This morning I sat in on a corporate breakfast and heard a well known presenter talk about social media for business owners and managers.
The advice was terrible and what was valid could have come from a 2008 book on business social media marketing.
But the room loved it and obviously the client – a major bank – thinks the speaker’s work is worthwhile. He has a market while many of us who’ve been covering this field for a decade don’t.
Timing is everything in business. Earlier this week stories went around the Internet about how Microsoft could have invented the first smart phone.
Microsoft could well have done it, they tried hard enough with Windows CE devices through the late 1990s and there was also the Apple Newton and the Palm Pilot.
While all these companies could have developed the smartphone in the 1990s it wouldn’t have mattered as neither the infrastructure or the market were ready for it.
Had Microsoft released the smartphone in the mid 199os it would have been useless on the analogue and first generation GSM cellphone networks of the time.
Customers were barely using the web on their personal computers, let alone on their mobile phones, so the smartphone would have been useless and unwanted.
Ten years later things had changed with 3G networks and real consumer demand so Apple seized the gap in the marketplace left by Motorola, Nokia and the other phone manufacturers with the iPhone and now own the market.
Apple weren’t the first to market with a smartphone, just as Microsoft weren’t the first with a Windows-style operating system and Facebook weren’t the first social media platform.
Those who were first to the market stood by while upstarts stole the market they built.
Plenty of people have gone broke when their perfectly correct investment strategies have been mistimed – “the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent” is often proved true.
That’s the same with the speaker this morning; he’s not the first to discover social media’s business benefits but his timing is impeccable.
Being first is no guarantee of success if your timing is wrong.