Who’s Wagging The Long Tail?

6 July 2006 at 10:54 am | In Marketing, Small Business, Social Media, Web | No Comments

Chris Anderson who came up with the concept of the Long Tail has a new book out, “The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More”, which was recently reviewed in the New Yorker.

Why is the theory of Long Tail potentially important for small businesses? Well here’s Chris’s summary:

The theory of the Long Tail is that our culture and economy is increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of “hits” (mainstream products and markets) at the head of the demand curve and toward a huge number of niches in the tail. As the costs of production and distribution fall, especially online, there is now less need to lump products and consumers into one-size-fits-all containers. In an era without the constraints of physical shelf space and other bottlenecks of distribution, narrowly-target goods and services can be as economically attractive as mainstream fare.

The New Yorker’s review raises an interesting but flawed criticism of Chris’s thinking. It suggests that it is only the big online names like Amazon, Ebay, and iTunes that can ‘house the long tail’ i.e. the massive array of goods and services that cater for very particular customers, tastes and passions. They are therefore wagging the long tail. In control. An online oligopoly.

Of course, these big online brands are making a bundle of money, but what about search and word of mouth. I know very few people, for example, who browse iTunes looking for podcasts on a particular subject. It’s the online word-of-mouth network combined with Google et al that is the primary guide in this space. Large aggregators of Long Tail content may be the one stop out of town megastores, but it’s the growing interaction and sharing of online communities and networks that means the internet high street is thriving in its diversity.

Blogging And UK Companies

11 April 2006 at 10:51 pm | In Blog, Blogging, Events, Global Microbrand, Marketing, Small Business | No Comments

I recently moderated a panel on podcasting at the Blogging4Business conference which, as the title suggests, primarily focused on blogging.

Matthew and Bernhard, the guys at Custom Communications which organised the event have done a great job of getting coverage for the conference as yesterday’s BBC story testifies. Good to see Hugh MacLeod quoted on the global microbrand and his work with Stormhoek and English Cut.

“… creating global micro-brands is cheaper and easier than ever before.”

What’s particularly interesting about both the small business blogs Hugh has been involved with, is that they’re not the techy businesses you might expect to be leading the way. Tailoring and wine-making must rank a close second and third to the world’s oldest profession.

What both these businesses have done successfully is reveal their passion for the sometimes arcane details of their craft - a level of detail and knowledge that strikes a chord with geeks everywhere. And then they’ve gone and out-geeked the geeks, SEO merchants and marketers by turning the social web to their very tangible advantage.

Podcasting The Niche

10 April 2006 at 2:39 pm | In Marketing, Podcasting, Small Business, Social Media | No Comments

Charlene Li gives a sneak preview of the latest survey from Forrester Research on podcast listenership, a story that has been widely picked up by the media including the BBC today.

The 1% who regularly listen to podcasts in the US seems like a very small number. The 20% of US households who will regularly listen to podcasts by 2010 seems like a pretty big number. The message seems to be that despite the hype, those looking to reach mass audiences through podcasting will have to wait a while. That said, a survey by BMRB suggested recently that 8 million people in the UK will be regularly listening to podcasts by September this year.

The other interesting numbers game associated with podcasting is how to measure listenership. Once a podcast is downloaded it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s being listened to. It would be good to have data around the proportion of podcasts that are listened to after download. Measurability of podcasting doesn’t, however, seem any less or more robust than measurabiity of newspaper or magazine circulations against readership. How much of a newspaper does an individual read? How often do they throw a newspaper away
without reading it? How many newspapers included on circulation figures are left in piles unread at airports? Uncertainties in this market have never stopped advertisers advertising, until perhaps now when their attention is increasingly turned towards niche audiences.

What’s interested me about media coverage of podcasting, however, is that it’s become increasingly focused on numbers - Ricky Gervais’s success being the most obvious example - equating podcasts to the metrics of mass media itself ie the volume of listeners. But podcasting, in my view, is all about the niche, not the numbers.

While big numbers are important, if you’re planning a piece of mass marketing or want to advertise on a podcast network, they really miss the point that podcasting provides a fantastic opportunity to get niche content to highly focused groups or individuals.