Early Adopters and You/Me
Posted by Jamie Hutson | Filed under Mobile, Small Businesses, advertising, marketing, revenue models, social media, web 2.0
Today’s Fast Company Big Idea is:
“Anyone who says early adopters don’t matter needs to go back to business school. Facebook and Twitter are beginning to impact business just as much as advertising ”
I follow these daily thought provokers from Fast Company because they are usually fairly interesting. I think this one is excellent. I don’t consider myself to be an innovator, but a late moving early adopter, I am becoming more early in the adoption cycle, but still I’m typically a little behind (particularly in the larger technology space, which I am still new to).
But the importance of early adopters has never left my thoughts. The early adopters are the business owners we seek out first when entering a new market, and they are precisely not the end users that we seek to reach on our website. They are the people who determine whether new technologies fail or succeed and build momentum for those that do. So I wait for the early adopters to try things out see if they fail. Early adopters are the front line in end user technology, and they need to be taken seriously.
A few days ago, I mentioned Lewis Black (ok, I’ve been a little harsh on Lewis, but I’m actually a huge fan) and his mocking of internet addicts - essentially early adopters. Again, a prime example of the lack of understanding most people have of how new technologies can help us do things better and faster, or sometimes just have more fun doing them. MySpace, turned into Facebook, then Twitter became the next hot thing.
Many of my clients are now “working” on a Facebook page, and already have a MySpace page. Do these pages help them at all? Not measurably, but the point is that even these late adopters and slow moving businesses now see that they “really should” be on Facebook. Do a quick google of “Facebook Marketing” (an auto suggestion in firefox!) and you can see that people are making entire businesses out of advertising consulting for Facebook.
But now, the innovators are moving elsewhere, which means the early adopters will be soon to follow. Where will they go, and what will be that next cool technology that will be affecting the way people to business? I would say mobile, but the iPhone already happened and the flurry of 3G phones coming out this summer will blow that away. Its not a new social network, because I believe people are getting fatigued. Semantic Web 3 dot 0, fancy buzz words? I think we are a year or two away from anything drastic coming across the radar.
Any thoughts…
July 6th, 2008 at 1:19 pm
[…] I have of late been very hard on the financial markets and the coverage of them RE: their view on the internet. And in fairness, I live alot of my life on the internet, I run an internet company and I know a few people who do as well. However, coming across a few data points (particularly this one from Greg Sterling) about E-Commerce having basically flat growth and a few fairly average earnings reports, I think I was getting a bit ahead of myself. I know a good bit about the markets, I know alot more about the internet, but the internet is still a small piece of the economy, and as a whole of our nation, only the early adopters are really savvy to its power and potential. I guess I just never really considered myself and early adopter. […]