One of the biggest books in marketing at the moment is Chris Anderson’s “The Long Tail”, which looks at how the Internet is creating demand for niche products, and allowing companies to supply these niche markets, which not too long ago were uneconomic to service.
We’re living in a fascinating time where older products and services might have a much-extended life cycle.
At the risk of sounding like a Steve Rubel devotee (given my recent references to his posts), he recently wrote an article for the Advertising Age, where he provided three ways that marketers can “thrive in the long tail world”.
Steve Rubel posted an interesting note about how economist Nouriel Roubinni’s blog about the US economy was picked up by the media.
It’s very interesting to see that more and more the blogosphere is a furtile hunting ground for journalists looking for news.
If you’ve done a web search recently you may have noticed the explosion of spam blog sites or “Splogs”. These sites are basically designed to attract the attention of search engines, which they do by displaying inane text with key words, or by stealing content from legitimate web sites. They make money by displaying money from well known ad networks.
Wired has just published an expose on splogs (not yet available online). The article highlights a university study that shows that more than half of all blogs are actually splogs. One splogger interviewed for the story claims to have made more than $70,000 in just three months.
An interesting article by Heather Hopkins of Hitwise UK analyzes the traffic to three well-known blogs, and comes to the conclusion that a blog’s popularity comes down to content (subject matter and quality), rather than the attention it may have received by the mainstream media.
Socialmeter.com is a interesting site that scans popular social networking services to gauge a given URL’s popularity.
At the moment it scans Del.icio.us, Digg, Furl, Google, Jots, Linkroll, Netscape, Reddit, Shadows, Spurl, Technorati, and Yahoo My Web. While is a useful tool, it’s not the be all and end all of popularity measurement, as a lot of traffic is bound to come to your site from outside of these services. Nevertheless, it is a useful tool, particularly, I think, for identifying any gaps in your the promotion of your blog.
Why does one blogger become a millionaire, while another equally worthy blogger toils for years for little or no reward?
Of course there may be a number of factors at play, but an interesting article Blogs to Riches by Clive Thompson for the New York metro looks at this very issue from the perspective of why some blogs are so much more popular than others.
Thompson sites research by Clay Shirky of New York University who took a sample of 433 blogs and counted how many other sites linked back to them. Shirley found that a very small number of sites (the so called A-list) enjoyed hundred or thousands of links, while everyone else had relatively few links.
If you have an interest in social networking AND an interest in business or marketing, I suggest you take a look at Cliff Kurtzman’s excellent article Marketing to the MySpace Generation (and the Economics of Social Networking) on www.marketingprofs.com.
The article examines the business model underpinning social networking sites like MySpace, and also looks at what new social networking sites need to do in order to succeed.
Kurtzman argues that new social networking sites need to do more than simply try to build a “better mouse trap”, and that none of the ventures he’s seen has what it takes to build a brand affinity that could rival MySpace. He also says that their business models - ad revenue on top of user generated content - just don’t appear to be economically viable.
Whether you’re blogging for fun, or for profit, it’s important to be able to do so efficiently. Every precious minute spent mucking around with spell checks, or uploading images to FTP servers, is a minute that you could actually spend writing. Microsoft’s Windows Live Writer, currently in Beta and available for download, makes the whole process that much easier.
Microsoft does not have a history of being particularly innovative. It was years behind Apple in introducing a usable graphical user interface and it was unfashionably late in embracing the Internet. Likewise, it’s been slow off the mark with the social networking phenomenan, an and it’s way behind the likes of MySpace or YouTube.
Everyone seems to launching social networking sites at the moment - and it’s not just Microsoft with its Live Spaces site. It’s getting to the stage where if you were backing one of these new sites you must be getting worried that the social networking arena is getting a little crowded.
Here’s a run down of a few other sites that have made announcements in this past week.
Fanpop is a new social networking site that allows fans of TV shows, movies, people and web sites to create social portals or “spots” devoted to the object of their desire. These spots contain blogs, headlines, forums, and links to other web sites. If you like a “spot” you can become a “fan”.
Microsoft finally released its social networking site, Windows Live Spaces, during the past week. Well actually it’s an upgrade of its MSN spaces web site, and it allows you to create a web site, start a blog, post photos, and build a network of contacts. Sound familiar?
Live Spaces is free to the end user, and is paid for by advertising, which Microsoft says is “critical to driving growth for the company.”
Well what you can you say? Here’s another example of Microsoft using its considerable muscle to try to dominate a new market. And how interesting that despite its considerable resources, so far Microsoft’s social networking effort is simply a case of copying the real innovators.