A dear friend of mine, John Lee, texted me. His text pretty much read, “What up?”

He sent this text sometime in mid-January and it has been a standard greeting between he and I for nearly 35 years. You see, we grew up together.

I, and at the time, had just begun to experience the beginnings of my current medical adventures. I had neither the time nor the interest in writing him a big long explanation.

But I had been keeping up with my Twitter account @RonMorrisBiz. I started this account a couple months earlier, and it was designed just for this particular type of text message. So I wrote back to John, “Check my Twitter account, ‘RonMorrisBiz,’ for an update on all recent issues related to medical.”

His response came back: “Don’t know Twitter,” followed by, “Don’t use Twitter,” and then closed with, “Don’t even understand how Twitter works.”

I smiled wanly. For I knew that Johnny was in the majority, and not the minority, of my very intelligent radio audience. And if he doesn’t understand or use Twitter, I reasoned, then who is!?

Anyway, that’s how Johnny Lee felt and it was clear that I was getting nowhere by directing him to an account that had been created specifically and exclusively for guys like him.

But Johnny is not alone. There have to be hundreds of thousands of business owners and highly successful people who don’t know and understand Twitter. I accept this. In fact, I applaud this.

Now, there is another side to this coin. As CEO of Pittsburgh Business Radio (American Entrepreneur Radio), Brian McMahon takes full advantage of all social media. Brian regularly uses Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Facebook, as well as good old blogging and e-mailing to “spread the word,” and/or learn more about our product and its markets.

The question then becomes, how much of Brian’s time is truly spent “advancing the ball” (a favorite phrase of mine) versus merely feeding Brian’s overwhelming psychic and subconscious need for social information?

Not even to mention that just using social media can produce awkward situations. Por ejemplo, I’ve noticed that both Brian and Andrew Rossi (our lead sales guy) both tend to use their iPhones to take notes during meetings.

This is fine, in fact I applaud their ingenuity … but to a prospective customer or even a customer, I would admonish them to be very careful. I tell them, “Make sure the customer knows that you are taking notes and not fooling around with Facebook or LinkedIn or some other social media game while you’re talking to them when all you’re really doing is taking notes. Don’t be afraid to announce that before you take those notes. In fact, get their permission. It’s all better than having them walk away thinking, ‘How rude that sales guy was … I’m never going to see him again’… ‘In fact, that guy was so rude by openly playing videogames while talking to me that I intend to let his boss know about it.’” And, of course, “his boss” tends to be me.

So here we have Brian McMahon, who swears by social media and John Lee, who swears at all of these electronic software. John, and somewhat like me, feels that the world might possibly be a better place without them.

Although I must point out that I have come around to the point where I do see value in some of the social media, such as LinkedIn, which is a great way to gain a reference and thus entry into a company that may be devoid of people you already know.

But overall, I’m still not convinced that this is the only way to go. You ask why? Well, and for one thing, I give you Mike Lopes. Mike is an ex-controller of World Wide Glass for PPG and for some period of time he worked in the treasury for PPG.

Mike is one of the most task-focused people I have ever met and he had some very hard and fast rules that almost never were broken.

One of those rules was his belief that the customer should put his objective for meetings “in writing,” so that Mike could compare it to the overall company goals. But other than that, Mike believed firmly that nothing, and I mean nothing, was written down. He just didn’t believe in it.

In the nine years I was in two different businesses with him, I believe there may have been three e-mails that included his name and signature and that gave directions to someone else. Three times!

Mike had a meeting with a client and when the client asked, “Will you remember me or any of the things that were said here today?” Mike replied, “Now that’s my problem, isn’t it? Don’t worry. I’ll remember everything of importance.”

And of course he did.

As far as e-mail was concerned, I only had two such e-mails. Compare this to a lot of the e-mails you see today wherein top executives pour their hearts out into long slobbering missives showing the way out. It’s a night and day difference.

Another example of Mike’s temperance with words can be noted by his “analysis” of a client account in Baltimore. We drove there, after the contract was already signed, to develop the primary specification for the project. In all, we were to recover some millions of dollars for them. When they asked how Mike planned on remembering the specifications for implementation of our plan to recover this money, Mike touched his head and said, “Not to worry, it’s all in here.”

And yet, Mike was a genuine risk taker/a real iconoclast. If he saw something that he considered to be a significant (but still niched) “problem” --- he would always come up with a solution.

Moreover, he had the courage to execute that solution.

And so I ask you a question that I’ve asked before --- “What are the successful ‘rules’ for an entrepreneur?"

In case you haven’t already seen this, it’s real simple:

• Find the problem – not too big of a problem, but certainly “big enough,”
• Then, focus all of your (business) energies on solving this problem, and;
• Keep the company excited about its direction and the future for them and you in all cases.

If done right, you’ll have a company that “owns” its own niche and is excited to play in that niche. All done by a guy who really is considered to be “nothing more than” a technical administrator.

So, here is a little experiment I want you to do. I’d like you to sit down right now and take out your cost/benefit analysis tools. Here we go:

First, and when you come to work in the AM, to “clean out your e-mails” (BTW, mine are presently in the thousands and still unattended to throughout the past years), ask yourself the following questions:

• How many e-mails did you just download?
• Next, how many of them relate to your company being able to “advance the ball?”
• Finally, ask yourself how many of these e-mails are asking for your time versus how many are asking for someone else’s time but yet it takes you 15 minutes to figure that out?

Next, you check your Twitter account and go through the same analysis. That is,

• How many tweets have you received?
• How many of them relate to your company being able to “advance the ball?”
• How many are truly for you or could be handled by someone else in the company?

Lastly, do the same things with such social media as LinkedIn, and/or Facebook and so on. In all cases, you’re looking for an answer to one question: “Is what I’m doing right now helping to improve the overall picture of my company by “advancing the ball?” This can include spending money as well, though you may need permission.

Once you’ve done this analysis for a week, add up all the time that you would have spent chasing down e-mails, tweets, text messages, and the like, that are “interesting” but not necessarily useful, to the cost of the business.

I’m not saying here that one should not respond to people that go to the trouble to write to tell you what a fine job you did and/or how much they enjoy working with your company/people, but do the same thing for the people who are in a foul mood because of your shortcomings.

You can also take all those congratulatory and/or meritorious e-mails and texts and flip them to your assistant or someone else in the organization who can draft a short thank you letter which basically says that we will commit to nothing but that (in the case of a prospective customer) would be more than happy to pass along your sentiments to the appropriate people. Things like that.

Start getting in the habit of doing this, and you’ll save literally hundreds of hours each year. And somewhere in those hundreds of hours are your own free time. You will get to the point where you’re so good with delegation that you’ll be able to succeed.

Remember, it’s all about time. I can probably sit down right now and write a check for ten million dollars and try to go out and buy ten more minutes at the end of my life. Well, no one would sell it to me.

No one wants to give up their precious time on earth; me more than anyone which is why I’m fighting this cancer tooth and nail.

And yet, we allow ourselves to be robbed of our time all the time, and in so many ways. One of these ways is part and parcel of the “new economy.” It’s all about surviving. It’s about having fun while this can still be done and especially to the people who don’t know they can’t do it!

Have a great weekend!

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