If you're paying attention, you know new hardware and software debuts every day. New social web sites seem to launch just as often.
And it seems popular social websites and technology are upgraded monthly, rendering the smart phone you purchased just yesterday obsolete...
What to do?
Well, for one thing, it is easy to allow oneself to be distracted by all this new stuff. Trust me, I know. I have this deep fear that I am missing out by not immediately adopting the latest thing, and that my business marketing will suffer as a result.
Problem is, a lot of us get swept up in the fervor, and we spend all our time trying everything.
The fear of the unknown makes us do silly and unproductive things, cluttering our marketing world.
And what we end up losing is time...time to do good work, to serve clients, to learn, to teach, to engage with our network.
Now don't get me wrong. I am not suggesting you bury your head in the sand and ignore the latest developments. I named my company Intrepid because I want people to be bold and fearless in trying new things...
I just want you to be smart about it. And initiate tests and experiments with new technologies that actually are in alignment with your marketing strategy.
You know your niche. You know your target market. You know your customer. If there are four new technologies you want to try - I'd select one. And focus like a laser beam on that one concept - and invest enough time to effectively determine if there is merit to incorporating it into your program.
Spreading yourself too thin - by coupling too many experiments with executing your regular program - you risk flubbing ALL of it - and injuring your main marketing strategy and not ascertaining a true test of the new idea.
You should be curious about new ideas, new tactics...but it doesn't mean you have to TRY all of them. Use your RSS reader to keep an eye on what the blogs are saying. Monitor LinkedIn groups on the subject. Engage your Twitter stream and see what that crowd has to say about it.
If at some point you legitimately determine there is merit to testing - then do it. Just don't needlessly distract yourself.
What do you think?