Extend your definition of early adopters. This is the subject of a captivating post by Jackie Peters, a quick read created yesterday and entitled Breaking Out of the Echo Chamber – Finding the Balance Between Early Adopters and Mass Markets. There is certainly a lesson in this that our semantic web community can apply. Are we in-bred? I don't think so, given the large number of new faces at the last Semantic Technologies conference. But we need to keep up our efforts to target more "real" people (read: "mainstream early adopters") and meet real demand by addressing real needs with real apps…

I'm suggesting that it may also be beneficial to perhaps differentiate between “anticipatory” adopters, people adopting a technology for its future potential (either as users or as contributors), even before that technology is ready, and actual early adopters, who do use the first versions for the user benefits they offer. It's easier said than done in marketing, as those two groups will invariably include two very different types of people. Organizing your marketing by group of users, so that you cater to both, can be a productive way to address that problem. May not be trendy, but old lessons still apply: sometimes one needs to divide to conquer.