The Long Tail – Quality vs. Quantity

One of the hottest revolutionary buzzwords leveraged in this contextual social media participatory web 3.0 panel was “Long Tail.”  The panel “The Long Tail of Social Media: Analyzing the Value Proposition for Publishers and Advertisers kicked off with each of the panelists defining what the long tail actually is.

VP Jeffrey Graham of Marketing, Customer Insights, the New York Times defines “the long tail” from a content perspective and specifically as the breadth of content – not the top 10 stories, but the other, lesser viewed pages.

Jennifer McLean, VP of Marketing, Director, Distribution at Technorati, said the sheer amount of content that Technorati indexes, and the growth of blogs, were primary growth stimulators for the long tail of blogging.  What makes a blog interesting is that the content tends to be very niche vs. what is seen on larger sites.

Shiv Singh, Social Media & Global Strategic Initiatives, Avenue A Razorfish defined the long tail in a more traditional sense – there are the large mass sites, however the long tail is comprised of the smaller niche sites that in aggregate are larger than the few big sites.  Additionally, Shiv says that the social influence levels are much stronger on the smaller sites due to the intimacy of the relationships.

The conversation evolved into a discussion about social networking and how companies can better engage and participate in social media.  Many companies are coming in late to the game when there are already well established networks and are having difficulty building social networks on their sites.  Many publishers are adding social networking features to their sites however building community around them seems to be a problem.

Jon Gibs, the facilitator brought the conversation back to (you guessed it) measures.  He broached the subject by talking about how current measurement tools (like Neilson and Comscore) are not providing the right measures for social media or the long tail.

Jeffrey Graham made a great point in that the industry needs to move away from eye-balls.  I couldn’t agree with that more – especially since eyeballs don’t necessarily mean relevance or quality in an interaction.  His recommendation was to look at the relationship between the interactions and the quality of the impression.

A great question was posed by Shiv “What value would we place on this conversation?” – the point being that not all conversations are created equal, and not all conversations can be measured.  It is also important to look at the pass along effect, the impact of the impression and the cost of creating the interaction.  Linking back to marketing objectives (awareness, closing a sale, etc) is vital to creating a successful interaction.

Measuring anything online is a challenge, and the long tail clearly presents some additional issues given the quality vs. quantity discussion.  At its core the conversation is more about quality (in the small niche sites of the long tail) vs. quantity (getting a ton of untargeted hits on a large site with a broad content focus).

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By odoniff on 2008 10 19

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