The Long Tail

 

I’ve reached Chris Anderson’s idea of the long tail extremely late (two years is a lifetime nowadays) so what I’m about to say here you may probably know by now. I’ll take my chances. 

 

Anderson has been talking about the “long tail” and how the end of blockbuster is coming near. According to the Long Tail “the future of business no longer rests solely with the high-volume end of a traditional demand curve. In other words, the 80/20 rule (80% of revenues are generated from 20% of products) is being challenged by a strengthening digital economy that is creating and servicing a longer tail of niche products and services”. What Chris is telling us is that offer and demand have changed and that now people are actually capable of getting pretty much anything they want, no matter how unique their tastes could be. In other words, now exist a long tail of niche products that obviously are not consider hits (i.e, massive products) but since they are available almost to anyone, they are now being bought by a small but important groups of people. Amazon, Ebay and iTunes are just three examples of “long tailed” digital retailers that now offer countless of different products that please very specific groups of people. I will not go on explaining the whole thing. I´ll rather let you navigate through this ideas on your own. But let me share a couple of quotes I extracted from Chris´ introduction (I haven´t bought the book because in Venezuela we are not allowed to buy things over the internet. Yep, it is a primitive country). 

 

¨This is the world the blockbuster built. The massive media and entertainment industries grew up over the past half century on the back of box-office rockets, gold records, and double-digit TV ratings. No surprise that hits have become the lens through which we observe our own culture¨.

 

¨Males age eighteen to thirty-four, the most desirable audience for advertisers, are starting to turn off the TV altogether, shifting more and more of their screen time to the Internet and video games.¨

 

¨Where are those fickle consumers going instead? No single place. They are scattered to the winds as markets fragment into countless niches. The one big growth area is the Web, but it is an uncategorizable sea of a million destinations, each defying in its own way the conventional logic of media and marketing¨.

 

One important thing to keep in mind is that the long tail can be analyzed from two perspectives. One, the one I believe Chris uses, is the ¨brand¨or ¨company¨ side, which focus on demand, profit, categories, and so on. The other one is the ¨consumer¨ side. A consumer that now participates in the generation of ideas and content, and that has the power to choose, swap, decide, etc. A power that he never had before. A power he is using actively today. If we don´t keep that in mind, we will jeopardize our brands and our businesses. Clay Shirky explains it better than me, but the point remains: we are now in the age of the prosumer who won´t do always what we want and whose motivations we need to study over and over again. 

image via miss rogue en Flickr under a CC license

MediaSnackers

 

Thanks to Garr’s blog I’ve reached mediasnacker.com. I saw the intro and immediately wanted to share it with you. It has a blog that surely promises to be a good and substantial read. It also has a podcast, interviewing people like Sir Ken Robinson, whose ideas on creativity are fantastic. Feel free to drop by to this cool blog talking about how everything has changed. 

 

This is the intro you will see on the site…

Here comes everybody

TED.com recently posted Clay Shirky’s talk. It is simply awesome. It adds to what has been said by Leadbeater, Benkler and Rheingold, that is, the power of collaboration which can also be seen as the power of people.
Shirky’s point is that we are at the verge of a new era which will bring us a time of chaos, a chaos of communication similar to the one created by the printing press that lead to new ways of understanding business and life at general.
The flickr question, as described by him using the popular social photo sharing website as an example, is to know whether a single contribution done once by a single non professional person is important or not. This question applies to flickr, your business, or whatever subject is open to social collaboration. It is the long tail of people collaborating (putting up a photo tagged Irak on Flickr, for example) for the love of it and not for the money. It’s about everybody doing something for passion and sharing it with the rest of us, whether it is a single contribution or a regular one. It is a capital question when you think about it, because organizations are used to the “institutional model” where “carrots or sticks” are the way for motivation and the way institutions work to get new and powerful ideas. Today’s world is different. Shirky talks in his blog, which by the way you should read now, about a cognitive surplus that we have today, in which even a couple of minutes devoted to writing a blog or publishing a podcast, instead of looking passively to TV shows, can make a huge difference. I totally agree. We are know waking up. We are know understanding the tremendous power that social media has given us. Would you like to use it? I certainly will.

P.S: Shirky recently published a book titled “here comes everybody”. I have not read it yet because in my country we have no access to dollars for e-commerce (yes, that´s right, I live in a jurassic country). Nevertheless, it seems to be a great book, so you should go ahead and read it. I will as soon as I get the chance.

From Mass to Grass

 

I just came back from Canada where I had the opportunity to go to the Word of Mouth Congress held by the Canadian Marketing Association. I just wanted to share one quick thought on Word of Mouth that I believe was the most important conclusion drew by the different panelist that took the stage at Toronto. 

 

The idea is this: Word of Mouth is NOT a technique, it is a philosophy. 

 

People should stop thinking of WOM as if it where some sort of BTL advertising. You can´t make a “word of mouth” campaign. What you can do is come up with a powerful and meaningful idea that will make people talk. 

 

The fact the WOM is not a technique is quite powerful and enlightening. Our aim, when creating communication, should be to spark conversation. But it is important to have in mind that conversations are held by people, not brands. Brands could deliver a subject for the conversation, like Dove did when it talked about what should we understand by beauty. But the conversation was conducted by people through blogs, websites, at coffee shops or whenever people could gather, both physically of digitally, to share ideas. 

 

Keep that in mind. 

 

We live in the era of conversations.