Famine City

Do you adopt or integrate?

In technology and marketing, we often talk about early adopters, innovators etc. when describing our user base or target market information. For a reminder about the specifics, visit Wikipedia's entry on Rogers' Diffusion Model. If you have followed this blog, I have poked and prodded at the diffusion model for some time and will continue today. 

I don't care about adoption any longer. I care about integration. The audience that integrates is my target market not just those who purchase the technology. 

Adoption is yesterday's news. Integration is today's most important aspect around a marketing or technology market. Let me go on to explain what I mean.  

• Traditionally adoption in the past means that you own a technology and may have tried it. However, it does not imply or require that you are actively engaged with said technology. 
• Integration means (at least to me) that you own the technology and it's a vital part of your life. Said simply, you can't live without the technology or you rely on it to a degree where it causes pain if it is not present. 

Why such an important distinction? Simple. Adoption isn't a channel and should not be a target audience until there is integration. My pet peeve in this area are people that own HD televisions, but do not have HD programming. I would argue they are only adopters, but not integrators. Sure, they have this great big screen with pixelation all over the place. When considering target audiences or adoption statistics, especially as it pertains to new technologies, it comes with some surprising math. Let's look at target numbers for mobile adoption for North America: 

• There were 254 million US mobile subscribers in Q1 2008, according to CTIA, the wireless industry trade group
• According to Nielsen, 144 million (57%) US mobile subscribers were data users in Q1 2008 (defined as those subscribers who used their phone for any data use, be that SMS text messaging or accessing the mobile Internet)
• 95 million (37 percent) US mobile subscribers paid for access to the mobile Internet, either as part of a subscription or transactionally
• 40 million subscribers (15.6 percent in May 2008) were active users of mobile Internet services, using those services at least once on a monthly basis

Numbers courtesy of Nielsen Mobile (this report is from July 2008). The numbers aren't perfect, but they illustrate the point: 

Now when you consider that you're building an app or a mobile application above, who is your target audience? Is it the 254 million people? The 144 million people that sometimes text or might use the mobile internet? Or are you thinking of the 40 million people that actively use the mobile web? My estimation here is that these numbers are considerably higher today. You can follow that mobile internet usage has followed Moore's laws.  However, this piece isn't just about mobile. It's about technology and marketing in general, especially digital. 

Let me provide one more example. I an a Wii adopter. However, I am not a Wii integrator. I play on the Wii a few times a month (at best). My four year old plays on the Wii almost daily. He is an integrator and, frankly/sadly, knows how to play it better than I for most games, sans Tecmo Bowl. If you were trying to reach me via a Wii channel or the like, probably not a good way to reach me as a marketer. 

Integration is an active opportunity for marketing. Adoption feels like a false number today. Though I recognize that this is a numbers game and audience segmentation exercise. I believe it's worth the effort. More importantly, you might be able to development something more meaningful for that respective segment. 

The next time that you are presented with technology adoption, ask the question how many people have integrated the technology to the point of "they can't live without it". When they say they can't live without it, you know they have deep integration.

follow me on twitter @marty_b 

Quick side note: Been enjoying the holiday season. Ready to get back to blogging at least weekly, not weakly. Sorry for the delayed posts. 

AP will never win lawsuit against Google

In 2009, the Associated Press has threatened legal battles to news aggregators, including folks like Google and Yahoo. In an NY Times article, it stated "A.P. executives said they were concerned about a variety of news forums around the Web, including major search engines like Google and Yahoo and aggregators like the Drudge Report that link to news articles, smaller sites that sometimes reproduce articles whole, and companies that sell packaged news feeds." The AP will never win this lawsuit.

The reason the AP will never win this lawsuit has nothing to do with Google or Yahoo's indexing practices. It has to do with the way that writers are utilizing social media. Today I see articles and writers are starting to include "live Twitter feeds" to social media outlets or tweeting out links to specific written posts. They are profiting from the use, sales, reuse of social media and they are not licensing it. Yet they are profiting from the indexing, links and so forth from the social media outlets. On the right, you can see how an article in the Cincinnati Enquirer has links back to Twitter updates and search terms. Obviously, practices such as this only further convolutes that debate, one which I do not believe the courts are well-suited to handle.

While I'm not surprised by the overall practice of linking to Twitter feeds, including individuals or search terms, the more the adoption spreads of the practice the less legal grounds the AP will have to stand on in the court of law. It's a murky area. Google and Yahoo are attributing correctly, simply not sending users to their (news outlet) site where news sites are profiting from advertising. While newspapers are utilizing social media and search engines to push their content out, for survival, they are simply making commoditizing their own content. It's an interesting path to extinction the AP is on and the court of law can't protect the AP. 

follow me on twitter @marty_b