When the iPad was released last year, there was a cacophony of ooohs and aaahs as geeks, early adopters and visionaries welcomed Apple’s shiny new thing. But if you listened carefully, you could also hear sighs and mumbles. That was from the people who were saying under their breath, “Oh s@!?# – another new technology to try and master – I give up!”
As a small business operator, it can be frustrating to try and stay on top of all of the technologies that may or may not be relevant to your business. It’s easy to question the justification for learning new things that may turn out to be a flash in the pan. Why get immersed in Facebook when it might turn out to be the next MySpace? So tablets are buzzing at the moment – didn’t the Palm Pilot have its day in the sun, to end up on a shelf gathering dust next to my Ipaq Pocket PC? Has Twitter peaked? Should I hitch my star to Foursquare, or Facebook Places – or neither? And I just signed up for a long contract with my iPhone 4 – don’t tell me that Android is the next big thing!
No one has a crystal ball that can tell you which technologies and platforms are going to be winners, or how things will evolve in the future.
Classic examples I use with my marketing students include the VHS vs. Beta wars of the 1980s, or the Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD stoush this past decade. Many people – and retailers – who invested in Betamax players and tapes or HD-DVD collections were left with expensive but useless equipment when they lost the marketing battle with their technologically inferior rivals.
It’s an understandable human reaction to say “Enough!” and refuse to adopt a technology until they work out the bugs, or until the winning format becomes clear. When I was a kid, my older brother installed a state-of-the-art 8-track player in his first car. When that technology collapsed soon after, he was so annoyed that he refused to buy a cassette player in case that technology became superceded, too. It did eventually get replaced by CDs, but in the meantime he spent more than 10 years in the music wilderness.
As a businessperson, I don’t think the expense involved in purchasing new equipment is the biggest issue – though that can be pretty substantial. To me, the biggest dilemma is how much brain space and time to devote to consuming and learning about new technologies that could transform your business (or at least help you stay ahead of the curve), but which equally could end up going nowhere, or which turn out to have no business application.
The danger lies in thinking that the business you learned as an apprentice or new graduate is going to keep going the way it has always gone, and that learning is confined to your youth. I meet so many people who went straight from uni or TAFE into business and think that their education is finished, and now they’re into the doing phase of their life. But the fact is that learning is a lifelong activity, and education comes in many forms.
Embracing new technologies and working out how they can apply to your business is, in my opinion, a cost of doing business today. Look on it as your own small business R&D. Not all of it will give you a pay-off – nor should you expect it to.
So set up that Facebook business page and think about developing an iPhone/iPad/Android app. Buy yourself a few toys and don’t feel guilty about claiming them as a business tax deduction. Start a collection of devices you don’t use anymore – and reflect on what you’ve learned by having them and using them.
For the record, after equal parts ooohing and muttering, I bought an iPad – because I can see a lot of potential for my clients to use applications that use a device of this type. It could very well end up on a shelf within a couple of years, but what I learn from using it in the meantime will increase the impact of what I will learn in the future.
Dr. Ray Welling is Director of Digital Strategy & Communications for healthcare communications consultancy Vivacity Health. He also manages a small digital content agency and strategic consultancy, and lectures in marketing at Macquarie University.
