Advances in social technologies continue to add complexity and risk to the decisions marketers make every day. Wherever you find yourself along the adoption curve, "be deliberate in your adoption strategy," says Jeremiah Owyang in a Web Strategy blog post. Each stage has its own risks and benefits: Being first can be costly and doesn't guarantee success, while those who come later can miss out on important advantages.

Here are five adoption stages, framed in the context of social technologies:

• Innovators take on new technologies right away and often evangelize them. This group jumped on the Twitter bandwagon in 2006.
• Early Adopters try out new technologies in a careful way and are perceived as thought leaders.
• The Early Majority adopts faster than the mainstream. Examples include some consumer, finance and healthcare companies that adopted social technologies in 2009.
• The Late Majority is more skeptical and adopts when the mainstream does.
• Laggards are cautious in deployment even after the technology has entered the mainstream. These folks will likely adopt social technologies in 2010 or later.

What is your approach? "If you're responsible for new technologies at your company, your personal adoption should be a level or two ahead of the organization's adoption," says Owyang, "as you cannot effectively deploy for your company if you don't personally understand the impacts of the new technologies."

Watch and learn from others, says Owyang. Find a company or individual ahead of your adoption category and study their success. If you're an early adopter, you'll reduce risk by learning from the failures of innovators.

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