The Social Media Bottleneck
October 17, 2008 by Jed Hallam
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‘What does this mean’ I hear you cry? Well, the social media bottleneck is a situation that we’re currently in.
Social media is a relatively new field, maybe not for the early-adopters but for most people it’s a new strand to public relations. This is especially true for clients. 
The social media bottleneck represents a group of early-adopters forming social media divisions or companies and then all vying for the small pool of clients who are quick to adapt and understand the benefits of social media. We face a situation where only two or three divisions/companies actually have exciting clients – the rest of the social media sphere have to scrap around for smaller, less exciting clients.
This could have one of two effects;
The two or three original break-through social media companies/divisions retain the majority of high calibre clients because they have the case studies and experience of working on social media projects with high-level clients leaving the remaining divisions/companies to either close or only retain small clients. This would (potentially) create a dualistic environment in which the few divisions/companies were able to charge unreasonable prices and offer a relatively pedestrian service. This would hinder the development of social media, who needs to advance a medium if you’re already making a lot of money from it?
OR
As social media develops and the original clients become seen as trailblazers, then less experimental clients become more willing to take their chances with social media divisions/companies therefore leveling the field and spreading the big clients more thinly over a wide range of divisions/companies. Thus ceasing the bottleneck and increasing the need for competitive advantage in social media companies, ensuring the client always receives the highest level of service for the best price. This outcome represents the ‘age of community’ and would help develop social media beyond it’s current capabilities.
Personally I believe (and hope) that the bottleneck eases and social media begins to represent what its ideology is based upon – community. It’s the only way in which we can truly progress and help clients to integrate themselves into social media – thus encouraging less-forthcoming clients to take ‘the risk’.
I think the second scenario is much more likely. I work with small-mid sized businesses who are generally pretty conservative about trying new things - but once the ‘technology’ becomes commonplace, they’re more willing to adopt it.
Blogs are a perfect example - even just 2 or 3 years ago there weren’t many corporate bloggers, and it had something of a stigma to it in the eyes of many - but now it’s everywhere.
Those who are adopting Facebook/MySpace/Twitter/YouTube channels/etc currently are just leading the way for others to follow - and they will, if only through necessity.
Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm was the must read book on tech marketing back in the early 1990s. And in many ways, the development of socmed is following that pattern - namely, in an early stage market, there are only a handful of “early adopter” customers who are prepared to take the risk on a new technology (or in this case, a new approach to PR and marketing). The challenge for the companies who service these early adopter clients is that in return for taking a “gamble” on these new businesses, they make heavy demands (in the tech case, heavily customising the product and service for their specfic needs - and perhaps similarly with socmed, either through pricing (ie discounting) or developing services that meet immediate client needs, but won’t scale for the bigger, early majority market).
The early majority companies are indeed conservative ie in the sense they don’t want a 1.0 version of the service. They want someone else to beta test - they will buy when they feel confident it is a safer purchase. And who influences the early majority? Their peers - other businesses. So how does the early adopted tech business or soc med agency “breakthrough” to the early majority. The Chasm that Moore identified between early adopter and early majority was that the very skills and services that make you successful with early adopters actually works against you in the early majority market. And many successful early majority businesses fail either because they try to address the whole early majority market in one go - or don’t possess the management skills to take the company through a very different phase. Moore’s advice was build “bridgehead” clients in the early majority market eg verticals. Once you get the case studies and reference sites on board, you can then use these to gain footholds in other segments. And then if the market really takes off, the market decides which company it wants to be the market leader - and the challenge is one of delivery rather than awareness or credibility.
I leave it to you to decide if the Chasm analogy works in this case.
PS I see you are using Brian Gardner’s Revolution theme - good chocie - though you need to put in your Adword code so that you display ads rather than Enter 120×600 Banner Code here