New Comm Biz

Hater

One of my roles over the last 5 years has been to help train internal teams on social media.  I used to get frustrated with people that didn’t “get it” or questioned the relevance of The Social.

Heck I used to get down right furious (I of course never loose my cool anymore). But I find it ironic/entertaining now that many recent converts find themselves in the same boat, filled with frustration.

I’d like to share the nugget of wisdom that has kept me sane all these years: We need late adopters.

If everyone was early adopters NOTHING WOULD GET DONE!!

We’d have thousands of bridges that never got finished. All roads would eventually run nowhere and dead end in a field somewhere. We probably never would have invented automobiles but instead jumped to rocket powered horses.(That’d be bad. Trust me.)

I am obviously exaggerating. But I hope you get my point.

Early adopters may invent amazing new ways to do things but late adopters make sure those things get built in the first place and continue to run when we’ve got bored and moved on to the next shiny object.

Why do marketing early adopters have so much angst with marketing’s late adopters? They control the budgets.And that’s the way it should be.

Never put an early adopted in charge of the budgets. Give them budget but don’t give them free reign. If you do, you’ll be out of business very quickly but you’ll have lots of shiny toys. Assuming they didn’t take them all apart.

So have patience. I know they can be grumpy and they sometimes talk trash. But let’s get real, so do you.

They’ll all get there but first we have to do our part to develop the processes and train them. (Don’t worry, we won’t have to follow the processes ourselves. We’ll be on to something else by then.)

Photo by Thomas Hawk

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