Network Effect vs. The Long Tail

I just discovered this guy's site which is, well, Worth Reading. Over and over, I discuss the idea of the Network Effect vs. The Long Tail. I usually refer to this as the "who you know" people vs. the "what you know" people. I haven't quite figured out this person's name, but he/she writes about heady topics with the same future mindset that I try using for myself. I recommend reading his piece that perfectly positions HitTail as a realistic approach to marketing that flies in the face of the power brokering good ol' boy network.

So, I won't just repeat his points. Instead, I'll explore how you see this in actual practice. Why are big manufacturers forced to pay for their search presence through Google keyword advertising (AdWords)? Why can't they just naturally target and dominate their topics? Shouldn't Ford come up when you Google "cars"? Shouldn't each drug company come up first when you Google their respective drug names?

Yesterday, I was involved in a long discussion about how the top manufacturers in the world, companies like the Fortune 500 and Global 2000, don't really own their own keywords without buying them through AdWords from Google. With only some rare exceptions, searches on generic terms, like "cars" will bring up everything but the big automotive companies. Those results are full of publishers, affiliates, dealerships, and just about everyone but the original manufacturer.

In a way, this makes sense, because many OEM's just don't do marketing, and they rely on their distribution networks and retailers to drive product demand. In other words, they're not marketers, and about all they know how to do is big-budget, big-media (usually TV) cognitive resonance pieces that get the world feeling good about their products. But even if the demand is created at this level, the sales are driven into local dealerships, and in the most extreme case these days, to patients demanding name-brand drugs from their doctors.

This creates a pain point, because the reality is that manufacturers almost never "own" their own company's industry keywords. Sure, they'll own the company name. But that only helps if people are specifically looking for them, in which case, the branding has done its job. It's the multitudes who stray away from brand loyalty, and go Googling to see what else is out there who need to be corralled back...

...or not...

...depending on how determined the successfully branded manufacturer is about keeping their customers. Peter Drucker says that the mission of any company is to get and keep customers. Companies with a successful brand have a certain amount of brand momentum going that makes them lose sight of the long, difficult battle it is to get those customers in the first place. That's why companies that have "made it" let customer service slip as their first impropriety of success.

Success doesn't mean you can slack off--that is, unless you don't mind making an opening for a competitor. All the companies sinking a fortune into AdWords ought to consider how much more valuable it would be to just naturally come up on the keyword in search where they should.

Is Search Dead?

TechMeme over the last few days has picked up stories about the alleged demise of print media. And a SEO/SEM manager from India recently linked to HitTail with a story about the decline of SEO and SEM (search engine optimization and search engine marketing, respectively), in favor of social media optimization (SMO?). He also acknowleged HitTail as the best refuge of search optimizers.

Meanwhile, Viacom is suing Google/YouTube for a billion dollars, 2/3 Google's original purchase price. Some think it's a showdown between old and new media, planned by Google while their publicly capitalized war chest is deep. It's better to get it out of the way sooner rather than later, and force some clarification on copyright laws and fair use. TV Shows are increasingly doing tie-in's with their Web audience. Cast aside any doubt that the very nature of media itself is changing. New lines are being drawn (blurred), and definitions and business models are up in the air.

Chris Anderson appeared to some as the harbinger of doom for the blockbuster hit, with his book, The Long Tail. Declaring the blockbuster dead was great for the book launch, and many were quick to point out the irony of The Pirates of the Caribbean 2 being the all-time weekend earner. But Chris himself was quick to point out, even at the launch itself, which I attended, that he was not predicting the death of big media, but rather a a recalibration. Blockbuster successes may never reach the proportionately high watermark of ages past (when adjusted for inflation and world population growth), and smaller, independently published works will reach a much wider audience.

Chris Anderson would characterize this as the long tail demand curve moving towards its true shape, representing the actual diversity of tastes in the population. And to navigate the formidable choice that exists, we need better "filters". For the past many years, the filter known as Google has reigned supreme. In those same years, the searches built into Amazon and eBay are the unsung hero's of long tail product searches. And today, we see specialized product comparison and opinion searches on the rise, rife with social networking features. The book, The Wisdom of Crowds taught us that sometimes collective wisdom is smarter than any single person, and real-world examples, like Wikipedia is bearing that out. The founder of Wikipedia is now planning a wisdom-of-the-crowd-powered search engine to compete with Google! Isn't that to be trusted more than some anonymous black-boxed relevancy algorithm?

So, is "Search" dead?

Already?

Just as with the premature proclamations of print's demise, so it is with Search. Search has at least evolved into a large centralized, undisputed authority (Google, of course). While not a pseudo-governing committee like ICANN or a decentralized distributed system like DNS, Google has indeed claimed this mantle.

And in social media networking, no one has. Not MySpace. Not eBay. Not Amazon. Not Digg. They're all walled gardens. They're all incomplete ecosystems. And by the very visibility of this global social-search-filter as the big brass ring that every company wants to grab, no one has the surprise advantage that Google enjoyed in its day. So, the chances of someone somehow reigning supreme are very slim. It's going to be a knock-down, drag-out battle the likes of which we haven't seen since the portal wars.

And during all that time, the only truism that will remain is search. Search will be standing in the wings saying "Come back to me. I work so well. And we're making changes to keep pace with the social nature of the Web. Just click 'more' and see."