Launching into niche marketing with Chris Anderson's "The Long Tail"

I have been intrigued with the long tail since it was first introduced to me and my classmates by Professor Burton a few weeks ago. I have become even more interested in it since deciding to go after promoting the niche topic of early returned LDS missionaries. Chris Anderson developed the idea of the long tail, and so I am hoping that by reading the second edition of his book The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More will help me better understand how to 1) Market my idea and eventually my book and 2) What exactly I'm getting into by trying to promote such a niche subject.

Preview
After scanning the book for several minutes, I am pleased to report that it seems like it'll be much less boring than I thought. In fact, it might even be a fun read! Chris Anderson writes in a colloquial voice, and tells personal stories throughout the book (I skimmed it here and there). From looking at the table of contents it also seems like he's going to walk me through understanding the long tail step-by-step. There are nice graphs here and there too which is always helpful in understanding economics.

Early Social Proof
Well, it's been 41 minutes and no one has commented on my Twitter or Google + announcement that I am beginning my research on the long tail. (And no, it didn't take me 41 minutes to write the last two paragraphs...I've been hopping between projects). That's all right though. I know that if nothing else, my hubby will be happy to talk to me about my research. He's already very intrigued with the long tail, not for any personal project reasons, but because he's a math/science/computer guy and new ideas in those areas always intrigue him. Plus, he's a big supporter of my early returned missionary project. But even without anyone's support, I already have enough personal drive to research this topic on my own.

books.google.com

Similar Books

• Makers: The New Industrial Revolution by Chris Anderson
• Free: How Today's Smartest Businesses Profit by Giving Something for Nothing by Chris Anderson
• How to Sell at Margins Higher Than Your Competitors : Winning Every Sale at Full Price, Rate, or Fee by Lawrence Lessig
• Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy by Lawrence Lessig
• The Innovator's Dilemma: The Revolutionary Book That Will Change the Way You Do Business by Clayton M. Christensen

In searching Google and Amazon to find books related to The Long Tail, I mostly found other books written by Chris Anderson talking about similar themes of smart ways to do business, particularly by incorporating internet technologies. Lawrence Lessig's name kept popping up as well, so I decided to check out two of his books, which are about the same things, although Lessig focuses a bit more on the law surrounding copyright and open-sourcing. Clayton M. Christensen showed up for both Lessig and Anderson's books so I decided to check him out as well, and it turns out that he also writes on very similar themes, particularly about smart ways to do business (especially if you are a large corporate company). One thing that I did notice is that Anderson seems to focus more on the lay-person (although he certainly could talk to high-powered business people) while Lessig and Christensen seem to focus more on the high-powered corporate people.

Who Cares?

After doing some more searching on Twitter and Google+ just to see what the conversation is, I found that most people who are interested in the long tail are professionals in web development, marketing, or technology. There seemed to be two main groups today too: those who are skeptical of the validity of the long tail, particularly in the music industry. I found these folks on Twitter. The article trending among these people is titled The Most Important Thing You Will Read All Day. I'm not going to pretend that I understood it completely, but it did seem to make a valid point about how hard it is to make money in that industry, especially if your music is in the long tail. Others, both on Google+ and Twitter are particularly excited about the hummingbird movement that Google is doing, which from what I understood is Google improving their algorithms for searches. I found a particularly useful video explaining how Google Hummingbird will help long tail subjects get better search results on this blog.

Formal Reviews

I couldn't find any professional reviews of the second edition of The Long Tail (maybe the professionals think the second edition is pretty much the same?), so I looked for some for the first edition and found two pretty good reviews. The first one was from The New Yorker and the other was from Slate.com. Both initially praised Anderson's book by saying that it had done a good job at "uncover[ing] a  phenomenon that's undeniably going on and [making] clear sense of it" (Slate.com article), but then go on to point out the flaws in Anderson's argument. The New Yorker points out that Anderson's idea is "not as original as [his] publishers would have us believe" and then states that Alvin Toffler actually wrote about the idea first in his book The Third Wave back in the 80s. Furthermore, the author of the review on Slate.com felt that Anderson was "overreaching" his claim and points out the areas where the long tail certainly cannot exist, such as the oil business. The author liked Anderson's book well-enough for the businesses in which the long tail can, and does, exist but just thought Anderson's claim went too far and therefore made it weaker.

Informal Reviews

There are a lot of opinions out there about Anderson's book, some full of criticism and others showering his idea with praise. I found a good blog post called Has the Blockbuster killed the Long Tail? This post starts off with this straightforward, almost deadpanned statement: "The Long Tail is dead." The writer later says, "Harvard professor Anita Elberse claims that she has evidence that the Long Tail is wrong, and that digital markets translate into more power to the blockbuster." He writes down what Elberse has to say and then refutes it thoroughly in his post. I like that he presented Elberse's evidence and admitted upfront that he needed to read her novel to fully understand her claim. I also like that in the meantime, he defended Anderson's book against this critic by elaborating more on what Anderson is saying. I love that he ends his review with "it is very early to dismiss Elberse's arguments completely, but if the above feature some of her best examples against the Long Tail, I don't think Chris Anderson will be too bothered."

In Good reads, I found digital enthusiasts, professionals, students, and contest winners reviewing the book. I loved this honest response from a contest winner, "Business is usually not the most interesting of topics and is difficult to express thoughts and ideas too but putting it in a comic format really did help me as a reader to see what he is talking about. I'm really glad I read this, it really opened my eyes towards the world of entertainment." So it's a good read, and the writing style seems to be colloquial enough for even the layperson to understand and enjoy. Yay!

Courses Using Anderson's Book

I found several courses using Anderson's book. Here are three of the top hits:

In Spring 2006, the University of Texas at Dallas had a class called ATEC 6V81 (Special Topics in Emergent Communication) that required students to purchase Anderson's book.

In 2009, The University of Memphis had two classes that used the updated and revised version of Anderson's book (the one I'll be reading): COMM 4211 and 6211 (Media 2.0: Production and Distribution in the Digital Age).

In Spring 2012, The University of Southern California, required simply "The Long Tail by Chris Anderson" for its COMM 432 class (American Media and Entertainment industries).

Multimedia

I found multiple clips of a presentation Chris Anderson gave for The Long Now Foundation at The Palace of Fine Arts Theater in San Francisco, CA. The whole presentation can be watched here. I chose to watch this nine minute clip. Some things that I gleaned from this clip  is that Anderson is 1) Really into watching business trends, particularly marketing and sales trends over long periods of time. 2) He's researched this idea of the long tail for a long time now. 3) He's interested in how trends affect culture. 4)He's personable. He's colloquial in style. He wants people to understand his idea. 5) He is passionate about this subject, and therefore does not mind spending a great deal of time researching it and explaining it to others. He is obviously an authority on the subject, really believes in it, and is good at convincing others to believe it. No wonder he has received so much praise and criticism! The guy is good!

First Impressions of the Book

Because this book is not available at the BYU Library (even though the library's catalog says it is) and ebrary does not have it available to read, and Google Books only has certain pages "available for preview," I ordered the book for $3.99 off of Amazon. If I like it, I'll keep it. If not, I'll sell it back. That's the wonderful thing about the digital world we live in, huh?

Anyways, I read what I could off of Google Books. The chapters I am most interested in (chapters 11--Niche Culture and 15--The Long Tail of Marketing) were of course not available for preview. So I read the introduction to the book, then a bit of chapter 2, then skimmed my way to the end. I skimmed because quite frankly the book was getting really boring. Not because the writing style was too hard to read. Actually, it was the fact that it was so easy! The words were very basic (a teenager could have understood this book, or even a tech-saavy middle schooler), and quite honestly I didn't feel that there was any real analysis in the book. Anderson obviously has done a lot of analysis himself, but I didn't feel as though he did a good job of presenting the analysis to his readers. It felt like I was reading example after example after example (some real and some hypothetical) of the same thing over and over and over again. I didn't see why the essay had been made into a book just to have the same thing printed on every page in a slightly different scenario. I saw what some of the critics said about him over-generalizing and making broad claims. I began to question what he was saying about the music industry not depending on hits anymore because others have questioned it and come out with strong evidence against it (see the above article titled The Most Important Thing You Will Read All Day). Furthermore, I kind of already knew everything because of Dr. Burton's blog post about the long tail. I didn't feel like I learned anything new from the book.

My Thinking So Far

Maybe I'll learn something new when I can actually read the entire book, particularly the chapters that sound interesting to me. Maybe all Google would let me see was the examples. I hope so. I was really looking forward to this book after reading all of the responses, good and bad, that it has received. If it ends up remaining boring, then I guess the bright side is that it will be a quick read because I'll end up skimming the whole thing.

Let's hope I can glean something from it though, even if it ends up being a skim. He knows his stuff. Surely there is something that I can learn.

And if not from Chris Anderson, then maybe from Lessig or Christensen or others just posting their own thoughts/stories/ideas on the web. There is plenty of information out there for me to glean information from.