The Long Tail (30 page)

Responding to bloggers is easier in theory, but no less delicate and time-consuming in practice. Again, it starts with listening (designate someone to monitor the feeds) and then figuring out when and how to respond. If a blogger praises a company or product, an email of thanks is often very appreciated (“They read my blog!”) and can create a lasting evangelist.

Criticism is trickier. Again, some sort of response is better than none, in part because it shows the blogger respect, which can go a long way toward defusing a situation. Blog convention is to do things in
public, so a response in the comments, where everyone can read it, often pays greater dividends than a private email. And ideally that response will come from someone other than a PR person. Like all of us, bloggers want attention, and the closer the person responding is to the actual topic of the criticism, the better. So, for example, a response from a product manager would be better than one from a customer-support person, because it means that the criticism was heard and taken seriously by the people responsible for making the product in the first place.

Fundamentally, however, there is only so much you can do to manipulate public opinion. At best, a Long Tail marketing strategy, focused on stimulating word of mouth among influential consumers, can just create awareness. If the product is no good, no amount of emailing is going to keep it from being savaged or ignored.

There actually is an industry that continually releases products that stink, and until recently has gotten away with it by dint of awesome marketing. It’s Hollywood, and I don’t mean to demean most of the movies it releases. But the nature of the way film is financed and produced is that huge bets have to be made on scripts and teams long before it’s at all clear that they’re going to be able to deliver what they’ve promised. And quite often things don’t work out. At that point, the similarities between Hollywood studios and venture capitalists diverge. The VCs kill the companies that don’t look like they’re going to set the world afire. But the studios all too often release anyway, assuming that an effective marketing campaign will bring enough people into the theater to recoup their investment.

That assumption is less and less valid. The problem is that word of mouth spreads so fast and effectively that bad movies are outed as such almost immediately. The old Hollywood marketing model was that you could twist some arms, buy a lot of ads, and “open wide” on thousand of screens, which should guarantee a few decent weekends, at least before the public caught on and realized that the trailer was a lot better than the film.

But today opening wide is not enough. Twenty years ago, the av
erage film dropped less than 30 percent in box office revenues from its first to its second weekend. Today, the average is more than 50 percent. Bad films are identified as such long before they are released (thanks to obsessive film fan sites such as Rotten Tomatoes and Ain’t It Cool News), and the audience reaction to early test screenings, once secret, is now blogged minutes after the lights come back up.

By the time a movie is actually released and reviewed by the big media reviewers, the insider word on whether the film is going to succeed is always spread around the world, far beyond the Hollywood insider community that used to have such gossip to itself. At that point, marketing can only do so much.

The reason that second-weekend box office is dropping off so much more rapidly is not that movies are getting worse. There has always been a mix of good, bad, and a lot of mediocrity in between. What is new is that we can spot the second two a lot faster. We can read more reviews—both positive and negative, professional and amateur—and hear what other audiences, including test screeners, think. This helps good films, but it punishes bad ones. Online word of mouth is the antidote to Hollywood marketing, and the first is in ascent as the second declines. Unfortunately, there’s not a lot Hollywood can do about that. The cat is out of the bag. Consumers are in control.

What happens when companies don’t listen to those consumers? Consider the sobering tale of Jeff Jarvis and his crappy computer.

In June 2005, Jarvis, a publishing strategist in New York City (he and I worked in different divisions of the same holding company), had a problem with his new Dell laptop. Like most other people in that position, he called tech support and, sadly, like most other people he got the runaround. Weeks went by and Jarvis’s frustration grew. He’d bought a lemon! The company’s customer service stunk! This company shouldn’t be able to get away with this!

At that point the usual options would be to complain to friends, never buy another Dell, or maybe even write a letter to Michael Dell himself. But Jarvis was one of those newfangled consumers. He had a
pretty well-read blog, called BuzzMachine, that was mostly about publishing stuff (and, randomly,
American Idol
fandom). And because a blog is a hungry beast and Jarvis writes faster than most people talk, he decided to blog about his frustrating experience with Dell. At length.

He called the installment “Dell Hell,” a name that would stick. In post after post he ranted about the company, its products, and its customer service. Not just poor quality control, but even worse: not listening at all, which is a cardinal sin in the Internet age. As he wrote: “I’m getting email from Dell people who clearly are not paying attention. ‘Dear Mr. Langley,’ said one. I corrected them and said the name’s Jarvis. The response: ‘Dear Ms. Kolar.’”

If Jarvis’s experience had been unusual, his blog posts would have been read by a few people and forgotten. But it just so happened that Jarvis’s experience was not unusual. Dell actually had a quality control crisis that even it was not aware of. The company had grown too big, was under too much Wall Street pressure to cut costs, and had drifted ever since its visionary founder had decided to take early retirement. The result was that there were thousands of angry consumers out there, just like Jarvis. And when he pressed “publish” on his first post, it was like striking a match in an oxygen tent.

The riot started in the comments of that first post, and then in the emails and nearly 2,500 comments that drove the next dozen posts as the movement took shape. Within three weeks, there were thousands of links to Jarvis’s posts and the phrase “Dell Hell” had entered the online vocabulary. The mainstream media took notice and Jarvis and his busted desktop could be found in everything from the
New York Times
to MSNBC.

It was only then that Dell found out that there was an angry mob at its gates. It promptly did all the usual right things: apologized to Jarvis, replaced his desktop, promised to reform its procedures, etc. But it was too late. Its brand was tarnished. A Google search on “Dell” showed Jarvis’s posts on the front page, and the Wikipedia entry on Dell discussed the fiasco.

Now, two years later, it is not going too far to say that experience helped transform the company. Michael Dell came back, vowing to re
turn the company to its customer-centric roots. He reversed a plan to offshore most of its technical support to India. (Not that such outsourcing was necessarily a bad thing, mind you. It just hadn’t been done well and became a symbol of Dell putting margins before service.) Dell revamped their product line, and not only improved the quality dramatically but also managed to get stylish and innovative along the way. (These words are being written on a new Dell laptop, which is relatively amazing given my long-standing loyalty to ThinkPads. But my perception of Dell has changed…)

Today, if you enter “Dell Sucks” into Google Trends, you learn two things. First, there are three peaks—Jarvis’s original posts, the moment a month later when the riot he started hit the mainstream media, and, a year later, when some Dell laptops caught on fire (due to Sony batteries, I hasten to add!). After that, it’s minimum suckitude, happily enough.

Second, the number one location searching for “Dell Sucks” is Austin, Texas, which not coincidentally is the headquarters of Dell. Yes, Dell is searching for “Dell Sucks,” just as it should be. It’s listening.

Here’s a fun experiment. If you have a Dell, an unresolved problem with that Dell (be fair and exhaust the usual channels first), and a blog, write about your problem. And wait. Based on recent experience, you should be contacted within a week by someone from Dell to try to sort it out. The company now has a dedicated team responsible for tracking the blogosphere and putting out fires when they start. Dell has gone from being oblivious to the power of the networked consumer to best practice in listening to the Long Tail.

The chart on chapter 11 of the top 50 sites by incoming links gives a glimpse of how to quantify this new landscape of influence. What that chart doesn’t show is what happens from rank 51 to 8 million. The ratio of mainstream media to amateurs falls, and even by rank 200, the high-influence blogs outnumber traditional media. Why do I put such a premium on incoming links as a measure of influence? Because they are the best way of measuring word of mouth ever invented.

Hyperlinks represent a profound change in the way we calculate influence. The traditional way of measuring media impact and power is based on audience size, readership, listenership, viewership, circulation, subscriber lists, and things like that. It’s largely based on the number of people who interact with media. What did they think of what they read, and what did they do as a result of that impression? We never know.

To understand why the new way—counting incoming links—is so much better, you have to really understand the social compact of the hyperlink. Like all really big and radical ideas, the hyperlink will take decades to be fully understood. It was first put into practice on the Internet by Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the Web in 1990, but conceptually it dates back to Ted Nelson, who conceived a global web of linked documents with the never-completed Xanadu in 1960—and even that built on the original idea of a global brain first articulated by Vannevar Bush in 1945. We’re only starting to see the full implications now.

When you think about it, the hyperlink is the ultimate act of generosity online. When somebody links to another site, what they’re doing is telling their readers to go elsewhere. They’re saying: “At this point, dear reader, I recommend that if you want more, you leave my site and go to this other site. I believe that site will be worth your time. I believe that you’ll be glad you went. I believe that you’ll be so glad you went that you’ll come back, and when you come back you’ll thank me for having wisely suggested that link.”

Likewise, what someone’s saying when they link to you is: “I think so much of you and your content and everything you stand for that I’m going to transfer some of my reputation, which I have earned over many years with my readers, and give it to you. I’m going to take the trust that my readers have in me and I’m going to turn that into traffic to you that comes with a positive bias.”

Traffic that comes from such third-party links (or from organic search results, which are determined by those links) is traffic from readers who are inclined to like, respect, and appreciate what’s there, because they are following a recommendation from a trusted source. This notion of traffic with a positive bias is a brand-new thing.

In the old model of media, we knew viewership, listenership, readership, but we didn’t know what people thought. It was neutral. Some liked what they found and some didn’t, but it was hard to tell the difference without doing focus groups or something similar. Traffic that comes on the basis of hyperlinks, which now represents more than half the traffic to the average site, is traffic with a built-in tendency for engagement, thanks to the carryover reputation of its source.

And the reason this is important is because Google, which is the way we monetize the Web, privileges hyperlinks above all else.

When Google decides what’s relevant, it’s not based on semantic analysis; it’s based on measuring the number of incoming links. Those incoming links are votes. They are votes of confidence. They are votes of relevance. They are an exquisitely measurable thumbs-up.

So links turn into high placement in Google’s organic search. High placement and organic search turns into traffic, which again comes with a positive bias because it was recommended by Google, and that positive-bias traffic turns into advertising revenues for the end site. It’s basically an economic exchange: Google turns reputation into attention (traffic), and sites turn attention into money.

This is why word of mouth rules all today. The oldest way of communicating opinion can now be amplified a thousandfold, measured, spread globally, and then directly monetized. Which is why Long Tail marketing starts with attracting the incoming links that drive the trusted, authentic, organic, bottom-up, grassroots opinion that ultimately influences consumer behavior in the twenty-first century.

In the power shift from institutions to individuals, spare a thought for the biggest institutions of all: the big multinational brands. With the most brand equity to lose, they’re often the most reluctant to depart from traditional top-down, command-and-control messaging. Which makes the story of Microsoft’s Channel 9 all the more surprising.

In early 2003, Microsoft seemed to have hit rock bottom in its public image. It was still under the cloud of the antitrust investigations that had dogged it through most of the late nineties, its share price had
flatlined, and Google had taken the crown as the cool company of technology.

Microsoft couldn’t seem to change the way it was seen. And when you think of it, that’s not surprising. For decades the public face of the company has been two men—Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer. Whatever you think of them is what you think of Microsoft. If you think of them as predatory monopolists, there’s very little they can say to change your mind. And if you think that they are constitutionally unable to create products that generate the kind of consumer loyalty and delight that Apple can, well, that’s not something an advertising campaign or press release is going to solve.