent.

Well my friend, you are a dinosaur. The web doesn’t work quite like that anymore. Sure, you can create a lead capture page, direct people to it through paid advertising, and turn an (increasingly smaller) profit. But what you’re eventually going to find out is that the wider you open your arms, the more you cash you end up holding in them.

I read recently that iGoogle isn’t really a web 2.0 app and when the author gave his reasoning, it all made sense. iGoogle doesn’t allow you to share anything. And if sharing is really the core of web 2.0, that really explains why it’s so hard for some people at the corporate level, and to a lesser extent, small to medium businesses to understand.

This “share to get” philosophy would have completed befuddled Me 1.0, the person who thought that I had to be three times as good, and then indispensable, to get ahead. I vaguely remember thinking getting ahead was all there was. Any notion that sharing would equal success would have had me on the floor rolling with laughter.

And it’s not just sharing resources that seems to instill this fear. It’s sharing ourselves. I’m including myself in this number because at this very minute, I’m shaking in my boots at the idea that I’m going to have to tell my colleagues where I’ve been for four months and how it’s possible that I’m nearly broke because of it.

How can I possibly share how sick I’ve been, and still feel like I can command serious attention and respect, goes my nutty brain.

In reality, the question is, how can I not? And I have friends in many higher places than I am in, who have said as much as that they’re just waiting for the opportunity to repay me for some past kindness. I have favors I can call in but I’m dragging my feet.

And I think the reason is part of what initially attracted me to the Internet, and it may be what is making some of the people I interact with nervous as well.

The internet was supposed to be this place that we could all go to be ourselves but anonymously. For many of us who have been here since gopher, it’s as if someone has tilted our online world, and all of a sudden, we have to make the kinds of connections that we fled to the internet to avoid.

Conversation? Yes. On a forum where I can go by a handle and have an icon represent me.

The whole thing with the pictures, real names, and the online live video is very scary to some of us.

And yet? This is where the Net is going. We can join it, or we can be left behind. The World Wide Web isn’t for spectators anymore.

[tags]web 2.0, web, business, tech, technology, social marketing, fears and social marketing, lockergnome[/tags]