The Long Tail, the Big Head, and the Engorged Body.

by J.S. Gilbert
advertisinginternetMarketingsocial mediaUncategorized

While many look at the power of the internet as being a mass marketing tool, I tend to appreciate the internet’s power as being able to deliver niche messages.

We have and continue to have many ways of reaching the masses, via television, radio, print, etc. But never before have we had as cost effective and as highly an effective way of delivering select information to select groups.

Let’s say you live in Decatur, Illinois and are a devotee of a particular Wagnerian opera. In the past, it would have been difficult to connect with others of a like mind. It would certainly take a bit of effort to identify individuals you could converse with, share ideas with, etc. If you were looking to buy or sell something that might have a very limited market, it was clear that you couldn’t run down to your local 7-11. Cost was also often a factor, with the necessity to sell products and services at a premium to cover the hassles of speaking to a small market and employing marketing methods that were usually rather costly.

You could try and get your local grocer’s to take a truckload of your new “Hot Sauce soda pop”, but chances are, if you could convince anyone to carry it, the sale might be rather limited to a few 6 packs at best. In most cases, something with this small of a market, wouldn’t get carried, simply because a grocer could fill their shelves with many, far more popular products.

This was sad for the customer, who had to seek out a vendor and often pay a premium price. It was also sad for the vendor, since it was costly, time consuming and difficult to identify a target market and create a proper vehicle to allow for the purchase.

While I understood to some extent how the internet was changing and shaping niche marketing, it wasn’t until I read “The Long Tail” by Chris Anderson, that I got to really understand what a dramatic thing this was. (By the way, Chris Anderson also wrote a book called “Free”, and I highly recommend reading both books.)

If you are already familiar with the term “long tail”, please skip ahead to the next paragraph. If not, I will try and explain it as best as I can. If you created a bar chart for, let’s say, beverages, and on the left, you started with the most popular, such as water, milk, Coca Cola and so forth, the bars would be quite high. As you moved from left to right, the bars would become progressively smaller and smaller. After a while, this might resemble a picture of a dog or cat or mouse, with a long tail. The tail represents niche marketing.

The chart I am showing is from Zooniverse.org

So, what we see is that through the power of search, individuals with very specific niche interests can seek out all manner of support service, vendor, friend, etc. For those with niche goods or services to offer, the proper use of SEO makes them easy to find and social networking makes it easy for them to promote to consumers of their niche products or services. In a considerable number of cases, this will allow for pricing to become somewhat adjusted down, as the new method(s) of marketing allow for a somewhat different business model.

Many of the businesses on eBay can thrive quite nicely servicing niche communities. Many of the sellers on Amazon.com function similarly. There are numerous marketplaces that assist individuals in marketing goods and services to small, specialty interest groups and individuals.

Also, competition among niche marketers within the same or similar areas of interest, invariably leads to lower prices and more varied choices for purchase.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of all of this (to me) occurs when niche marketing or niche information goes mainstream. For example, even the internet itself at one point was a niche product. The book, “The Cuckoo’s Egg”, written by Clifford Stoll in 1989, deals with very early internet espionage and was one of the very first books to come out on the internet. It is a fascinating work, but at the time, the interest in the internet was extremely limited. Subsequent books, written many years later, dealing with hacker crime sold considerably better.

Thousands of products, services and diversified interests were at one time niche information or niche marketed and are now among the most consumed brands, products and services there are. Facebook, twitter and LinkedIn, all at one time occupied very small parts of search and consumption. The venerable Google was a niche search engine, which toppled mainstream competitors such as Alta Vista and Ask Jeeves. Ask Jeeves, now Ask.com, could perhaps at this time be considered a niche player, thus showing how very often, things can work in reverse.

I asked some of my friends and colleagues; “What are some things that are considered mainstream, that were niche marketing or niche information a few years ago?”

Paul Strikwerda, who is an international voice talent, transplanted from Holland has a blog called Double Dutch. While much of his insight tends to get applied to the field of voice over, he’s studied psychology, neurolinguistic programming and has a perspective I enjoy hearing. He brought up a couple of things I expected to hear, reputation management and social media. Social media is perhaps the hot buzz term of the day. Reputation management may be a bit behind in terms of it being mainstream, but as they might say in the record business, it’s charting with a bullet. The term Social Media, delivers back almost 700 million pages on Google and the term Reputation Management gets you about 35 million pages. 2 other things Paul mentions as mainstream are eco-consulting and Justin Beiber. Justin Beiber returns 0ver 400 million pages on Google. Beiber Fever didn’t even exist until fairly recently and speaking of the power of the internet, Beiber was discovered in 2008 by Scooter Braun, who stumbled across some music videos of Beiber’s on YouTube. It is quite conceivable that if it wasn’t for YouTube, Beiber might be a barista at a Starbucks right about now.

Now, as for eco-consulting, I was surprised to see over 45 million pages returned. Interestingly, we get more page returns for eco-consultant than we do for reputation management. And I can think back to not that many years ago when the word “green” was most associated with Kermit the Frog.

David Smith, trend charter and owner of San Francisco digital agency MediaSmith mentions in-game advertising, mobile marketing and digital out of home as three items that in the recent past were rather obscure, but now are becoming mainstream. Gaming, in all its varied forms is very hot news and there are hundreds of thousands of people studying every aspect of gaming, from advertising to mobile games, serious games and games for social media. I haven’t checked, but I’d be willing to bet that there are almost as many FarmVille farmers in the world as there are real farmers. (Thanks to Jaime Palmucci, Digital Marketer in Seattle for bringing up FarmVille) The search term in game advertising brought back 591 million pages on Google, perhaps making it even slightly more important than Justin Beiber.

I actually wrote an article about 8 or 9 years ago on in-game advertising. At the time, there was very little information available and very few participants. It still isn’t the kind of thing one can easily find a primer on, but there certainly are a lot more players and a considerable amount of information, including all kinds of available statistics. However, looking back at my article, most of it still is applicable today and it could run almost as-is.

David Greenwald has been a strong presence in technology in the Bay Area for many years. He too mentions social media and also mentions tablet/ pad computing. Indeed, there have been many attempts by numerous manufacturers at making a tablet or pad computer in the past. It wasn’t until Apple’s creation of the iPad that any of the pad / tablet spaghetti stuck to the wall. This is truly a category that has jumped from the depths of obscurity to becoming a major, if not the major force driving technology today. The name iPad delivered over 1 billion pages in our Google search. Add to it, the other brands of pad and tablet computers, apps and operating systems and I wouldn’t be surprised if the applicable pages were closer to a billion and a half.

Perhaps I should stop at this point and take a few steps backward. We need to examine the term mainstream. The definition I like most is taken from an online dictionary, and is, “The prevailing current of thought, influence, or activity”. So, when we look at mainstream, we see that it can tend to operate on a fairly specific timeline. The number of pages that Google might return for any given association of words, could represent something that at one time was mainstream, but no longer is, for example, the Sony Walkman. As a search term, “Gerald Ford” might deliver back millions of pages from Google, but this wouldn’t be any great indicator of relevance or of him currently being mainstream. War, politics, music, literature, and of course technology all have effects on the ebb and flow of mainstream. It is quite conceivable that if this article is revisited in several years, Beiber fever may be a thing of the past. The iPad could be sitting in a pile along with old Pac Man machines, and altogether new activities, people, products and services will now be occupying the mainstream.

There are ways of charting the mainstream; learning what’s likely to become hot and what’s inevitably going to be old news. Most of us have access to some form of analytics these days, although they may be somewhat basic and crude. I can tell how many pages and what pages people have visited on my sites, and I can also often tell how they got there. Even this basic information can help me understand my own impact and personal relevance and learn within my own little world, what’s hot and what’s not. Beyond my pea shooter of information, lays veritable arsenals of info statistics. Billions of dollars are spent every year on every manner of statistical data, which is used to help determine everything from what color the new Chevy’s might be to who’s going to run for Governor of Alabama.

We get to see this information often disseminated to us as some sort of paid advice or recommendation. Articles indicate the best or worst 10 occupations for the coming decade. Or we may have a stock broker dialed in on trends that could affect the futures market, an IPO, etc. Often though, this information is the guarded property of large corporations and governments. Now with social media, GPS and our general lives being an open book within social media, this data on us is worth its weight in plutonium. Some of the major valuations on Silicon Valley companies comes primarily from their vast repositories of behavioral information, purchasing , etc.

Niche and mainstream should of course be seen as dynamic and evolving. Some things can stay mainstream for what seems like an eternity. Other things, like the pet rock, may have their day in the sun and cool off rather quickly. And still many more things tend to occupy varied areas of gray within the niche and mainstream worlds. Notice how technology has affected the travel agency industry and magazine/ newspaper publishing, just to name a few. It’s MySpace one day and seemingly the next day, Facebook. Now Google is hitting hard with their third incarnation of their “Facebook killer” called Google+ (Remember Google Wave and Google Buzz? Well, not too many people do) Will the third time be the charm? Do we become early adopters, knowing that we could be investing a great deal of time and effort and wind up in the end with little to nothing to show for it?

Sites like http://www.google.com/trends allow you to see what the hot current search terms on Google have been. Today, for example one of the hot trends is Jennifer Lopez and Marc Antony splitting up. So, in a sense, we can say that because this meets the earlier definition of mainstream as being part of “prevailing current thought”, Lopez and Antony splitting up is for now mainstream. Where this will sit in a week or a month is anybody’s guess.

Another site that offers interesting perspective into trends is http://www.psfk.com/. Covering politics to food and fashion to health, you can get a great sense as to where things may be heading for a broad range of concerns. Trendhunter, http://www.trendhunter.com/ is an online magazine that will make your head spin. Even free Google Analytics, http://www.google.com/analytics/ can be a very powerful tool for your own personal or small business interests. You can look up interesting information on hundreds of thousands of sites at site analytics. Here I pulled up a bunch of statistics for the Coca Cola site http://siteanalytics.compete.com/cocacola.com/. However, the juicy info there will cost you. Many web hosting services will offer free or low cost analytics packages. GoDaddy.com, http://www.godaddy.com/hosting/website-analytics.aspx offers a number of analytics packages. http://twitter.com/#!/toptweets is an interesting site that retweets a number of tweets that fall within the parameters of dealing with top trending terms. There are a ton of other sites that offer up the most popular tweets of the day, week, month or year. Twitter Counter shows you top tweets, top tweeters and charts and graphs and things http://twittercounter.com/pages/100.

Judicious use of a search engine will give you a ton of sites offering all kinds of ways that you can chart your own niche vs. mainstream subjects. Understanding and applying this to personal needs and desires, whether it’s as a consumer or a provider will help you be better prepared for many of the challenges that will be coming along. For example, while we are currently in a depressed economy, there is no doubt that there are people succeeding and flourishing every day.

Whether niche or mainstream, on the way up or on the way down, we have never before experienced the level of choice and availability we have today. Our level of participation seems to be only limited by our imaginations.

I’d like to thank everyone who participated. This wasn’t as much about right or wrong answers and I wish I could have included everyone who participated in this article. What I inevitably wound up doing was simply pulling names from a hat.

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