Social Media Roundup: Partners Talk Crypto, Security Hiring

LinkedIn and Reddit are highlighting the growth of MSP and agent partners.

It’s clearly an exciting time to work in the channel. Partners are not only landing more customers and sales, but they’re getting the chance to meet in person again. Multiple channel enablement firms hosted vendors and partners at events this week.

Partners often hold back on sharing their true feelings about vendors, customers and other topics that cause them headaches. However, platforms like Reddit allow for semi-anonymous commenting that can shed a fascinating light on the industry. If you haven’t checked out /msp, you’ll want to do so.

We explored LinkedIn and Reddit to find worthwhile conversations featuring partners. A brief summary of interesting channel-related social media interactions follows below.

MSPs Talk Hiring

The subreddit /msp has grown into a thriving online community. Partners discuss a variety of topics, from bashing vendors to asking for advice. Recently the owner of a smaller MSP took to the subreddit to ask their peers about hiring. When should a growing firm hire its first employee?

One commenter recommended hiring at 80-90% capacity, taking into account the length of the hiring/onboarding process.

“Besides giving you scope to take on more clients, it’s good for the business owner to not have to be the one constantly manning phones, and you’ll be in a much better position when emergencies happen, so it’s worth hiring sooner rather than later,” HearMeSpeakAsIWill said.

Another commenter recommended waiting until you feel overworked.

“Hire when you can offload enough to keep a half-timer busy. Do the projects you’ve put off … and then offload to the next in line. Rinse, repeat, and grow,” skydivinfoo said.

However, plenty of users countered skydivinfoo’s advice. Check out the thread and consider joining the community!

Agents Talk Security

While MSPs possess a thriving Reddit community, agents tend to make more of an appearance on LinkedIn. Matthew Toth, who leads the Michigan-based consultancy C3 Technology Advisors, sounded off on cybersecurity. He said partners need to put more focus on the little things.

“If you do really simple things well, like patch management, communicate and execute on security policies, email training and protection, you’ll eliminate a majority of your attack surface area. And these things happen to be the least costly,” Toth said.

Source: LinkedIn

Partners and vendors agreed.

“Everyone wants an easy button,” said Robert Williams, Herman Miller’s director of global technology operations. “There is no easy button.”

Source: LinkedIn

Telarus and Crypto

This lands more in the “content” category than “social media” category, but Telarus recently delivered an interested panel on cryptocurrency. The Utah-based technology services distributor brought in experts to discuss topics like bitcoin, blockchain and doge.

Calvin Cooke, founder of b/digital partners, and Roman Jeitziner director of sales engineering at Open Systems, joined Telarus co-founder Patrick Oborn and vice president of sales engineering Josh Lupresto.

And Telarus’ competitors also enjoyed busy weeks. PlanetOne hosted its kickoff golf event in Scottsdale, Arizona. In the meantime, Avant brought several sales and supplier agents together for a baseball game in Dallas.