In this swirling world of the digerati, we tend to encourage others to “drink of the kool aid” in the way that we are. What I mean is that we push our more mainstream brethren to partake in all the things we are – twitter, plurk, identi.ca, blogging, social media etc etc.

I’ve often felt this is a dangerous thing to push people into – us bleeding-edgers can cope with a service going down, or even entering the deadpool, oh we’ll moan about it ad nauseum, but deep down it’s kind of what we expect with a lot of these things. In the same way that its a pretty cool thing for VCs to be able to say they were in at the ground floor on the next Google, it’s pretty cool for the digerati to say they were one of the first to use the 2.0 offering du jour once it achieves critical mass.

One of the most even-keeled posts I’ve read lately about uptake for later adopters is from Steve Borsch. Steve gives sage advice when he says, in relation to one of his corporate clients question about whether Twitter should be one of their marketing platforms, that;

[you should] begin to participate, watch it (especially for brand mentions), but make it very peripheral to the rest of [your] strategies since the service simply isn’t reliable

I agree wholeheartedly with Steve but would extend his comments beyond merely reliability – to include viability, business-sustainability and the other due-diligence measures that somehow seem to have been forgotten in this mad dash to the kool aid fountain

Ben Kepes

Ben Kepes is a technology evangelist, an investor, a commentator and a business adviser. Ben covers the convergence of technology, mobile, ubiquity and agility, all enabled by the Cloud. His areas of interest extend to enterprise software, software integration, financial/accounting software, platforms and infrastructure as well as articulating technology simply for everyday users.

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