Today at noon, Eastern U.S. time, @ckieff and I will do a Social Marketing Tweet Chat. Chris runs the Social Marketing firm, 1 Good Reason and we often chat at various conferences. He has been running the Social Marketing Tweet Chat for some time now, and asked me to join him to share some of my perspectives.

While I pay close attention to social marketing, I approach it more from the technology side than from the marketing side. I typically present myself as an “Old guard, hardcore geek”. The closest I get to marketing is when I describe some of my work as “helping people tell their stories on computers”. So, I will present a different perspective than some of the other folks that Chris often speaks with.

The current themes that I’m most interested in, in this area, and that I expect to explore at lunch time are convergence, the long tail, and the technology adoption lifecycle. In short, I believe that too many marketers do not spend enough time focusing on convergence. Various forms of digital technology are rapidly converging, but too often, it seems, marketing campaigns are not converging.

At the conferences Chris and I attend, it always seems like all of the focus is on the really large publishers. However, the long tail suggests that marketers, and especially those focusing on a social component, need to look more at the publishers that are not at the top of the A list. That is where the social action really is taking place.

Finally, I suggest that marketers should look more at innovators in the technology adoption lifecycle instead of early majority, late majority or laggards. The innovators are the folks that test out technology, when they find a product they like, they become the champions of the product and are the most effective influencers for a product. It seems like technology firms understand this, but few other firms seem to focus on who the innovators and early adopters for their brands might be. As an aside, the original research that led to the sociological model of the technology adoption lifecycle was based on hybrid seed corn sales in the 1950s.

So, join in at noon and share your thoughts for what I hope will be a lively discussion.