sometimes we forget where we are on the curve
May 10, 2007 – 6:33 pmFriend and colleague Renee Blodgett (she can blame me for getting her involved in the people search engine startup Spock) wrote an interesting post about what she calls the web 2.0 echochamber. Her point is that we in the online startup business can get wrapped up in the new and latest tech fad but often forgot our place as super-eager early adopters of new technologies and services. To her point, my brother a 33yr old manager of a TGIF’s restaurant back east has never heard of half of the web services that Renee’s friends insist everyone is using. My mom can still barely turn on a computer and my Dad, a pretty middle of the road adopter of new things, has barely heard of anything beyond yahoo, amazon.com, ebay and espn.com. As a marketer, it’s easy to forget sometimes, just because it seems cool, doesn’t mean it’s mainstream. And if it, whatever it is, doesn’t solve a real problem for a large group of people, then it’s not likely to go mainstream.
Is it a generational thing like Renee posits? Nope, I don’t think so. We just sometimes forget the whacky insular world we live in SF, the Valley, Seattle and sometimes LA. Does that mean Twitter isn’t important or potentially huge? Nope. As the next generation comes of age - they like their previous generation’s counterparts in Europe and Asia are much more mobile. But let’s not rush to distraction, remember not everyone is as infatuated with the latest and greatest as we are.
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