September 13, 2005
Tail Winds
Posted by Kevin | Print This Article
(I’m baaaack…)
Are we so niched out that we’re becoming a world of isolated groups? This article says maybe (and Steve Rubel, from whom I got the pointer, connects this fear to the reigning business buzzword by subjecting his post “The Short Tail.“)
A couple of thoughts.
This all sounds strangely familiar. Ten years ago or so, when “personalized portals” were all the rage, the same fears were raised. I distinctly remember lots of folks (particularly the mainstream media) crying that if we choose only to read the news or information we’re interested in, then society would lose its diversity and our brains would atrophy or something like that.
Verdict on their fears: mixed. People do tend to gravitate toward news and information they are interested in or that represents their viewpoint. Big surprise. This has been proven on a grand scale not so much by the web as by cable television (FNC, anyone?).
However, I question that there’s really any difference. Yes, in the past century, there were a lot of common social experiences due to limited choices (we all watched the same television shows because there was never anything really good on the Dumont network). But most people congregated in their own local communities and groups — niches, if you will — where they socialized with people of similar backgrounds and viewpoints, and where each other’s existing opinions were reinforced.
Today, we might be “bowling alone,” but we still tend to gravitate toward the same things (books, movies, channels, websites, blogs, and, um, associations, sometimes) as people who are a whole lot like us.
In the past, it was easy for “tastemakers” (or elites or editors or whatever) to get their own thoughts before a large number of people because, again, the audience had limited choices. On what planet could this be considered a good thing? It’s the height of hubris for mainstream media to suggest that access to an unlimited number of choices via technology is somehow less “conducive to diversity of thought” than a small group of editors selecting five or six stories for the front page of the New York Times or twelve or thirteen stories for an evening news broadcast.
I mean, come on.
Finally, the notion that providing service to niches (a la “The Long Tail“) means that people will become forever segmented and isolated within those specific niches fails to understand two fundamental things: 1) people and 2) marketing.
Nobody is represented by one niche of interests. They belong to multiple niches. And they are always looking for new niches to join. This is how Amazon makes money (some quarters, anyway). It isn’t just that they serve the needs of a group of people interested in eighteenth century French literature. It’s that they somehow figured out that a lot of people who like eighteenth century French literature also like, um, let’s say PG Wodehouse novels and used ABBA records.
Let’s not forget that success with the long tail — in business or an association — is not about finding a micro-niche and serving it. It’s about identifying micro-niches and figuring out what other niches those customers might want to belong to. Call it a tailwind, blowing people from niche to niche based on the behavior and interests of people like them.
It starts with knowing what niches your members belong to and using technology to track, and understand, their behavior.
In other words: those committees or staff members that exist in every association who insist that the latest news on whatever project they’re working on needs to be front-and-center on your homepage and the headline in every newsletter and sent to all members even if they have nothing in common other than the fact that they’ve sent your organization a dues check in the last twelve months? They’ll kill your association if you let them.
No comments yet.