I finally got around to reading The Long Tail by Chris Anderson, Editor-in-Chief of Wired Magazine. If you are not familiar with the “long Tail” concept (which seems unlikely) the basic idea is that while you can make a lot of money selling hit movies, music, books, etc, you can also make a surprising amount of money selling a little of a lot of less popular movies, songs, books, etc.
Amazon.com has been one of the biggest poster children of the Long Tail effect. As they started their business they carried many more books than it was possible to carry in the local Barnes and Noble. Both Amazon and the local book store would carry the latest New York Times best sellers but Amazon would also carry books that were not economically viable in a local store. They might only sell 100 copies of one book a year, but they might have a million books that they sell 100 copies of. The long tail is a graph of a demand curve.
I have been putting off reading this book not because I thought the idea was uninteresting or unimportant but because I had not grasped the depth of the idea and just how much more there was to glean from this simple idea. Anderson no only explains how Amazon.com is a natural progression from previous long tail ideas like the Sears & Roebuck catalog but also how the long tail is not one demand curve but the some of a larger number of niche demand curves. This is made most obvious as he analyzes how the music business sells fewer “hit” Cds any more but has numerous niche hits and an amazing variety of niches. Part of what is driving the long tail is the ability to search and find products of interest.
Anderson’s book should be a must read for anyone who is interested in business or working in a business that is effected by the change in demand curves, which is just about everyone. It is a well-researched and insightful book about a topic that was deeper that I realized.
Today is the last day in My Oovoo Day, which might more accurately been named My Oovoo Couple of Weeks. What is Oovoo? Does the post office deliver mail on My Oovoo Day?
Oovoo is a new video chatting application that is available for Mac and Windows. It allows up to 6 people to have a video chat at the same time in a display that has been compared (by people like me who watched too much TV in their formative years) to the opening credits of Brady Bunch or the grid for Hollywood Squares.
My Oovoo Day was a cleaver marketing strategy to get promotional buzz for the software. The organizers of My Oovoo Day gathered a number of popular bloggers and podcasters and arranged for them to hold a series of chats. You could then sign up for one of up to 5 slots for each chat. As expected the bloggers and podcasters promoted the day. I signed up to chat with John Wall of Marketing Over Coffee, CC Chapman from Managing the Grey (and Accident Hash) and Mitch Joel from Six Pixels of Separation. Because of problems with the My Oovoo Day event, I was only able to get into the chat with John Wall (the email confirmation apparently got eaten by my spam filter and you could neither cancel a registration nor register again to chat with the same person) but these were independent of the Oovoo software.
The event itself was interesting. I had not chatted with John before. The software was still pretty green. I was using a Mac and had to do an update to a new version on the day of the even before anyone could hear me. I crashed at least once so this still seems like Beta software. The audio worked well. The video did not keep up but that seemed to depend on the bandwidth of each user.
Bottom line, Oovoo is worth looking at for a small group video chat. The idea of doing an event like My Ooovoo Day is also worth looking at as a model of how to promote a new product, but… it would be better to wait until the product was a little more ready for prime time.
I was talking to a co-worker about the wonderful book “Made to Stick” which I have been reading. The book studies why some idea stick with us and some don’t and how to communicate so that people will remember your message. When the topic of using surprise to make your ideas sticky came up, the co-worker recommended this video done by the American Lung Association called “Odds”. This is one of a number of memorable ads at the site firebrand.com.
I recently finished Punk Marketing by Richard Laermer and Mark Simmons. As the subtitle of the book is “Get Off Your Ass and Join the Revolution” it may come as no surprise that this is a marketing book dripping in attitude. Since the book was just published this year it is the best book I have seen to incorporate web 2.0 and social media into more traditional marketing methods. This book is a wonderful companion to Guerilla Marketing. It focuses on how to get more marketing done with less money and is filled with good examples of people doing just that.
I have heard a number of people express the opinion recently that Apple has changed the way that it announces products. This comes from the fact that Apple recently pre-announced two products, months in advance before you could even order them. The two products were the AppleTV and the iPhone. This has set the expectation for a number of people that they might learn about the next iPod or the next iMac in a similar pre-release fashion. This post is intended to discourage that expectation.
Let’s back up a bit and look at what this from Apple’s point of view. In general when Apple, or some other hardware company, releases a new product they are going through a product transition. So when they announce a new iPod they are trying to maximize how much money they make. A product transition has some risks for the company.
If they announce a product too soon and the product sounds very good then people may choose to stop buying the current product and wait for the new product. This is called the Osbourne Effect after Osborne Computer Corporation which pre-announced a series of new products in 1983. The company went out of business shortly there after and the most common story has been that their sales dried up when they announced these new machines. (Whether this actually caused Osbourne to go out of business is not universally accepted in retrospect, no one seems to argue that this was helpful to the company).
If a company still has old units in its warehouse when it ships the new product, these products will have to be sold for less money (or perhaps not sold at all). But, if the company guesses wrong how many of the old product it will sell in this transition and runs out of units in the warehouse then it may lose sales to a competitor. Combine this with a slip in the new product and you get the kind of scenario that can keep executives awake at night.
So why did Apple decide to pre-announce not one, but two products last year? The main reason would seem to be that they were not going through a product transition. They did not have a TV box when they pre-announced the AppleTV nor a cell phone when they pre-announced the iPhone. Why does this make a difference? The big difference here is that customers may in fact not buy some product that they were planning on buying and wait for the Apple product, but in this case it was not an Apple product. So with the iPhone, for example, what Apple wanted was for people to decide not to by that new BlackBerry, Blackjack, Razr, etc but to wait for the iPhone. What Apple did was create F.U.D. (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt) about their competitor’s products. They did not need people to pre-order the iPhone so much as they wanted them to at least wonder whether they should wait and see. FUD is a very useful marketing tool. If you don’t have something sell, marketeers are trying to at least get you to wait before buying a competing product. Their hope, which worked in the case of the iPhone, is that if you wait long enough they will have a product you will want to buy.
So, will Apple pre-announce the next iMac. That is unlikely. But if they get into yet another consumer product business then it is very likely that they would pre-release that product.
I finally got around to reading The Long Tail by Chris Anderson, Editor-in-Chief of Wired Magazine. If you are not familiar with the “long Tail” concept (which seems unlikely) the basic idea is that while you can make a lot of money selling hit movies, music, books, etc, you can also make a surprising amount of money selling a little of a lot of less popular movies, songs, books, etc.
I have been putting off reading this book not because I thought the idea was uninteresting or unimportant but because I had not grasped the depth of the idea and just how much more there was to glean from this simple idea. Anderson no only explains how Amazon.com is a natural progression from previous long tail ideas like the Sears & Roebuck catalog but also how the long tail is not one demand curve but the some of a larger number of niche demand curves. This is made most obvious as he analyzes how the music business sells fewer “hit” Cds any more but has numerous niche hits and an amazing variety of niches. Part of what is driving the long tail is the ability to search and find products of interest. 
