On early adopters

The nearer we get to finishing our software I start to think more about our marketing plan. None of us has a background in marketing or PR so when we were working on Zoimusic we commissioned a plan from Spark PR, one of the top technology agencies. What came through to me more than anything else is that the technology press is a massively crowded field and cutting through all the noise is extremely difficult.

As well as getting a plan I started to read all the recent marketing books like Purple Cow, Beyond Buzz, Made to Stick, Crossing the Chasm etc. etc. Now there is a well known graph in Crossing the Chasm which shows a gap between the early adopters and the mainstream users. This may have been true in the past but now I would go further and say that there is almost no connection between the early adopter and mainstream user when it comes to web applications.

In the past technology had to be paid for. A new gadget or a new piece of software cost a significant amount of money so the early adopter had to choose between several different options and think carefully about which one to buy. Money down, the early adopter had an investment in a product so in persuading others they were also persuading themselves that they hadn’t wasted their money. Now most web applications are free. Early adopters can try absolutely everything and anything, it entertains them for a short while then they move on to the next thing. It’s why you see a spike on Alexa for companies featured on TechCrunch as people take a look, decide they don’t like it and move on.

Inward facing

Even for those applications which do grab their attention the early adopter tends to be inward looking. Twitter is a classic example of this. There are a core group of early adopters who use it obsessively because it solves a problem that is unique to their group. For anyone outside it there is not much point to Twitter in its present form. Neither me nor any of my friends use it because it simply isn’t useful to us. So in the past their non-tech friends would listen to early adopters because they acted as some kind of filter but now that group looks in on itself, as Morrissey said, it says nothing to me about my life.

It struck me yesterday when I was reading Mike Butcher’s post about a new Spinvox add-on. In it he says:

So is this new Spinvox add-on of any real value? Does it make sense to call a number and suddenly update 30 social networks at once with “I’m on the train, looks like I’ll be late for that meeting” or similar?

Here’s the deal – most people are one one or maximum two social networks. I use Facebook and Linkedin. Twitter has passed me by and seems like a total waste of time for most people in its present form. Spinvox have added a solution that is only a problem to tech early adopters. As Kryten would say its a great plan with two minor flaws: most people don’t need to update their status across multiple networks because they don’t belong to multiple networks and they never update their status.

The first lesson of all those marketing books is build something that people actually want to use. To get attention it will also have to be distinctive. Take facebook itself. They didn’t try and get any press in their early days, they just built something useful for college students and went direct to the mainstream user. Coverage from journalists and bloggers is the icing on the cake, not the cake. You have to bake that yourselves.

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