Jeremiah Owyang (@jowyang) had a tweet last Friday on twitter that got me thinking. The tweet implied that Steve Hall, Todd Mintz, Phillip Jeffrey, Jameson Bull and a few others (@skyle & @mdy) all agreed that Twitter’s early adopter period was over. His question was “So, do we evolve or devolve?” That got me thinking about early adopter status in general in terms of social media.

Early Adopters

Are we at a point where there are no more early adopters in this medium? What qualifies someone as an early adopter? I’ve been called an early adopter by some, but do I really fit the bill? Social Media has become its own full fledged microcosm, complete with experts, critics, evangelists, followers, interlopers, stalkers, etc… So, I ask you, can there be any more early adopters in the social media space?

To be honest, I don’t know the answer to this question. I guess I could ask Jeremiah, or Scoble, Shel Israel, Loren Feldman, Steve Hall, Chris Brogan, C.C. Chapman, my good friend Dan Patterson (and yes I could probably make this list go on forever) what they thought, but would that get me what I’m looking for? Somehow I don’t think it would. These are folks who are widely known and well respected in the social/new media industry, but are they in a position to say who is and is not an early adopter?

Maybe when you get right down to it, it doesn’t really matter. But then again, when something stops being new enough that you can get on the bus before everyone else, does that mean something? Every form of media has a point where it simply begins to be accepted and utilized by the community at large, has social media hit that point yet? Facebook has over 60 million users, MySpace almost twice that, which means that around 1/2 of the United States population is utilizing social media in some form. That’s a lot of people.

As a comparison, let’s look at the daily circulations of the 100 largest print newspapers in the US. They have a combined daily circulation of a little over 37,000,000. That’s somewhere in the neighborhood of 10% of the American population. Now granted, print newspaper circulation has been on the decline for a while (thanks mainly to the internet), but even so, the fact that in less than 10 years social media has managed to work it’s way into so many American’s lives is pretty damn impressive.

My answer to Jeremiah (had he asked me, which he didn’t) would be this: we must continue evolving the process, stagnation is an ever present danger in media of any form. The Newspaper industry has been stagnant for decades, but there was no immediate threat. New media has become that threat, and thus far has been putting quite a hurtin’ on print media.

As I noted in my last column, aggregation seems to be the current social media obsession — could this be seen as a sign of stagnation? I can’t convince myself that it’s not, but then again, I am just an observer, not a developer. And last but not least, where does social media go from here? Where does the evolution of social media take us? I don’t have the answer to that question, but I’m really looking forward to the ride that will get me there.

Greg Hollingsworth is a marketer and blogger who also writes about politics on Devil’s In The Details.

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