yinkaolaito.com – the branding gavel, brand communication expert, nigeria brand consultant, social media expert

During the weekend while taking stock of about to be finished first quarter of the year 2010, my head raced through a lot of stuffs. One of such is the implication of being a social media laggard.

I am sure most of us have not forgotten our marketing 101 class. At least we can all remember product innovator, early adopters, early majority, late majority and laggards. While thinking about this, I stumbled on an article by Jeremiah onwang which seems to capture what I have in mind. I guess this will make a good read for anyone who wants to do some brain exercise in social media application. 

While most us here either as individual brands or corporate brands are still waiting for the ideal time to jump in, people are already sharing the booties. While we are still saying our population is still small, the early adopters, innovators are already making their mistakes and winning their laurels. Waiting for the ideal time may seem like waiting for ‘godot’ who may never return.

Jeremiah Owang says that as a social media innovator, individual is willing to try new technologies as well as evangelize them. If his conclusion is to be considered right, he says most of these innovators started out in 2006.Jeremiah said most of them learnt by trial by error as there were not enough applications that could help them much when they started out. They may appear to have gained thought leadership by now if they have been consistence but their downside is that they would have invested too much time and effort to make it work. Some of them might have abused the platform rules because they did not realized there were rule s then.

The early adopters have learnt from the mistakes of innovators and might have gained from the experience, mistakes of their fore runners. This group may belong to 2007 users. Early majority joins around 2008 when most supporting technologies have developed and have reduced their risks of failure. This group took time to learn. Even though my opinion with regards to date of adoption may differ from Jeremiah’s view, I do believe we shared common opinion generally

My point of argument is that there are countless corporate and personal brands who are still laggards in our environment. Till date they are still in the valley of indecision. They are still skeptical about the use of social media. They want to understand everything before they join the group. Most of these laggards will join later in the year or beyond. It is just my concern that by the time they want to join, they would have lost a sizeable portion of their market to any of the groups who embraced social media early. They may not gain thought leadership status and there is likely tendency that their brands’ engagement tread would have leaned. The bond between such brands and their targets may not be tight. There is also a tendency that the social media sea may not be clear enough to encourage non initiates to swim through. I stand to be corrected here. It will take them longer years to enjoy any benefits.  Where is your brand today?