With that in mind, I sat down with Adam Green and Chel Pixie of VibeMetrix for dinner before the inaugural Boston Blog Marketing Meetup (which I’ll blog more about later).

We got to talking about the history of Boston’s tech community—Adam has survived more than one downturn over the years—and then the conversation turned to how we are positioning ourselves for the downturn. After sharing how my company positions itself, he questioned, given the current economic slump and growing concerns over the viability of the many startups which have banked on low-revenue “if you build it they will come” business models, whether “web 2.0″ is a term anybody will want to associate themselves with a year from now.

His question is a good one, and the answer doesn’t just involve incrementing the integer and moving on. It involves retrenching and rethinking your business model before it’s too late. Advertising Age’s Michael Learmonth puts it best:

Raising money for an ad-supported web business is going to be tough for anyone who can’t demonstrate a clear, relatively quick path to profitability, and advertisers are about to get a lot more conservative than they’ve been for the past three years. Marketers likely won’t decrease their online spending, but they’ll be under pressure to justify it and show results, which means a flight to search and proven sites and less experimentation with social media and new platforms such as Meebo, Twitter, FriendFeed, Drop.io and even YouTube.

This bodes poorly for both startups and established companies with heavy ad revenue business models.

So what’s a company to do? Here’s my advice:

1. Don’t panic! The Hitchhiker’s Guide put it best. In tough times, humans tend to panic and behave irrationally—don’t spook the herd. We can smell fear, but will also cling to stability.
2. Focus on keeping the business that you have. If you’re in services, touch your clients every day. If you’re a product company, think about how you can reward loyalty.
3. Prune, don’t chop. Tempted (or forced) to cut your budgets? Do it carefully, and don’t cut your lifeline!
4. Ask for more. No, NOT from your financiers, from your customers. You don’t have to ask for a lot, just a little. And it doesn’t have to be money, it can be publicity.
5. Rethink, but don’t react. Rethink your business model, not for the current downturn, but for the next boom: are you positioned to survive until it comes, and thrive once it does?
6. Check in with folks. Silence definitely can be deadly, especially when it comes to customers and capitalists. With your survival guide and thrive plan in hand, give your VCs, angels and biggest customers/partners a call, please.

I entered the job market during the recession of the early 90s, and remember clearly my company being listed on Barron’s infamous “Burn List” article that heralded this decade’s dot-com crash. Today, I’m watching sites like FuckedStartups closely (oh how I miss FuckedCompany though), especially as I think about my research calendar for 2009.

So I know that today’s rain will end, and the economic downturn will also end. Boston (and the US in general) has at least one more good tech boom in the cards, probably more. Meanwhile, my heart goes out to some amazing people who today are facing a new day with gloom inside and out. Fear not, for “this too shall pass.”

I am very much enjoying Paul Gillin’s new book “Secrets of Social Media Marketing”. I’ll write a full review shortly, but I was inspired by the leadoff quote in chapter one, from A.G. Lafley, CEO of Procter & Gamble:

The more in control we are, the more out of touch we become. But the more willing we are to let go a little, the more we’re finding we get in touch with consumers.

Being a science nerd, I was struck by the similarities of this to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principal, which essentially states that the more precisely you know a particle’s position, the less precisely you can know its momentum.

Media training has been part of my job for about 8 years now, and boy has it changed. Anybody who’s still trying to sell the control paradigm is selling snake oil. Even old school PR master Apple can’t keep the genie in the bottle when it comes to secret projects and bad news (though the news has been good lately).

Here’s what I wrote way back in 2006 while at Topaz (emphasis mine):

It’s clear that companies are learning to give up control. Our media training slides, for instance, don’t talk about controlling the conversation any more. Richard Edelman stressed this issue of control at the last Syndicate show, and most PR agencies, if they haven’t fully embraced social media, are definitely talking about blogs and how they change the corporate conversation. A few of them are taking a stab at podcasting and even video.

Those who remain staunch supporters of the old “command and control” model of PR will ultimately either adapt or die. Forget “disruptive technology:” In astronomical/geological terms, social media is what you would call an ELE (Extinction-Level Event, pronounced “Ellie”).

I used to think that there was room for tradition. But the more I work in social media, the more I see all media heading in this direction. Yes there’s still plenty of room for good media training and good messaging. But if you don’t prepare your company or your clients for this, it will be your loss–look out for that fireball.

Folks, as Paul Gillin so deftly states in his opening chapter, bad news isn’t always bad news (emphasis his):

Negative feedback isn’t necessarily bad. We know that criticism is more useful than praise. It helps us to understand our shortcomings and make our products and business better. If customers are willing to offer you free advice, why would you not want to listen? If negativity exists, wouldn’t you rather find out now than wait until it turns up in The Wall Street Journal?