August 13, 2006
Behind the Long Tail
Chris Anderson's Long Tail has occupied a lot of attention lately. The book is a best seller (#14 on the NY Times best-seller list today, #48 on Amazon when I checked just now.) Anderson spoke at ALA in New Orleans this June, and in 2005 he spoke at the OCLC Symposium in Chicago (scroll down to a video.) Anderson's blog is an experiment -- he tried out many of his ideas between the time of his original article in Wired and the publication of his book. Though his posting has slowed, he still is putting up recent data and links to other comments.
Anderson is a wonderful speaker, self-confident and self-aware. By the way, in New Orleans, a questioner who brought his own perspective (how can you possibly place any faith in the market after the disaster that capitalism has wrought on society?) got up several times in the question period to challenge Chris Anderson, who finally dismissed him with a "let's move on, shall we?" in just the right tone. Reminder to self, never put yourself in a position to be so publicly humiliated.
In New Orleans, Anderson said how pleased he was to be talking to librarians, who are in the "sweet spot" of the long tail. I think he's wrong and Michael Casey is right: "We have a long way to go in order to serve that tail. We may get there, in time, but we're nowhere near there now."
Actually, Casey is way too optimistic in my view. Other than the Library of Congress and maybe Toronto PL, no one has a chance to capture the long tail. But that's a good thing.
By the way, either you "get" the long tail already, or you've clicked on the links above, right? Here's the Wikipedia entry just in case.
OK, here's my point: it's not about the long tail. The power distribution (hey, you said you get the long tail) represents a measurement of the behavior of market participants. Let's look behind the long tail, and find our patrons. They are the ones who are in niches somewhere along the curve, and it's our problem to find them, but it's also our opportunity.
Here's where it gets even better. As you move down along the long tail, you move away from hits, and towards quality. David Foster Wallace puts it this way: "And I'm not saying that television is vulgar and dumb because the people who compose Audience (sic) are vulgar and dumb. Television is the way it is simply because people tend to be extremely similar in their vulgar and prurient and dumb interests and wildly different in their refined and aesthetic and noble interests." (A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, page 37. I'm sure I found my way to this quote originally from something Anderson wrote; it's cited on page 192 of the Long Tail.)
Well, we really like to think of ourselves as providing resources for the higher "refined and aesthetic and noble interests" of our patrons, don't we? But if it were easy, anybody could do it. Easy is New York Times bestsellers, DVDs, and prepub alerts. Hard is the data mining that comes from digging deep into our ILS circulation records, correlating that with other information, and then acquiring the right materials and letting the small group of our patrons who are interested know we have what we think they would like.
Jeff Bezos talks about getting to the "hard middle." Here's how he put it in an interview with Wired:
"If you think about the marketing of products, it's easy to see polar extremes. At one end you have Super Bowl ads selling Coca-Cola or Budweiser; at the other, you have a sales force pushing an expensive product to 500 companies. What's difficult to sell is the "hard middle" - marketing an inexpensive product, where the gross profit per sale is low, to a small group. A very successful, profitable, midlist book might sell 15,000 copies. In the old world, finding the right 15,000 people to buy that book was ridiculously expensive. This is something that Amazon.com and the Internet in general have really helped with." (Wired 13.01, "The Zen of Jeff Bezos.")
That's the Jeff Bezos of Amazon, if it's not clear. The Amazon that's eating our lunch, if that's not clear.
Okay, 15,000 items may be the hard middle for Amazon, though not for us. But the principle is the same, no?
So, where is the hard middle in our library? Almost certainly not the same place as it is in your library, and isn't that great? Ours is probably sailing, gardening, youth lacrosse, John Frederick Kensett and lots of others we don't know about...yet. All we (and you) have to do is find the groups of interested patrons with common interests, figure out what they want, communicate with them, and then beg them, plead with them, and kill to have them communicate with us. Can't be done? Sure it can. You bet it can.
Let's go.
Posted by Alan Kirk Gray at 06:34 PM