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Web 2.0 News
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| The Long and the Short of it |
| Saturday, August 05, 2006 |
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| In Category: Web2.0 News, Articles |
| Comment(s): 3 |
| Views: 6190 |
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 I've been following the recent Long Tail revival that's happening on my blogroll. Lots of reposts, lots of flaming, blaming, bashing and praising. The usual.
I think that the Long Tail has become quite a meme. Even more so than the ClueTrain phenomenon, in my humble opinion. Too hot a topic for the regular readers of NEO Binaries to ignore.
The Long Tail term (with capital letters) was, inarguably coined by Chris Anderson in his 5 page long article for Wired magazine. In it, he discusses the effect of the long tail of a sales revenue versus product line graph when the product inventory is being sold on the Internet. And the key point of Anderson's the Long Tail essay is this:
"Products that are in low demand or have low sales volume can
collectively make up a market share that rivals or exceeds the
relatively few current bestsellers and blockbusters, if the store or
distribution channel is large enough."
In his original essay Anderson based his Long Tail theory on the then successful online businesses, Amazon and Netflix. He then went on to write a whole book about the topic and ironically enough, the book is currently being sold on Amazon.
As we've all see happen all too often on the Internet, this theory was picked up by every blogger, self-respecting online store owner, consultant, and verbose end-user and was taken to all the different directions of the compass and talked about in every corner of the world. Everybody drew up their own theories and counter-theories to this phenomenon and as is usual again, in the blogosphere, the topic keeps turning up.
The missing piece of this jigsaw puzzle seems to be to figure out a way to aggregate these micro-niches into a big enough inventory to attain sufficient volume to make business sense. Amazon and Netflix succeed at this with apparent ease - over time they've built a repository of products to meet even the most niche customer's demands. The million dollar question that comes up, of course is, how is a new business supposed to retain such inventory volume?
Recently, I've read a few more blog posts on the topic and I really think that JP Rangaswami's (Confused of Calcutta) reasoning is the best description I've seen yet. JP blogs regularly about the Software-as-a-Service model and the Enterprise, (ostensibly, his blog is about Information, though) and usually his posts are original, insightful and usually emphasize a razor-sharp wit.
In his latest, JP links to the blog posts (good job, JP!) that cause him to ponder on why the whole Long Tail (and even to some extent the ClueTrain manifesto) exists. And I agree with him. It's about Trust. With a capital 'T'.
One of the reasons the Long Tail comes into existence is because the same product, service or whatever-have-you is being sold in different ways by different companies on the Internet. There was a time when anything you would buy you would do so because you knew the owner of the store you were buying from, and always had the assurance that it would be free from manufacturing defects and even if it malfunctioned you could return it and get your money back.
Then came big business where the economies of sale forced this trust model to go away and be replaced by a CRM and support system, where the customer would be placed in a one-in-a-million queue of other customers.
Like JP puts it, Trust is an immensely difficult proposition to scale up. The "Trust me" promise has been broken several times by big business.
Trust used to be something that bound small groups together. Over time
we tried to scale trust. It didn’t scale. And what happened instead was
Big Everything. In an Assembly-Line meets Broadcast world.
Big Everything broke trust. Big Media lied. Big Content Producer
reduced our choices. Big Pipe and Big Device reduced it further. Big
Firm wrongsized away. And Big Government did what it liked.
All too true. And then came the new, "open" way of doing things. The SaaS meets Web 2.0 meets the Enterprise way. The new wave of application creators and yes, marketers, who want to know what the Customer needs and want to let the Customer know in turn, that the mistakes they make will not be hidden behind lies and "Public Relations", instead mistakes will be acknowledged and rectified.
This openness is all but evident in the fact that any self-respecting online business today has a blog where key people from behind the PR Firewall come out into the open, put down their thoughts and take the feedback that customers, and anonymous Internet visitors put down and rework things in the machine.
Customers want to be heard, acknowledged and rewarded. They know what they want, they want to do it their own way, and that too, without talking to the customer support hotline.
This rebuilding of Trust is the key to building a successful business, online.
Christopher Carfi's Social Customer manifesto comes to mind:
THE SOCIAL CUSTOMER MANIFESTO
- I want to have a say.
- I don't want to do business with idiots.
- I want to know when something is wrong, and what you're going to do to fix it.
- I want to help shape things that I'll find useful.
- I want to connect with others who are working on similar problems.
- I don't want to be called by another salesperson. Ever. (Unless they have something useful. Then I want it yesterday.)
- I want to buy things on my schedule, not yours. I don't care if it's the end of your quarter.
- I want to know your selling process.
- I want to tell you when you're screwing up. Conversely,
I'm happy to tell you the things that you are doing well. I may even
tell you what your competitors are doing.
- I want to do business with companies that act in a transparent and ethical manner.
- I want to know what's next. We're in partnership…where should we go?
"Where do you want to go today", indeed. :-)
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| Saturday, August 05, 2006 at 8:27 PM
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Gaping Void did the Kryptonite lock story where a bic ballpen could be easily used to crack the lock.
Sad but very, very plausible.
http://www.gapingvoid.com/Moveable_Type/archives/001071.html |
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| Thursday, August 10, 2006 at 3:12 AM
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Brilliant read Dhiraj. A sort of philosophical proof that web applications will change things a lot. For the better. |
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| Saturday, February 02, 2008 at 8:06 PM
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I'm a very good user of your ballpen. But I'll like to know the payoff for your retiring skilled staffs |
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| Bliki, Information Management Systems Comparison, Benefits of 'SaaS', Knowledge Management, Document Management, Enterprise Content Management, Digital Asset Management, Secure Online File Storage, Version Control System, Group Collaboration, Content Delivery and RSS casting, Personal Information Management, Community and Enterprise Blogs, Corporate Intranets, Integrated Word Processor |
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