Identifying the Next Small Thing

Posted on December 13th, 2011 by Larry Chase

If you want to stay a couple steps in front of your competitors, keep a sharp lookout. Very often, the next big thing is really a small thing, greatly magnified.

Look at Twitter. There’s not much to it. Only 140 characters, in fact. And that’s because the founders wanted to make sure you could easily interact with Twitter on your cell phone. They wanted it to be as easy as, well, texting … which is another one of those small things you see everywhere.

But, just because you’ve identified a small thing that takes off, this doesn’t mean you have a meal ticket for life. You might, if you played it right at the beginning of the Internet, but then other trends can burn right out. Remember Friendster? MySpace is shrinking fast right now.

Twitter looks like it might be plateauing at this time of writing. Still, even if Twitter shrinks a bit, it will probably always be part of our landscape. Moving forward, we will always see an endless parade of new, cool stuff that might or might not burn out. Your job is to identify those waves and catch one that has legs. LC

The Internet Marketing Tip above originally appeared in Larry Chase's Web Digest For Marketers which you can subscribe to at no charge at www.wdfm.com.