Suddenly Everbody Wants To Be An Early Adopter
At the start of the year it was Quora. Not so long ago it was Google +, then came Oink and recently the invitations have come flooding in to my inbox for Path. The race to become an early adopter on the hot new social service is an ongoing battle that rages every single day. Big organizations, brands, businesses and the general public want to sign up to the latest service before it gets big so as they are the ones who discover the “next Twitter or Facebook”. I see it at training days I give as well with people less interested in learning about practical tips about the social networks that have millions of users and more interested in wondering what is coming next and what they could be missing out on.
To understand how we are in this situation you need to rewind about 3 years to a world where Facebook and Twitter didn’t exist. Big businesses and the media in particular didn’t see those coming. These platforms have changed the way we communicate and do business but even though they seem obvious now they were initially dismissed as geeky or for “college kids”. A few years later and social networks sit at the very core of many news organizations and many businesses have integrated them across everything they do from sales and customer service to marketing and market research. Everybody got caught flat footed with their pants down when social media first emerged and smart people don’t want that to happen again.
Along with a fear of missing another huge cultural shift comes the changing pace of technology. Most of us have smart phones, fast 3G connections and tablets are also on the rise. Social technologies are more available than ever to the masses and quite simply there are more people around now to become early adopters than there were a couple of years ago.
I’d always encourage people to stick with what works already. Facebook might not be as sexy as it once was but it has a billion very loyal and engaged users. There might be a better start up brewing in a garage somewhere that will help us communicate better than Twitter one day but right now hundreds of millions of people spend hours on Twitter every week. Get in front of those users and create meaningful engagement instead of reading tech blogs and looking for the latest hit.
The chances are you won’t see the next big thing coming anyway. It won’t be Google + and the most important thing is it won’t happen overnight anyway. Although Twitter and Facebook had huge growth from early days they didn’t burst on to the mainstream for a good 3 years after launch. Chances are that hyped mobile app with social location based features that all the bloggers love is not going to be the next big thing. More likely it will be something like Instagram that is over a year old, has 15 million + users and a massive sense of community. The big hits don’t just burst on to the scene one week to the next but rather they grow year on year until their traction is such that they hit a tipping point and they burst in to the media and the mainstream and snowball from there. Trying to be an early adopter is fun and more people are trying to do it but for the most part you are much better off sticking with the mainstream services and backing the services that are already winners.
