At blast! PR, we work with a lot of start ups. They come to us with excellent ideas designed to directly answer the social media generation’s major pain points and blow the 800-lb gorillas out of the water. They’ve poured everything they have into creating what they see as the “next big thing.” But despite how much we believe in them (and we do) or how great the press coverage is, there still remains the biggest hurdle for 99% of start ups – getting people to change their old habits.

For the “bleeding-edge” generation that we claim to be, we are still creatures of habit. Our email may be riddled with spam, but we’ve given that email address to everyone we know so we’re not going to change it now. Facebook changed its user interface and we hate it, but hey, it’s bookmarked on our browsers and we have all our pictures there so we’ll just deal with it.

What does it take for someone to change their habits? A personal offense by their current social media service (Facebook accidentally deleted your Christmas ’07 album, and you don’t have the back ups)? A forced submission (all your other friends are doing it)? Or is it that there are just so many new social media start ups out there that people don’t even know where to begin to look if they are dissatisfied?

The Internet changes and improves by the second. I recommend not getting yourself stuck in habits at all, and leave yourself open minded enough to experience all the next big things you encounter online. You might just find exactly what you’ve been looking for.

Carla Vicens, Senior PR Specialist

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 8th, 2009 at 3:26 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.