SPURspectives

I love this quote, or at least this half of it by David Lloyd George. The entire quote is, “Don’t be afraid to take a big step. You can’t cross a chasm in two small steps.” No one knows this better than Wile E. Coyote. I think it has a lot to say about the current state of the social media marketing frontier. This reminds me of the early days of the Internet when there was radical change happening at a maddening pace. Social media seems to be in the same boat today and the fallout is beginning.

I’m talking about Geoffrey Moore’s book, Crossing the Chasm, and the wonderful little graph he co-opted to explain the adoption of technology products and services by the public. It divides the market into five groups along a time line that shows when people adopt a certain technology. The most interesting part of the curve is the chasm between stages two and three. This is where most technologies fail to develop into a full product with a fully supportive company behind them and they die, unlike Wile E. Coyote.

The plethora of social media products and services currently available is mind boggling, to say the least. They won’t all make it. They can’t. The market isn’t big enough. Yesterday’s announcement that one of the larger services, Pownce, a competitor to Twitter, is shuttering its site and merging with SixApart highlights one of the first social innovations to make it to the chasm, and fall in. There will be more. The questions that remain are who will they be and what do you do about it?

If I could answer the first question, I wouldn’t be writing this blog post. I’d be deciding if I wanted to have lunch with Warren Buffett, again. Suffice it to say that things will change, companies come and go, life goes on, so hedge your bets. That answers the second question. Hedge your bets. Here’s what I mean:

• Don’t freeze. Staying out of social media is a mistake as big as when your uncle Gilbert said the Internet is a fad.
• Don’t try to use ALL of the available social media outlets and tools. Have you seen what’s available? You’ll end up divorced and spend the rest of your life in therapy.
• Do look carefully at your target market. Who are they? How old are they? How do they communicate with one another?
• Do match your selection of social media channels to the needs and habits of your target market. Note that “channels” is plural. You need a multi-channel approach.
• Do watch what is happening with the adoption of your selections and the maturation of the companies that developed them. Be prepared for change.
• Do have a plan should one of your channel selections become no longer viable.

So, don’t stay out of social media altogether and don’t try everything all at once. Rather, put together a plan with a well-rounded selection of social media services at various stages of maturity that match your target market’s needs and interaction habits. A multi-channel approach hedges your bet that one might fail/merge/transform/get expensive/etc. It also enables you to interact with your community at multiple touch points. Furthermore it allows you to interact with people using both pull and push marketing tactics. Then you can listen, record, respond, suggest, and have a real relationship with your constituency.

It also helps to realize that loads of products and services are born and continue to exist for their entire product life in the first two segments of Moore’s hill. I think this is particularly true for non-consumer products or specialty products — products where the market is niche and limited to not include the possibility of mass adoption. So if you match your mix to your target base, monitor the results, and keep an eye on the horizon, you will end up watching the Coyote leap off the cliff instead of following him. Meep-meep.

Tags: early adopters, early majority, laggards, late majority, lifecycle, marketing, pownce, sixapart, social marketing, social media