Be a Social Media Early Adopter but Market with an Early Majority Strategy

The first premise of this entry is that a marketer should be an Early Adopter of social media technologies. The second is that the social media technologies actually used to go to market should match those used by the Early Majority of the customer base. The third is that presumed actual use of social media is overblown for most market segments.

Let's start with you, the marketer. Do you know what these are:

Twitter. Facebook. Ning. Blogger. SMS. Podcast. Linked In. Plurk. Pounce. Delicious. Jaiku. Skype. Orkut. Second Life. Yelp. YouTube. Cuil. RSS. Stumbleupon. Digg. Flickr. wetpaint.

Does not knowing make your marketing heart flutter that your marketing plan is behind the times?

As a marketer of almost any sort, you need to know what these are. You should be using some regularly, whether you really need to or not-pick the ones your customers are likely to use and consider it professional enrichment. You should take time each week to update yourself on facets of social media and tinker with what is relevant.

Now, what do you know really know about the social media usage of your customers? Let's start with a quick refresher on a typical technology adoption curve. The vertical axis shows number of adopters of a new technology, the horizontal axis shows time. Generally, it's most efficient to time technology marketing, in this case social media marketing technologies, for the early majority.

What social media are your early majority users of social media really using? Some may have Linkedin or Facebook or Twitter accounts but are they really using them? Your mission is to ignore media hype and find real data on what your customers really use.

The good news, the reality, is that in most cases, for most market segments, the actual use of these social media tools is over hyped. That which is exciting naturally gets disproportionate press.

Most recently, I have had the pleasure of marketing to marketers. I spent a good year crafting a marketing strategy mixed with new school and old school marketing tactics. The new school tactics (e.g. Facebook group) provided a progressive company image and some brand awareness but the old school tactics (e.g. trade shows) provided virtually all of our leads. My dream was to shift fully to a social media and inbound marketing strategy, but not enough of our prospects were embracing those channels, not even a majority as far as I could tell.


And so I was not astounded to recently learn from Forrester Research that "social media use in B2B is early stage; it's not well understood". Consider these statistics from a recent Forrester/Marketing Profs survey of B2B marketers:

• 32% use blogs; of those only 32% find them effective for brand building (about 10% of the total)
• 30% use forums/social communities; only 30% of them find them effective for building brand or generating leads (about 9% of the total)

(More from Forrester on that here .)



I was astounded however by a customer anecdote indicating that this market might even be more in the Dark Ages than I had thought. I asked a power user of the product we marketed-very sophisticated direct marketing software-how often he searched the Internet and what types of terms he searched on. This guy is a seasoned, sharp six figure marketing manager in a demanding $1B company.

His response-"I don't really have time to search. I don't search on anything."

We're not even talking about social media here...we're talking about basic internet search! This affirmed our difficulty in reaching corporate marketing people via paid or organic search. Many of them don't even search let alone participate in social media. My conclusion-the culture and pace of American business in many places do not allow for active social media participation or even regular use of the internet for information gathering purposes. Our perception of the use of social media, especially in the business markets, is based mostly on the very visible early adopters (e.g. some 3 million Twitter users).

So to recap-

Pay attention to social media and learn how it works and use it-find it's real value firsthand. You, as the marketer, must be an engaged Early Adopter.


And pay very deep attention to the social media habits of your customers. Find or build real data about usage and talk to your customers firsthand. If most of them aren't yet engaged in social media, it's not time to invest heavily. Craft your marketing strategies to fit the Early Majority of your customer base. The WRM will be strive to efficiently time the use of old school and new school marketing strategies...not too early and not too late.

Finally, social media adoption rates are growing quickly. Keep in touch with current data. Dig in to understand not just sign ups but actual usage. I'll leave you with a good site for marketers on Facebook usage including these charts showing growth by age group .