Keeping Tension in the Machinery

A recurring theme in the development of HitTail has been keeping tension in the machinery. You cannot become the dominant authority and source of information on a topic if you don't have a lot to say, thereby becoming prolific. This is a reason why blogging and SEO go hand in hand. It's also a reason why blogging and public relations go hand in hand. Seeing this helps show the connection between PR and SEO. But I've blogged that topic to death, and this is about the "tension" issue.

Keeping tension in the machinery is mostly a matter of keeping up your blog posts. If no suggestion comes in through HitTail, get a blog post out there anyway. It will stimulate the suggestion process down the road. In fact, keeping a steady flow of blog posts going out will generally keep a pretty steady flow of suggestions coming in. It's like keeping up with the assembly line. HitTailing can fail because of overall operational efficiency issues (OOE). Using Technorati or BlogPulse can be a convenient way of seeing when it's urgent that YOU yourself post, to fill in the quiet times when other people are not blogging about you. This stimulates HitTail suggestions AND is good for just keeping general activity up.

OOE is the economic study of making business processes most profitable and efficient by knowing what the slowest machine in your assembly line is. You can never produce more overall than this weak link allows. So, the goal is to lower wasted excess on the other parts, or to speed up the bottleneck with greater capacity. When everything is at peek efficiency, your business is producing exactly as much as it can. And this is the tension in the machinery.

HitTailing won't work unless a constant flow of blog posts are going in. But when does the "tension" end and the spamming begin? Well, always assume that your primary goal is to do a favor for your subscribed readers. If you are posting regularly, you will inevitably acquire some subscribers through Bloglines and other readers. Ask yourself whether each post you make has value, and will enrich their "daily read". For example, this is my fourth blog post today alone, because I am on a roll. I am going to deliberately stop, even though I have more to say, because too much tension can be as bad for the equipment as too much slack.

Understanding Long Tail Thinking

We're grateful to every one of the HitTailers and bloggers who are generous enough to mention us, especially in these early days when a lot of people still don't "get it", and some who do are torn about whether to spill the beans.

So, it is in that light that we want to give a particular shout-out to the women of Blog Squad at the BuildABetterBlog site. They not only have identified us as a potentially useful tool, but they refer to our video as a way to better understand long tail thinking!

Well, to us this is phenomenal praise, considering almost as difficult as making HitTail has been explaining why it works. We consider the release of Chris Anderson's book fortunate timing in helping explain the cause, but are keenly interested when people refer to OUR video as a way to wrap your mind around the concept. Yay!

And we're not alone in sending Kudos to BuildABetterBlog. Thanks for the grass roots support.

The Entrepreneur Magazine eBiz Show

HitTail was just featured on Rob Cowie and Chris Malta's radio program and podcast. You can tune in and listen to the interviews on WSRadio's site.

HitTail = Free Natural Search Optimization from PR Firm

"Why free?" is a recurring question about HitTail. Will it be free when it's out of beta? How do we plan on making money on it?

HitTail is free because we want to change the world. "We" in this case is Connors Communications, a PR firm that gets it. Natural search and public relations are inextricably linked in ways so deep that only by creating HitTail can we make the world get the depth of our understanding and commitment. Making the basic service free incalculably advances this cause. Don't worry; there are plenty of premium services whereby we can monetize it.

How does HitTail relate to the broader field of natural search and the pay-per-click industry?

Unlike PPC, natural search optimization has had great difficulties becoming a mainstream part of marketing. We plan to change all that. While HitTail doesn't cover all aspects of natural search optimization, it does tear down some very imposing walls. We want the natural search discussion to spontaneously start like a thousand points of light across the world. And the timing is right with the increasingly popular notion of the long tail. The metal is hot, and we're hitting it.

HitTail: Write useful articles that readers will love more

Connors Communications has recently dubbed me Chief HitTailer, but based on an article a week ago, that title might rightfully belong to Matt Cutts. He wrote:

"Okay SEOs, what can you learn from my previous post about changing the default printer for Firefox on Linux? In the last week someone wrote and said “I want you to talk about SEO, and don’t give me any of that crap about good content.” I’m going to beg to differ. I wrote that post mainly because I’ve looked for this information a couple times and never found exactly what I was looking for quickly. That tells me that in this small niche, I could utterly rock the search engines. Plus once I figured out the info, it was only 10-20% more time to package it up nicely. Now this short content post can act as an evergreen draw for searchers"

He goes onto explain his methodology in identifying and researching a niche to make sure it's worth his time. Although he's Google's SEO liaison to the world, it's written like a true SEO. I think Matt may have been drinking too much of his own cool aid. He now wants to own concepts like default Linux drivers!

Anyway, the thinking behind Matt's post is similar to what led to the development of HitTailing. While yes, it is easy to identify then dominate new niches that you happen across every day, unless your blog is a personal freestyle blog, you often have to remain on-topic--especially if it's a corporate blog. And even the 10 to 15 minutes that Matt says he spent researching Linux printer drivers could be eliminated if the tool both identified the topic and did the research -- and keep it close to your core topic to boot.

Matt opens his post commenting that one of his readers asked what he was doing writing about Linux printer drivers. Matt's response amounted to the fact that it was worth it because he made a grab for all the traffic on that niche topic. This comes close in spirit to HitTailing, but not right on. Rather, I would suggest that while personal blogs should feel free to indulge in off-topic subject matter, it's better to use a competitive intelligence tool that specifically shows you under-developed niches more closely related to your core topic.

Not All Keywords are Suggestions

I'm falling into one of the same traps as many HitTailers, and that's the fact that many of the terms that appear in the Keywords tab are exciting to me, even though they are not being issued under the Suggestions tab as well. And because of a draught of suggestions, I'm tempted to manually move appealing terms to the Suggestion tab. These are things that once written about, we ALREADY seized the top positions, and therefore no longer need to be targeted. It's functionally a waste of time to get fixed on them.

But these terms are SOOOOO GOOD.

Terms I no longer need to target include...

• Natural Vs. Paid Search


• Paid Vs. Natural Search


• Free Keywords


• Blockbuseter Vs. Niche


• Long Tail Marketing


• Longtailing

Almost any one of these terms, I could write on about indefinitely. And as appealing and worthwhile as it may seem, I remind HitTailers that it's not about writing about things you know you already position well on. Even if you're on page 2 of results, that one more post stands much less chance of boosting you onto page 1 and generating more hits, than picking something of interest that's on page 3 which you never deliberately targeted and bringing it to page 1 or 2.

It's about amassing a mass of topics - not about one super-topic.

It's about tightening the knit of the net - not about stronger fibers.

It's about exposing more of your site's surface area to search - not about polishing the pages it already knows about.

Natural Search Ready For Mainstream Marketing

So we've definitely been trying to play nice with the paid search world since Gary Beal clued us into how effective the long tail concept is for paid search. The thinking goes that the natural search list, when plowed into a paid campaign, effectively doubles your real-estate on the search results page. You appear once in the natural space, and again in the paid space. That's at very least.

At best, you're taking results that would not have appeared until a few pages in (the suggestions), and you're instantly catapulting them onto the first page of results via very low-cost paid ads, and without new writing. The ads are low-cost, because the phrases are normally not very competitive. And theoretically, Google can cross-reference their click-through relevancy data on the paid side and the natural side, and give a special boost to those things that are deemed relevant in both. Think a venn diagram with two intersecting circles representing the data, and your site in the intersection.

But I can't help but think that the greatest value in HitTail is still in elevating natural search optimization into the mainstream. To gauge the interest in this topic, I need look no further than what HitTail is NOT telling me to write about. I blogged a couple of times about natural vs. paid search. With no special effort, we're already on the first page of search results. Same for natural vs. paid inclusion, and a variety of variations. The interest is there, and based on a few experimental posts, I can see people nosing around the HitTail site. And we so quickly grabbed the top spot, that HitTail knows we no longer need to target it.

And it is with this thought that I predict that natural search optimization is going to be the biggest thing in marketing in 2007. The demand is building up like a boiler getting ready to blow. But very little of the pressure is being released, because any and all investigation leads you to a shadowy world of spamming or adversarial relationships with your IT people--both of which are deemed unacceptable. Yet, it doesn't stop the marketers from re-reaching for that Holy Grail of marketing. It's like Homer Simpson reaching for that electrified cupcake. Eventually, one of those times that the marketing folks reach for natural search, someone will guide them to HitTail.

It's difficult to imagine a mere "approach" to natural search optimization making it ready for the mainstream. But that's exactly what's happening with HitTail. For a long time, the mechanics of SEO have been reduced to child's play, thanks to hyper-optimized blogging software. The people making this software are very SEO-aware, and for anyone doubting this fact, you need look no further than an incident that got one of them temporarily banned from Google. But it was only one of the big-3 blogging packages that did this, and they have since throttled back and settled into "best practices," which Google and the other engines continue to reward. On a post-per-search-influence basis, blogging software far out-shines most CMS packages.

The only missing ingredient allowing the average marketer to take advantage of this new blogging search reality is knowing precisely which terms to target to bring in the best, most qualified traffic in the shortest time-period. And that's where HitTail steps in. The whole SEO discussion, which still often needs to be had, can be put aside temporarily while the marketing team gets down to the business of taking back some of the natural search traffic that is rightfully theirs.

An Encounter With Syndication Spam

We got coverage today from CNET News.blog 2.0 today, giving one of the first indications that the HitTail message may be ready for the mainstream. His headline, "HitTail helps you profit from the dregs of search", is right on. Rafe's feedback is positive, but apparently I create a lot of cult-ish and hype-ish writing. OK, guilty as charged. Blame Guy Kawasaki and his books, The Macintosh Way and Selling The Dream. They installed in me a need for a pseudo-fanatical love for what I do. And yes, I was an Amiga computer user too, making me just a few steps shy of all out Zealot.

I'll work on that, but this is not so much a post about HitTail as it is the

But this perhaps is going to turn into a post about CNET syndication, and re-publishing issues in general. You have to love the term syndication and aggregating content. That is such a euphemism. It used to be that when the flow of data wasn't quite so free, syndicated content meant something like The Associated Press, where users of the content were actually expected to pay. And as recent Google news shows us, it sometimes still works that way. But for the most part, the original publishers of content are just not as tech-savvy as the ad-revenue incentivized "aggregators".

This was newly impressed upon me this morning when I said, OK, surely Technorati has the CNET HitTail article. It is their Web 2.0 Blog, after all. The article has been up since midnight, so I'm told, and it has been producing hits on our site since 2:00AM. So surely, the blogosphere knows about it by now, right? Here's a screenshot of the Technorati search...

Aside from the insight that this provides about whose grabbing for what traffic, this was an untenable situation for me. Imagine, the authoritative word on HitTail is coming first from something called BlogJunkTruck, when the actual story ran on both the CNET and News domains! So, up comes PingOMatic, and I do what CNET should have done at midnight--pinged the blogosphere. And a few minutes later, here's the same search...

Not that it would have really made much of a difference, picking up the few blog searchers who are out there. Most hits from a mainstream-ish media site are going to happen based on their existing readership. And already by 11:30AM this morning, the CNET blog article is challenging our second top referrer. And once CNET was picked up in Technorati, you can see it's the most authoritative of the three sites. This concept of authority may eventually help the engines weed out syndication spam.

HitTaing is a much better alternative to making an AdSense network than syndication spam. Problem is, HitTail is not automatable. You have to have something to say, and not simply query X-sites on Y-topics, pull in, reformat and spit out the results. Alternatively, HitTail starts with your existing site as a sort of query, and determines what NEEDS to be written about, as if it were a suggestion box. Matt Cutts has written a very popular thread on choosing topics and writing. All this contributes to my belief that we have something that's ready to take SEO to the mainstream marketing world.

Oops, there I go with that hype again. I'll have to work on that.

Power Law Curve Vs. Logistics Curve

The fact that so many real-world situations follow what looks to be a 1/X long tail power law distribution curve has profound implications. As Chris Anderson says in his book, it may change the shape of business. But a true power law curve is infinite at both ends. As X approaches zero, the head of the curve goes up to infinity, because 1/0 is infinitely high. Few products in the real word, even blockbuster hits, have infinite demand. Even things that can be re-consumed like movies have an ultimate potential consumption of the population of the world watching the same movie over and over for the time period being calculated. It's a scary picture, but yes, it's most definitely finite demand.

Similarly with the long tail, which represents the diversity of products, there is a finite supply. For a given time period, it is possible, albeit difficult, to count every single product on the planet--even taking into account things that are not being advertised for sale, but really are.

So you see, even when real-world situations look entirely like a power law curve, in reality, they're not. As you zoom in on the head, you reach the maximum demand for your top selling product. As you zoon in on the tail, you reach the end of your inventory. This "reaching the end" indicates that there actually was an inflection point in the formula, and regression analysis would reveal that a different formula may be at play, albeit one with some wildly large or small values plugged in to make it look like a 1/X power law curve. Candidate formulas would be the population density curve or the logistics demand curve. They both speak of reaching perfect equilibrium in marketplaces and ecosystems (population and sales drop off as restrained by available resources). And this is today's main shape of business. Sam Walton's use of the logistics curve is sometimes credited allowing Wal-Mart to achieve such stellar growth, always having exactly the right inventory on the shelf at the right time and almost never any shortages.

Anyway, a post by Alex Barnett implies that such curves may be at work in keyword traffic distribution, which is of great interest to the HitTail crowd. There are two radically different directions that the ultimate goal of HitTailing could go, based on how HitTailing impacts the shape of the curve over time. If Alex's observations are true, and HitTailing would enhance and continue the trends he's observed, then HitTailing will be about changing the shape of the curve into something more like the pure logistics curve. If instead, HitTailing grows the head and lengthens the tail proportionately, then the inflection points are never moving toward the center, and the 1/X power law holds true, and will always be the best formula fit in regression analysis.

I know this post is a bit too techie for the mainstream marketing crowd we're trying to attract with HitTail. Suffice to say, based on our discoveries, we're going to adjust the HitTail site to foster the best HitTailing habits. It may be to achieve the purest logistics curve, or it may be to scale up the 1/X curve. Time will tell, and we've got a wonderful online discussion on the topic.

Natural Search and The Long Tail in the Tornado

One of the benefits of incubating HitTail at a public relations company is media training. To get the level of service I'm getting "for free", I'd have to be paying in the area of $20K/month (many clients are serviced at a much higher level). Many truly new endeavors--ones that are not just another copy-cat me too play--are difficult to explain. It's easy to say "it's just like MySpace" or "it's just like YouTube". It's much harder to say it's like nothing else that's ever been, but here's why everyone on the planet is going to love it.

And once explained, such notions are difficult to buy into. Otherwise, they would have already been invented. HitTail is one such endeavor. And the timing of Chris Andersons' The Long Tail book coming out to coincide with the launch of our product is fortunate. It alleviates us of some of the heavy lifting that explains WHY HitTailing works.

I have hope. At least one HitTailer says "Never mind how it works, exactly — something to do with algorithms. All I know is that it does work."

And its thoughts like this that helps us refine our positioning and messaging. We look so much like Web analytics to people who are concerned with such things, that we risk intimidating off the millions of people we wish to attract that don't have the time or interest in deciphering charts and graphs. They just want to be told what to do in order to achieve their goals. And that's just what HitTail does.

But getting this across consistently, every time has been a real challenge to me. There are so many different types of audiences, and so many tiny adjustments that need to be made to each audience. I think the mainstream marketing audience of the world, the main audience we're trying to reach, has not necessarily even heard of the long tail yet. So, we need to explain it to then AND how a pure long tail marketing tool is going to change their world forever. For them, I needed to get it across with narration and strong visuals without turning them off with techie details. This turned into our Flash demo, which has been wonderfully received and even used as a crash-course introduction to the long tail concept, but, the Yannis of cre8asiteforums told us to lose the flash in favor of showing the app itself. You can't please everyone, but it's my job to do so.

That's why incubating HitTail inside a public relations company has been so valuable. I spent 2 months wrangling with professional SEO's, explaining why its different from mining your log files for keywords and why its helps the emerging industry of SEO, instead of being a threat. This has made me a spontaneous expert at any of the questions my PR-brethren have labeled as the difficult fastballs and curveballs. Where I break down is the easy questions, like "What is HitTail?" The question is so open-ended and that I could talk forever, or give a one-sentence summary. Neither is appropriate.

As I'm learning, it is my job to understand the goals of each journalist, and provide the answers that satisfy their goals and lead the story where we want it to go. So, when I'm asked "What is HitTail?" my answer should be along the lines of:

"HitTail is a time-saving writing suggestion tool for small to medium sized Web publishers who wish to reach a larger audience and increase their natural traffic coming from search engines, who don't necessarily have the budget for advertising. It plays off of the notion being recently popularized by The Long Tail book, implying that the traffic from all your less-popular phrases added together can be far greater than your most popular terms. You can chose to use or not use the suggestions provided by HitTail, in your blog or Web publishing software. When you do, your site tends to snowball over time, and can lead to dominating a market niche."

And that has to all flow naturally, without sounding rehearsed. I have to speak from the heart on every question, and be able to shorten, expand or adjust each answer depending on the goal of the journalist. And after all that, I also have to be ready for the unexpected.

I could have gone about developing HitTail in a number of ways, but doing it through the channel of public relations is so right. In addition to the numerous tie-ins between SEO and public relations, SEO has a huge public relations problem. HitTail has provided a framework where we can endless extol the benefits and ease of natural search traffic as a top-line marketing priority, without even mentioning SEO. That's not to downplay the field. It simply defers the much more complicated discussions for a later date. So many SEO discussions lead to the "big infrastructure fix", and there's nothing surer to turn off a discussion with a marketing person than telling them that their success is going to rely on getting the IT people to do something they don't see the value of.

HitTail and public relations is a perfect match. HitTail and Connors Communications, a small boutique agency in NYC that has repeatedly been a "game changer" (Amazon, Priceline, GoTo, etc.) is brilliant. There is no surer way to fix the SEO public relations problem than to promote the most workable sub-section of SEO as a standalone product for mainstream marketing, that's ready to be swept up in the tornado that is natural search and the long tail.

One HitTailer Per Journalist (Exclusives?)

In disputing Chris Anderson's figures from The Long Tail book in The Wall Street Journal, I think Lee Gomes has done more to promote the long tail concept than anything else. It's hard to imagine something sparking off more self-fueling publicity than a good controversy. Had everyone just accepted the long tail theory as fact, it wouldn't be new. It'd be: "Yeah, the shape of business has changed, everybody knows that, ho hum."

But instead, it's "Dem's fightin' words!" And that is brilliant. And in a public relations sense, that is a "big hit". Guy Kawasaki likes a good enemy. It really helps frame what you yourself are all about. Not that I think Lee is really opposed to the notions--just that he thinks the evidence shouldn't be taken at face value.

A lot of people are buying Chris' book, even though the premise can be summed up in about a paragraph. The problem is that a lot of people just don't get it and need lots of evidence. And that evidence once provided is nit-picked apart, even though the prevailing trends are self-evident within those market segments Chris discusses.

The long tail doesn't apply in every market. But where it does apply, it can be a powerful force.

So, does everyone need to carry a multitude of obscure products like Amazon to benefit from the long tail effect? Do you need to aggregate a multitude of small sales across a large array of markets? In other words, do you need to be the big guy benefit from the long tail?

The answer is it depends on what your interests are, and what you will use as your measure of success. If you want modest success that will simply let you be your own boss, take the vacations you want, and work in the field you want, the long tail can be a powerful ally. I have a new neighbor, a lawyer from Argentina who came to Columbia University to qualify for the US Bar exam. As a hobby, he raises champion Polo horses. A horse he sold recently for a modest amount became a million-dollar champion. He wants to appear at the top of Google for all searches having to do with that horse's name, and the buying and selling of champion Polo horses. It's a perfect long tail play.

Were it champion horses, I wouldn't be so sure. But it's all subject-matter having specifically to do with champion POLO horses. So, I am very confident about his chances to dominate the space.

He's already published, with several websites and articles in print-publications. So, he has a perfect starting point for putting the magic of the HitTailing process to work. At first when I explain HitTail, it sounds like a magic wand that you wave and get to the top of Google. But then, it's clear that one top position on one obscure keyword that MIGHT pay off is just the beginning. Just as Chris says, the long tail is about a mass of niches, HitTailing is about a mass of small successful pages. You need a whole network of pages, each of which holds top positions on an obscure term that MIGHT pay off.

And for people just starting out HitTailing, or worse, starting to write for search engines WITHOUT HitTail, the biggest challenge is knowing where to begin. The post I made about whether HitTail saves time shows that only 5% of the things that you MIGHT write about will even make a difference. Otherwise, you may be targeting concepts you already dominate, or concepts that will never be searched on.

So, will The Wall Street Journal be interested in some Argentinean lawyer whose ambitions are to control all the Internet traffic on champion Polo horses? Probably not, because it's not going to be turned into a public company with investment opportunity. But then again, maybe, because horses are indeed an investment opportunity. And the story of a lawyer doing this on the side, because it doesn't cost him much more effort to do so than not (thanks to long tail theory) has strong human interest appeal.

How many more human interest stories are out there for journalists, hidden in the long tail? Can you say "infinite"? Perhaps one more bird we're killing with this stone is providing journalists with an infinite supply of human interest small-business stories. The long tail tends to be full of passionate people doing what they do out of love. The fact that they make money off of it is sometimes a welcome bonus. And we believe that this welcome bonus is only even possible in some cases thanks to HitTail. We'll work on digging up those stories for any journalists who are interested.

There's such a large supply of these stories in the long tail, that maybe we can cut a deal on providing exclusives -- one HitTailer per Journalist. Hmmmmmm.

Yes, HitTail Saves Time Over Analytics

Two months ago, we answered the question of whether HitTail saves time. This was one of the first indications that we were onto something different and simpler than analytics software. HitTailing is for people who don't want do deliberate over charts and graphs, but rather want to get right to the business of growing the qualified natural search traffic on their site.

None-the-less, this post is about reproducing that same graph almost 2 months later. Many more HitTailers have jumped on the bandwagon since then, and we have much more data. Does the size of the sweet spot look the same? Yes.

This graph shows how much of pure search activity HitTailers are zeroing in on, after filtering out even 10x more data. What's in red represents only the pure search activity HitTail cares about.

Green is what ends up in the suggestions tab.

Once again, this is NOT a long tail diagram. The lessons learned here are...

1. There is a very uneven distribution in the search optimization skills of HitTailers. But way more "super-optimizers" have jumped on the HitTail bandwagon since the last time we posted on this subject.

2. Even highly successful traffic-driving sites vary wildly in the number of suggestions that they issue. Certain website publishing techniques simply spike the suggestion process much more than others.

3. Most HitTailers have extremely low traffic sites, perhaps explaining their interest in HitTail in the first place.

4. The proportion of keywords issued as suggestions remains unchanged. Only a small fraction, on the order of 5%, get issued as suggestions, confirming our theory that yes, HitTail saves you enormous amounts of time by helping you zero in on the portion of your long tail of keywords that matter.

Grass Roots Growth vs. One Big Hit

Does slow & steady win the race?

HitTail has been out since about June 6. That's just over two months. It was launched as a beta with no official announcement--only a roll-out in the SEO forums. It has not been picked up yet by any of the major Web 2.0 publishers. It was briefly "SlashDotted" by being held on Jason Calcanis' controversial Netscape Digg-clone homepage on launch-day. But that was hardly a big hit. HitTail's growth so far has been an organic process. It had been grass roots and word of mouth, partially because of the difficulty of "getting it".

And we're happy to say the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive, indicating that we're doing something different than everyone else.

Some related products that have come out in the meantime have managed to get covered in publications such as TechCrunch. The product was easily understood, had a high value, but was not being turned into a free product. Additionally, their beta program felt rather exclusive when you applied, and from the lack of buzz I've heard since, has not signed up a lot of the applicants. HitTail on the other hand is an open public beta program, and we've stated our intent to keep the basic service free even after beta.

So, what's the difference between grass roots growth, and getting one big online media hit? We all know Alexa data is skewed towards Alexa-using Webmaster sites. Thankfully, it would skew HitTail and other related products about the same, because that category of product specifically appeals to Webmasters. So, the graph at the top may actually be an apples-to-apples comparison.

The Fallacy of Behavioral Targeting

Behavioral targeting is great if your website covers diverse subject-matter. But if you're a niche site and your readership is brought to you through natural search, then your visitor has already been targeted merely by virtue of the fact that they arrived at your site. If your site is about blue widgets, it's a pretty good bet, your visitor is interested in blue widgets, or they wouldn't be there. You don't have to worry about serving up an ad for newlyweds or such. The advertisements delivered on your site merely need to be context-sensitive.

And this means that niche sites can be much more respectful of visitors privacy than large destination portal sites. Large sites want to do profiling to deliver increasingly customized advertising and services, basically having the site customize itself to your particular needs. Amazon put a patent application in last December showing their interest in building profiles that, in addition to all they know about you from your site behavior, can cull information in public databases. And of course there is the "forever" search history that AOL brought to the forefront of public awareness the other week by letting out anonymous search data that is so telling that you could identify people.

Niche sites of the sort where HitTail really shines follow different rules. At first glance, they seem to be ad a disadvantage compared to sites like Amazon that can deal up behavioral targeting. On the other hand, they achieve something very similar to behavioral targeting merely by choosing any ad network such as AdSense that has built-in context sensitivity. You're not profiling anyone or violating any privacy concerns.

In fact, HitTail achieves its considerable magic without building user profiles of any kind. You might say that you are building a fuzzy profile of the entire audience for your niche. In this way, you can get all the efficiencies that come from tailoring your content to fit your audience through your content decisions over time, instead of making your site have to dynamically reconfigure itself based on what it reads out of a profile.

Monitoring a Meme

So, with HitTail being a brand new product and a made up word, I have the unique opportunity to watch it set into public awareness. More specifically, I get to watch what goes out through syndication systems vs. who the original writers are. And our first press release went out on Monday. So now we have examples of meme with a variety of different starting points:

1. Posts in the HitTail blog


2. Auto-syndication drawn from this blog (SEOData is just one example)


3. Genuine articles written by bloggers & the media (Mostly stored here)


4. A deliberately syndicated article (82 instances)


5. The press release


6. Press release re-publishing (37 instances in 3 days!)


7. Stories written as a result of the press release and our pitching


8. Social Bookmarking (del.icio.us is just one example)


9. The YouTube viral video


10. The blogosphere (consisting of original content plus syndication spam)


11. News

This approach to watching something set in from scratch is "pure", because the term HitTail was virtually unused before our product. Our monitoring searches have sort of a built-in filter not enjoyed by companies that name themselves as common words.

HitTail Provides Suggestions to Boost Natural Search

Our press release went out today officially announcing HitTail.

Monday August 14, 10:00 am ET
New Product Reveals Best Keywords Within Your 'Long Tail' of Search

NEW YORK, Aug. 14 /PRNewswire/ -- Connors Communications announced today the beta launch of HitTail, a content intelligence product that reveals in real-time the least utilized, most promising search terms hidden in the "long tail" of a Web site's natural search results. HitTail uses sophisticated, patent-pending algorithms to identify these under-performing keywords, thus creating suggestions for written content that will boost search engine results and lessen dependence on purchased keywords.

Unlike "analytical" search engine marketing services, HitTail actually provides users with actionable information that will ultimately increase a Web site's qualified traffic. This information is derived from tracking code placed on each page of a site by its owner, allowing HitTail to monitor keywords used to access the site and, through its proprietary algorithms, issue custom-tailored suggestions.

During its beta period, HitTail is offered free of charge. A premium package including competitive analysis and writing assistance will be available in the coming months.

"The pay-per-click industry uses the long tail concept to encourage ever-larger keyword buys because it provides an inexhaustible inventory of obscure, valuable keywords," said Mike Levin, chief HitTailer. "But the dirty secret of search marketing is that this concept works just as well with free natural search, the 'elephant in the room' of any search marketing discussion."

HitTail has already generated a buzz among bloggers as an essential optimization tool. "HitTail adds an important dimension to keyword suggestion tools -- finding the terms on your own site that could generate more traffic, both through natural and paid results. This helps publishers claim the traffic that they were previously leaving on the table," commented David Berkowitz, director of strategic planning at 360i.

"One of my greatest passions is to be instrumental in the growth and success of companies," said Connie Connors, president of Connors Communications. "HitTail is a remarkably easy but powerful marketing tool that can help businesses of all sizes. I am grateful to the thousands of early beta users who have helped us continually improve the product and who are demonstrative of the success they are having using HitTail."

About HitTail

HitTail is a content intelligence product that reveals in real-time the least utilized, most promising keywords hidden in the long tail of your natural search results. We present these terms as suggestions that when acted on will boost the natural search results of your site. It's simple, easy to use, and the results are immediate. HitTail was developed by Connors Communications, a leading technology public relations and online marketing firm. For more information visit us at http://www.hittail.com/.

Your Various Long Tails of Search

Ever wonder how much search traffic was occurring on your site OTHER than Google, Yahoo and MSN? Wonder what the long tail of search looks like each for each engine? How about your long tail of search once you filter OUT the big three? Now, you can find out. We just added the "Other" option under Your HitTail tab.

HitTail has already been showing people all over the world the shape of their long tail of search. The difference with this new feature can answer questions like: does all the rest of your search traffic added together even equal that of Google? (of course not). Does it even equal that of MSN?

Sure, the chicken-and-egg effect exists here. Just because all the other engines added together don't even come close to the big three doesn't mean you can ignore them. This is merely a way to keep it in perspective, and investigate differences in the longtail shapes between engines, and the search landscape as a whole, with and without the big three factored in.

How long does it take to be on Google search results?

The common wisdom (today) is that it can take as little as a few days to get new pages indexed if your site is already well known and indexed by Google. And for brand new domains, it can take as long as 6 months. The HitTail domain was registered on June 6, 2006. It's fully indexed by Google in less than one month. So, it depends on how much of a push you give the site to get it started. And for those of us who were launching sites last year, we know that at times, no matter what you do, it can take as long as a year. I don't expect Google will go through a phase like that again, due to competitive pressures. They have an interest in new sites being included.

On the HitTail site, the traffic leading the site by search engine is gradually catching up to the traffic leading to the site by links. Links tend to have spikey traffic, because most links these days are from blogs, and the link scrolls off the homepage after awhile. This is necessary to establish the in-bound linking criteria for Google, but after awhile, all you need is to be included in the search engine results to keep your qualified traffic up.

So, what is that little push that you can use to get a brand new site (or previously invisible site) to be included in under a month? In the case of HitTail, it was almost an immediate linking fan-base based on the beta program. For sites that don't have such a fan-base to work with, I would recommend blogging with Blogger, and using the FTP function of Blogger to "plant" your blog into an subdirectory of your site. This effectively takes away Google's choice of ignoring you. Granted, Google sends out an entirely different crawler to pick up and index your blog content. But we cannot help feeling that there is some cross-pollination.

Similarly, you may consider paying for a Google AdWords campaign, or even running AdSense advertising on your site. While this may seem counterintuitive, the fact remains that if you're using other Google services on your site, than your site is known to the Google systems. It doesn't necessarily mean that you'll come up better in natural search, but the theory goes that it probably couldn't hurt. There is a whole line of reasoning that goes: Google's various products for different stages in a customer relationship all have a built-in measure of relevancy. If someone goes from search hit (paid OR natural) to a successful checkout, then they're probably highly relevant on the original keywords.

This is no guarantee that using Google's various services will have any impact at all. But one of the pieces of evidence that there is some connection between the different systems is HitTailer Gary Beal (GaryTheScubaGuy), who continues to report that the use of high performance natural keywords in paid campaigns consistently improves the performance of the paid campaigns.

At any rate, the process of being included in Google is exactly the same momentum-building, snowball rolling process as HitTailing itself. It takes quite a bit of work to get the ball rolling, but once it is, it becomes self-sustaining. And you do what you can to make that initial process easiest. Starting out with a product that people LIKE linking to will help. And using Google services that take away Google's option of NOT seeing your site may help.

Performancing Software Vs. Analytics Software

It's unavoidable that we're categorized as a search metrics service. But we have yet to provide HitTailers with anything that could be called a metric, short of the ratio numbers at the top of the long tail diagram. And even that's a stretch. All we're trying to do is help you increase your natural traffic by explicitly telling you what to write about. We're more like a distillery, taking your 100,000-word-lists, and refining them down to just a couple of words that matter. HitTail is not analytics.

HitTail is performancing software. By HitTailing, you directly impact on the performance of your site, dispensing with all the pesky, pedantic steps in between that marketing-types like to ponder. Appropriately, Markus Merz of the Performancing.com website is one of the first to get it. He colorfully describes HitTail as the SEO Mafia, leaning on you, telling you exactly what you ought to be doing if you know what's good for you. Yep. Markus gets it.

In the most extreme example of how not-analytics we are, we could strip out everything but the Suggestions tab, and it would still work. But then, it wouldn't be as fun. We've had nothing but positive feedback on our Ajax interface and real-time search hit monitor. It's part of the quality that makes HitTail so addictive. And we're breaking some cool ground, letting you browse millions of records no slower than if it were 100 records.

The inevitable categorizing of HitTail as search metrics is a result of the overshadowing analytics mindset that has been with us since WebTrends. Now, there are literally dozens of products in the analytics space, both free and paid. And since HitTail's introduction several months ago, new players are jumping onto the scene that focus on natural search. We are engaged in the "Portal Worship" stage of peformancing software, where analytics plays the same sexy role that portals played circa 1999, before the stellar rise of Google. What these new guys don't get is that no one who's building their qualified website traffic really wants to spend all their time with charts and graphs. They just want to be told what to do--quickly! They are HitTailers and just don't know it yet.

It's a good thing for HitTail that the competition don't see that the world doesn't need is yet another analytics package--particularly not one that's going to become a paid service. Google has set the price of analytics. And the benefit provided by the competition has to be large indeed to justify paying. The only analytics software worth building these days is one that captures all the extended data available to webservers, but normally not captured in the log files, plus all the data that's normally lost via the multitude of Internet caches (at both the ISP and local level), and which lets you query the results with a very powerful language, get the response as an XML feed, and format it for easy, meaningful consumption--in other words, a pipedream. The next stage of analytics development requires more than the current Internet infrastructure can provide.

There's a little ground still to be made with predictive analytics, but as far as predictive analytics for the purpose of building new natural search traffic, it's already here in the form of HitTail.

Happily, because HitTail basically sidesteps the entire search metrics discussion, we are able to focus HitTail in on what's important: driving more traffic. We zero right in on the predictive quality of the data that's available. We've built and patented the machinery to separate the wheat from the chaff. We've automated the flour mills. And by making higher quality flour available to a broader (non-technical) audience, we let you bake the bread.

To extend this metaphor a bit further, the HitTail copycats that are stuck in the search metrics mindset are counting your stalks of wheat, sorting them by height, and providing you nice photographs of the wheat fields. Then they're saying: "There you go, that should help you bake the bread."

This is why we renamed MyLongTail as HitTail. Anyone can pull the long tail of keywords from your logfile data. But it's not about your long tail. It's about you HitTailing. It's a process to be performed--not a report to be run. And HitTail handles the first half of the chore, milling it down into flour, so you can take it that last step, and bake the bread.

See Your Google, Yahoo or MSN Long Tail

One feature we quietly rolled out was the ability to view different long tails for different search engines. So, on your long tail chart, you can switch between viewing your total long tail, and your long tail within just Google, Yahoo or MSN. It's been described as way-cool. We agree.

There is a lot of discussion about how much of your traffic actually comes from Google vs. Yahoo vs. everything else. And if you can get this figure, usually it's in pie-chart form with little connection to keyword distribution. You don't know whether a particular engine is biased towards just your popular keywords, or whether it’s a diverse selection.

Now, you can see it very clearly. View what your long tail of search looks like in just Google, Yahoo, MSN or all of them together--another HitTail first.

The Long Tail of Disappointment

Have you signed up for HitTail only to be crestfallen about how little activity is actually happening on your site? Wondering why HitTail appears to be underreporting compared to your actual log file, or search activity that you know for a fact is taking place?

Welcome to another aspect of why HitTail is not analytics. We go to some lengthy measures to make sure that your own search benchmarking activity is filtered out of the Search Hits tab. Likewise, if a competitor is doing aggressive keyword testing and clicking on your site over and over, we're only going to record them once. And if a genuine qualified visitor is doing heavy research, searching on every keyword variation they can think of you and continually rediscovers you, we likewise only record them once.

This is part of the HitTailing philosophy. The first word that a person things of is the only gut-honest one. We postulate that there are many more people who, given the same thoughts, will grab for the identical keywords. With each successive search, you're just repeating and refining a concept that ALREADY led to you. By taking only the first, the Search Hits tab is a much more honest representation of the number of people discovering you through search hits and links: one entry under the Search Hits tab, one visitor.

And yes, this errs on the side of under-reporting uniques. And yes, this is a major disappointment to people who thought they had boku more traffic, based on the prior click-stuffing they were observing in their analytics software, but which was coming from very few actual competitors, yourself, or likewise obsessive individuals.

And the other side of this crestfallen experience is that if your site is generating many fewer uniques than you thought, your site is also going to generate many fewer suggestions than it might. This is all a symptom of insufficient seed-content on your site, or perhaps not adhering to SEO best practices (wrong choice of blogging software). The solution is to blog your heart out. Get enough seed content out there to spike the HitTailing process. The HitTail website has only recently just achieved that sort of self-sustaining momentum where the suggestions coming have surpassed my ability to keep pace. That took 2 months of heavy blogging.

Lesson learned? Among the many other benefits of the HitTailing process is an honest appraisal and ongoing insight into the actual volume of unique traffic you're receiving. Often times, this is much less traffic than one would hope for or expect. But it is yet another example of why big sites with constant flow of new content have the advantage.

So, don't slink away with the long tail of disappointment between your legs. Instead, build yourself up into an expert in your field by choosing interesting and timely topics that may require a little extra research--topics that you've really been meaning to blog about anyway and won't have time for later. Get the snowball rolling.

Click Fraud: Hedging Your Bet

Click fraud keeps popping up in marketing news. In a double-whammy, Google announced a tool to let you examine click fraud abuse, and a Judge OK'd a $90 million dollar settlement between advertisers and Google. This was a classic case of, "OK, it's an issue, and here's what we're going to do about it," and appears to be a reversal of Google CEO Eric Schmidt's let it happen attitude.

MSN just got into the paid search business, with Ad Center. The paid search industry is currently about a $7 billion, with expectations for it to grow to $10 billion, by 2009. It's in the spirit of protecting this growing piece of pie that Google, Yahoo and MSN announced last week a joint effort to publish click fraud measurement guidelines. Are Yahoo, MSN and Google going to pull together over something that's just "self correcting" anyway? Hmmmmm.

So, this post ultimately is about the timeliness of HitTailing entering the scene, as the click fraud problem achieves more and more visibility. No matter what the hype or reality behind the size of teh click fraud problem, HitTailing is an excellent way to hedge your bets. Natural search is always the elephant in the room when discussing search marketing. And it is most often overlooked due to the perceived difficulties and obstacles to doing well in natural search.

The long tail principle turns these perceived difficulties on their head. Doing well in natural search is really quite easy when you get your expectations in order. Simply observe how people are finding you, and where you are not already coming up in the top positions. Make those topics into the subject line of a new blog post, and you're likely to have just won a top position on that term. That's just how natural search works. Sustained over time this process, known as HitTailing, can result in an awful lot of qualified natural search traffic building up--and offer a viable way to minimize exposure to click fraud.

Default Search Vs. Blog Search Engines

HitTailing is about doing increasingly well in natural search over time, and mostly about influencing the all-important default Google search. The default search of Google, Yahoo and MSN are used more than the specialized tools, such as Local, Picture and News search. But there is a specialized form of search that's worth looking at to improve HitTailing. And that's the blog search tools.

Monitoring blog search sites is a way to keep your finger on the pulse of what's being discussed online faster than searches in the Google default search will reveal. This helps you manage your HitTailing process because it works as sort of an early warning system that your posts are being picked up and on their way to having some influence. The fact that they show you how many blogs link to yours gives you a rough idea of how much influence. And finally, it gives you an opportunity in near real-time to see what other people have to say about you (or your product, website, etc.) and respond to them.

And this is what people mean when they talk about engaging in the online dialogue. Blog search-and-response happens in near real-time, with controversies flaring up and playing themselves out in days rather than weeks. It's as if Google picked up and included new material in real-time, and you could just sit and watch Google results change as the state of the Internet changed.

This is what people mean when they talk about monitoring the blogosphere. The granddaddy of blogosphere monitors is Technorati. There are many other tools, such as BlogPulse, Sphere, Google Blog Search, Ask, gnoos and others. How in the world do they know what's being posted FASTER than Google's crawl can pick up? It's because of blog pings, which are basically just automatic notifications to centralized ping servers whenever posts are made. In other words, when you blog, your blogging software proactively notifies these services. It's much like the search engine submit tools of ages past, and has seen similar abuse--but that's the subject for a separate post.

Today, you have to use Technorati, plus a few others to make sure you're seeing everything that's being posted about your website or topics of interest. So, why isn't one blog monitoring tool enough to monitor the blogosphere? Unfortunately, the ping servers are not as centralized and universal as we would like. Not all ping servers are notified of all posts. Technorati tends to be notified most, because its one of the original blog search tools. And there are a few other big, centralized ping servers that are generally notified by default by all the big blogging tools, such as Verisign's Weblogs.com (not to be confused with AOL's Weblogs, Inc.), and Yahoo's blo.gs. And these centralized tools, especially when they have API's, is what allows new players onto the scene without having to cut deals with every blog software company to ad a new ping server to the list.

And many blog search tools are attempting to knock Technorati off its throne. But Technorati has the first mover advantage, and one of the few things that stand a chance of giving Technorati a run for its money is when be Google eventually incorporates real-time blog search into their default search. But for now, Google's not even making blog search one of the primary tabs, such as News and Images. Technorati is going to have to slip up, or the alternative tools are going to have to somehow be radically better to displace Techorati.

But this all leads us to the question of why bothering to do all the extra work of immersing yourself in the blogosphere? If HitTailing is a natural search play, and default search is used thousands of times more than specialized search, is it really worth getting into the blogosphere rat race? And won't the concept of specifically searching blogs go away as main search engines approach ever closer to returning fresh web results in real time?

The answer is that so long as specialized blog search tools are doing a better job of showing active discussion than the default search tools, they're worth paying some attention to as your blog achieves critical momentum. It's part of getting the snowball rolling and acheiving the snowball effect in the first place. As you put this difficult work into posting and building critical mass, the default search tools of Google, Yahoo and others are inadequate to offer insight as to how well you're doing. Technorati and the others help you gauge how well your blog is achieving critical momentum. For example, I often search on the term HitTail in Technorati. This tells me both whether my own posts are being picked up, and who else is talking about HitTail. It's not exactly part of the natural search core message of HitTailing, but it broadens my perspective, and allows me to venture into some of the other aspects of optimization not addressed by HitTail.

What other areas of optimization, you ask? Basically, link building. The old school of link building had people asking for, trading or buying links from other sites. And that can still be effective if you find the ideal partner. But generally, the new school of link building advocates having a product or message so compelling that people naturally link to you in the most valuable non-reciprocated fashion. It helps if you build in a viral mechanism that encourages linking. Think about how authoritative you look if hundreds of people link to you, and you don't have to link back. This is the strongest posture available on the Internet. If you're HitTailing AND have people organically linking to you at a steady rate, you are in a strong position indeed.

This process of getting the [snow]ball rolling is actually so important, that we're considering incorporating the process into HitTailing itself. And to that end, you will be well served to get familiar with the blog search tools. Some of them have RSS feeds, alert lists and trending. Get familiar with them. Find your favorites. And find ones that offer sufficiently different results so that you're comfortable that you're spotting all the online mentions of your product, service, website or blog.

HitTail: Your Website Suggestion Box

Did you know that you already have a Suggestion Box on your website? Not everyone does, and even fewer know how to open it and read the suggestions. A recent post in Google Groups says it best...

"The typical perspective of the information architecture on many Web sites is all about an individual looking at the world from inside the corporation out on the world, not the world looking into the organization. [...] This is where services like http://www.hittail.com/ can come in, to really help you understand how people are thinking about your company or your client and better aligning the language used to accurately reflect what real people think about the company's brand and products."

That's right. The suggestions tab is the Web equivalent of a suggestion box, where website visitors don't have to go through the trouble of filling in forms and submitting... they already did... before they even reached your site! The search that led to your site is a suggestion of how your company may be viewed from the outside world.

So why HitTail, and not the plethora of new search-centric analytics software that's popping onto the scene? Easy, because nobody wants to be paralyzed by charts and data that need to be poured over and have further meaning induced. HitTail wades through your suggestion box for you and brings to your attention only those suggestions that may in fact improve quality. That's the patent-pending special bit of HitTail that sets it apart. Any user giving our service and the others a try should be impressed by how only about 5% of all the keywords collected ever make it into the Suggestions tab. Think how much time we're saving you!

And we at HitTail are big fans of the business gurus of our day... and era's past. Several times, we have invoked Peter Drucker's name. But this time, it's time to talk about another business guru whose heyday was post WWII, and the rebuilding of Japan. Japan didn't always have a reputation for quality products. Early on, Japanese products were often considered cheap. That all changed in part from the US sending one of our brightest over to Japan to help rebuild--Edward Demmings. Where Drucker's core principle is how the mission of business is to get and keep customers, Demmings' core principle is that competitiveness comes from listening to your customers and employees, and rapidly incorporating innovations into production. The fancy word is total quality management, or TQM. It's a process, much like HitTailing. But it all starts with listening to the right details from the right people.

...in other words, using a suggestion box, and actually taking the best suggestions.

The idea is: who better knows what you need than the people you're trying to sell to, and the people who are actually putting the product together? Remember the Honda Civic circa 1970's? It was a low-cost economy starter vehicle. Today, it's a premium quality vehicle with quality and customer satisfaction ratings that rival Mercedes. The Japanese word for this process is Kaizin. One of the most recent and impressive examples of TQM in industry, was the rebirth of Harley Davidson. This can backfire, with companies pursuing higher-end markets and profit margins, making openings in the low-end for competitors, such as Hyundai. But that's subject-matter for another post.

The point here is that the suggestion box is critically vital to for constant improvement. And the suggestions should be collected from a large sampling of population... much larger than what you yourself, and even your team can brainstorm. The best suggestions for website improvement can be gleaned from the tealeaves of your Web log data.

And most analytics packages isolate you from this data by focusing on top trends and in-site navigation analysis. HitTail instead considers search hits important events. What was significant about this hit? Is it the first time this hit EVER occurred? Does it already have a secure position? In other words, it asks all the questions that someone pouring over analytics data would have to ask. This is why analytics has evolved into its own dedicated profession. Most people approaching analytics software, even the free stuff, fall victim to paralysis through analysis. How do you go from looking at a page full of pretty, but intimidating, charts and graphs to doing taking some action that's going to help your site?

That's where HitTail comes in. HitTailers are often struck by the stark simplicity of the user interface. Seem familiar? When was the last time that something deceptively simple-looking displaced a much larger category of software that everyone assumed was better? Google! That's right. When Google came along, all the other major Web properties were engaged in portal-wars, looking for every conceivable way to keep you on their site. But Google, by focusing on what was really important--relevancy--and combined that with a stark user interface that stripped out all the nonsense, thereby improving the value of what remained.

Analytics are engaged in their own version of portal-wars. And a couple of competitors that jumped onto the scene following HitTail's introduction are promising more natural search hits (the most valuable commodity on the Internet) are basically letting you drill down on much more search detail than other packages provide. By leaving out things like click-path analysis, you've freed up a lot more capacity for recording search details.

But a paralyzing glut of details is a paralyzing glut of details.

Thankfully, HitTail is not analytics, and we're not going to present you with yet another set of charts and data to decipher. We just do writing suggestions--simply stating, if you write about these topics, more website visitors will come. And we show you how well you're doing with one simple long tail diagram.

So when comparing HitTail to the other entries into this space (which have curiously rushed out their offerings within 2 months of HitTail's release), keep in mind the time investment they're asking you to make. If you add just one more tool to your website and your busy life, shouldn't it be one that takes an approach that is most respectful of your time, and doesn't ask you to become an analytics pro before you realize any benefit?

Think of HitTailing like checking that Edward Demmings suggestion box. But instead of wading through all the many suggestions that plain analytics software would provide, HitTail zeros right in on what's important. Act on those suggestions, and your product (your website) will improve. Keep it up over time, and you can take a lost cause and turn it into a premiere quality offering.

Long Tail Marketing

It's amazing how quickly controversies flare up and play themselves out. The Lee Gomes Wall Street Journal old-school response vs. Chris Anderson's long tail book lit up the blogosphere. The WSJ article is available for direct linking, something you can never assume to be true with the WSJ. They essentially "lock up" their content, allowing it to be searchable via Google (as a content partner), but not always reachable. I guess when they need to be a player in the blogosphere, they let articles out on a case-by-case basis.

These are all old topics by now, but epitomize the message behind long tail marketing. Large mainstream press is still the 800 lb. gorilla of media, and a Lee Gomes article can make quite a stir. But the reaction is swifter and broader than the mainstream media has a backchannel to handle. All the activity that would normally be routed through letters to the editor now take place online and in real-time. And where Chris' longtail site is no WSJ, it's perhaps a 400 lb. gorilla of the blogosphere.

And that epitomizes the battle. Chris was the self-proclaimed winner, because he was able to respond to the WSJ article through a blog that he controlled about as quickly as the WSJ hit the news stands. And his site already had considerable reach and notoriety, and so was able to make his voice heard instantly. Everyone knew where to look. It all played out in a single day, and Chris' voice boomed like a Chicago hardline rocker across the Internet. Lee's voice on the other hand was quiet and delayed, relying as he did on an associate Nick Carr to get out his response the next day.

And this in essence summed up the debate. Yes, the old school way of doing business isn't going away. Chris never said that it was. Sure, there was some bombastic exaggeration in promoting the book. Language like "the new shape of business" and "the hit is dead." But Chris constantly makes the concession that the long tail effect is strongest where product is electronic, or otherwise lends itself to the new model. If I recall correctly, he has a chapter dedicated to this fact.

Hits play an important role in our national psyche. They give us common currency for that water cooler discussion. It turns a diverse population into a global village. The same technologies allowing long tail successes also have an amplifying effect on true hits, and allow rapid global distribution. Before long, the $100 laptop and global Internet mesh will allow people in any country in the world to see blockbuster hits. Unmitigated, this could result in global homogenization, and put culture and tradition in jeopardy.

So, the long tail effect actually plays an important social role in mitigating the homogenization that comes with better technology, economies of scale and gentrification. It's actually a shame in some ways that the long tail phenomenon is most effective with online economies. I would love a multitude of high quality niche specialty shops. Problem is that a shopping mall that could even begin to rival the diversity and choice available online would have to be not the size of The Mall of America, but the size of Minnesota itself.

And this ultimately is why the long tail is so often coupled with the concept of marketing. The actual transaction takes place with a combination of online payment and fulfillment through either electronic or physical means, such as shipping. In many ways, once the prospect makes their purchasing decision, these details of the transaction are of no consequence. The place where the long tail effect was most important was in the marketing phase. The processes of marketing and sales have been brought closer together than ever before in history.

A person has a need. This person turns to the Internet and performs a search. They find one or more sellers. Relationships are formed. Relationship deepen as the person continues their research, and becomes a prospect. One particular prospect-seller relationship strengthens, based on the merits of the product, pricing, or some other factor. The prospect places the order and becomes a customer. If handled properly, the customer becomes a repeat ongoing customer. And therefore, the Peter Drucker mission of any company is fulfilled: to get and keep customers.

This is the dream of almost all marketers: a nearly automated customer-finding, relationship-managing, deal-closing, up-selling, success-story manufacturing machine. The level of automation that can be brought to the process is at unprecedented new levels, and the case studies that Chris put in his book, such as Amazon and Rhapsody are excellent examples. For Lee Gomes to latch onto the 98% rule as an attempt to invalidate such a fundamental shift in the way business MAY be conducted is silly.

Business is changed forever, and Marketers are in the drivers' seat. There are unlimited products and services. There are factories across the globe that will manufacture them, and talented workforces across the globe to provide service. The most precious resource in all of business is shaping up to be natural search traffic. It's the oil of the knowledge worker economy. It's the finite natural resource that's there waiting to be tapped into by the prospectors of the information age. And Marketers are the new long tail prospectors.