A concept that is widely discussed in the digital arenais that of ‘The Long Tail’. The phrase ‘The Long Tail’was used by Editor-in-Chief Chris Anderson in anOctober 2004 Wired magazine article and it is alsothe title of his blog. He used it to describe the strategyof certain types of business, particularly those thathave had success online where, in addition to itemsbeing sold in large quantities, there is a long tail ofproducts sold in increasingly small numbers to ever-diminishing groups of customers.The concept of a frequency distribution with a long tailhas been around for a very long time. Before theinternet, the media industry made its decisions basedon the notion of a normal distribution of customers –targeting the largest audience sectors found at thepeak sector of the bell curve. Now internet-basedmedia adopt a long tail strategy with increasinglytailored output for increasingly narrow audiences.Says Chris Anderson: “The theory of the Long Tail isthat our culture and economy is increasingly shiftingaway from a focus on a relatively small number of‘hits’ (mainstream products and markets) at the headof the demand curve and toward a huge number ofniches in the tail. As the costs of production anddistribution fall, especially online, there is now lessneed to lump products and consumers into one-size-fits-all containers. In an era without the constraints ofphysical shelf space and other bottlenecks ofdistribution, narrowly targeted goods and services canbe as economically attractive as mainstream fare.”Some of today’s most successful Internet businessesleverage the long tail to reach underserved customersand satisfy demand for products not found intraditional physical stores. Examples include Amazon,which makes available at the click of a mousehundreds of thousands of books not stocked in localchain stores; iTunes, a service that legally bringsniche music not found in record stores to people whocrave artists outside the mainstream; and Netflix,which exploited the long tail of demand for movierentals beyond the blockbuster hits found at the localDVD rental shop. Anderson shows that the businessimplications of the long tail are profound andillustrates that there’s much money to be made bycreating and distributing at the long end of the tail. OK,hits are still important. But as the above businesseshave shown, there’s money to be made beyond HarryPotter, U2, and Pirates of the Caribbean.

The Long Tail of Marketing

Now, what about marketing? While Anderson focuseson product availability and selling models on the Web,the concepts apply equally well to marketing. There’s no doubt that there is a long-tail market forWeb content created by organizations of all kinds –corporations, nonprofits, churches, schools, individuals,rock bands – and used for reaching buyers – thosewho buy, donate, join, apply – directly. As consumerssearch the Internet for answers to their problems, asthey browse blogs and chat rooms and web sites forideas, they are searching for what organizations likeyours have to offer.Unlike in the days of the old rules of interruptionmarketing with a mainstream message, today’sconsumers are looking for just the right product orservice to satisfy their unique desires at the precisemoment they are online. People are looking for whatyou have to offer right now.As marketers understand the Web as a place to reachmillions of micromarkets with precise messages justat the point of consumption, the way they create Webcontent changes dramatically. Instead of a one-size-fits-all web site with a mass-market message, weneed to create many different microsites – withpurpose-built landing pages and just-right content –each aimed at a narrow target constituency. As marketing case studies, the examples of Netflix,Amazon, and iTunes are also fascinating. Thetechniques pioneered by the leaders of long-tail retailfor reaching customers with niche interests areexamples of marketing genius.

The Long Tail

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The Long Tail of PR

Instead of spending tens of thousands of dollars permonth on a media relations program that tries toconvince a handful of reporters at select magazines,newspapers, and TV stations to cover us, we should betargeting the plugged-in bloggers, online news sites,micro-publications, public speakers, analysts, andconsultants that reach the targeted audiences that arelooking for what we have to offer. Better yet, we nolonger even need to wait for someone with a mediavoice to write about us at all. With social media, wecommunicate directly with our audience, bypassing themedia filter completely.We have the power to create our own media brand inthe niche of our own choosing. It’s about being foundon Google and Yahoo! and vertical sites and RSS(Really Simple Syndication) feeds. Instead of writingpress releases only when we have ‘‘big news’’ –releases that reach only a handful of journalists – weshould be writing releases that highlight our expertideas and stories, and we should be distributing themso that our buyers can find them on the news searchengines and vertical content sites.To succeed in long-tail marketing and PR, we need toadopt different criteria for success. In the book world, ifyou can get to some major TV show (say, Oprah), it willbe a success. But, instead of focusing countless (andprobably fruitless) hours on a potential blockbuster of aTV appearance, wouldn’t it be a better strategy to havelots of people reviewing your book in smallerpublications that reach the specific audiences that buybooks like yours? Oprah is a longshot, but right nowbloggers would love to hear from you. Oprah mustignore 100 books a day, but bloggers run to theirmailbox to see what interesting things might be in there.Sure, it would be great to have our businesses profiledin Fortune or BusinessWeek. But instead of putting allof our public relations efforts into that one potential PRblockbuster (a mention in the major business press),wouldn’t it be better to get dozens of the most influentialbloggers and analysts to tell our story directly to theniche markets that are looking for what we have tooffer?

The long tail may be a good thing for, say, a rock bandor an author, but it can be rather different for a PRissuing statements and news releases, or, worse, whois trying to counter false or damaging information. Thiscan manifest in at least three ways:

the most obvious is that only organizations with themost disciplined of procedures can track and managethe content of their own web presence (it is a lot easierto overlook something in a virtual environment than,say, on paper);

many communications can be multiplied and lockedinto an elaborate, aggregated network of cross-references in which positions are set in a virtual amber;

and finally, because search engines automaticallycache web pages, it is quite possible for users toretrieve content the originator believed had beendeleted or erased.Social Media forces PR to see things differently. Nolonger can one set of messages to one audience servea purpose. Social Media has forced PR to focus on themainstream as well as the Long Tail, a group of nichemarkets reachable via dedicated channels. We nowhave the real ability to put the public back into public re-lations. The public means communicating to many dif-ferent groups, even those hard-to-reach nichecommunities on the Web. PR starts to look less like atypical broadcast machine and more like a living,breathing entity capable of also participating inconversations with public (through direct-to-consumercommunication) contribute to more meaningfulengagement and brand visibility, and help people makepurchasing decisions. These conversations alsorepresent an opportunity to foster brand loyalty.The tables have turned. In PR 2.0, we no longer relysolely on promoting products through third parties. Wecan take off our marketing hats and have realconversations with people. PR professionals are learn-ing to advise brands that they can reach customers inmany ways, through traditional channels and socializedmedia.This is PR for the mass market and for reaching thosepeople who comprise the Long Tail—reaching out to thedisparate markets that collectively represent your cus-tomer base. And no steps can be taken without firstlistening. Consider the difference between PR and PR 2.0:

News releases vs. engaging with communities;Spin vs. relevance;Speaking in messages vs. genuine conversations

related to the subject matter of peers;Wire services vs. social/conversation tools and

networks.PR in the Long Tail has the ability to reach individualsand influence their behavior, whether it’s an opinion, areferral, or a purchase.

The Long Tail of Search

Keywords in SEO (Search Engine Optimization) fallinto two broad categories. Short-tail keywords aresimple one- or two-word phrases that are typicallyvery general in nature and attract a large volume ofindividual search requests. Long-tail keywords, on theother hand, are more complex queries that containmore words and are much more specific in nature.Individually they attract a much lower volume ofsearch traffic than their short-tail counterparts, butcumulatively these long-tail-type queries account forthe lion’s share of internet search traffic.In any keyword domain there are a small number ofhighly trafficked keywords or phrases and a largenumber of low-trafficked keywords or phrases. Often,the keyword domain approximates to the right half ofa normal curve with the tail of the curve extending toinfinity. Low-trafficked keywords are therefore alsoknown as ‘long-tail keywords’.The highly trafficked (short-tail) keywords have thefollowing characteristics: highly competitive, consistof one or two words, have a high cost per click* andmay have low conversion rates** as they tend to bequite general.Examples from the accommodation sector mightinclude ‘hotel’, ‘London hotel’ or ‘cheap hotel’.Low-trafficked (long-tail) keywords are not thatcompetitive, often consist of four, five or more words,have a lower cost per click and can have a higherconversion rate as they are quite specific indicatingthat the searcher is further along the onlinepurchasing cycle. Examples might include ‘cheap citycentre hotel Dublin’, ‘stags weekend hotel Temple BarDublin’ or ‘business hotel with gym and spa Wexford’.Effective search marketing campaigns tend to put alot of effort into discovering effective long-tail terms.Search engine marketing programs often fail becausethe marketers optimize on general keywords andphrases that do not produce sufficiently targetedresults. For example, someone in the travel businessmight be tempted to optimize on words like travel andvacation. But by entering ‘‘travel’’ into Google you gethundreds of millions of hits. It is virtually impossibleto get to the top of the heap with a generic word orphrase like ‘‘travel,’’ and even if you did, that’s notusually how people search. It is ineffective to try toreach buyers with broad, general search terms.You have a choice when you create search enginemarketing programs. One method is to optimize onand advertise with a small number of words andphrases that are widely targeted, in order to try togenerate huge numbers of clicks. Think of thisapproach as an oceangoing drag fishing boat withhuge nets used to harvest one species of fish. Sure,you capture thousands of fish at a time, but you throwaway all that are not the species you’re after, and it is

a very expensive undertaking.True success comes from driving buyers directly tothe actual content they are looking for. The best approach is to create separate searchengine marketing programs for dozens, hundreds, oreven tens of thousands of specific search terms thatpeople might actually search on.

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*Cost per click = is an internet advertising modelused to direct traffic to websites, where advertiserspay the publisher when the ad is clicked. Withsearch engines, advertisers typically bid on keywordphrases relevant to their target market. Contentsites commonly charge a fixed price per click ratherthan use a bidding system.

**Conversion rate = in internet marketing, CR is theratio of visitors who convert casual content views orwebsite visits into desired actions based on subtleor direct requests from marketers, advertisers, andcontent creators. If the prospect has visited a mar-keter's web site, examples of conversion actionsmight include making an online purchase or submit-ting a form to request additional information. Theconversion rate is defined as follows:

CR =

Successful conversions are interpreted differently bycontent creators. To online retailers, for example, asuccessful conversion may constitute the sale of aproduct to a consumer whose interest in the itemwas initially sparked by clicking a banner advertise-ment. To content creators, however, a successfulconversion may refer to a membership registration,newsletter subscription, software download, or otheractivity that occurs due to a subtle or direct requestfrom the content creator for the visitor to take the ac-tion.

Number of Goal AchievementsVisits