Should PR ignore the long-tail?

Link: PRWeek.

"If the blog has only been viewed nine times in two months, responding would only exacerbate the problem," says David Krejci, Weber Shandwick's director of web relations. "There are millions and millions of blogs. So you need to pay attention to how much cross-linking is going on. If only 200 people are reading or linking to a blog, that's still important, especially if one of those 200 writes for BusinessWeek."

There seems to be an emerging view that PR people should focus on the key influencers, and either by design or implication not worry about the small sites.
We saw a version of this view recently in Rubel's extraordinary advice to Dell to fly the heavy-hitters to corporate HQ.
Now, Weber Shandwick says (quote above) its advising clients to ignore the small blogs (which together constitute the long tail) and focus on the influentials.
This approach seems to be based on the idea that the blogosphere, for all the rhetoric and Cluetrain Manifestos, is really an extension of old media. And the same PR principles necessarily apply.
I think there is some real risks for PR practitioners in adopting this 'short-cut' method.
For a start, I was struck yesterday when reading Seth Godin's new blogging ebook by just how forcefully he makes the point that the influence of bloggers is very tenuous. He argues that bloggers are not powerful in the way the media was because there are millions of bloggers. We can all publish but publishing doesn't give us the power that the oligopolistic media has long enjoyed.
Godin also points out that bloggers who start becoming product marketers will soon lose their audience. One application of this is that a blogger might be influential when they are blogging against something eg Jeff Jarvis criticising Dell, but how influential are they going to be if they go on a freebie trip to Dell HQ and come back saying everything is so much better now.
The other problem I have is that the interaction between bloggers and search engines can mean that just about any blogger can be influential in particular circumstances.
Since I heard Buzz suggest this on his blog, I have become a devotee to the practice of googling "<company or product> problems" or some version of this idea before I buty anything. I recommend everyone does it, its a great way of accessing other people's experiences.
When I do this, I'm not looking for product endorsements - I want to get behind the marketing hype. And I'm not much interested if the bloggers reporting problems are A-listers or have no links at all.
If I start reading a few blogs (no links) who write sensible stuff about the problems they had and there seems to be a pattern and the company involved seems to have been tardy in responding, then I start to think twice.
In a sense, of course, I'm going to be more impressed if the company has responded appropriately to a long-tailer like me then if they have bent over backwards to placate the so-called 'influencers'.
That's the way the new world works.
If you want to influence bloggers, I reckon it might be smarter to work from the end of the tail (the no link blogs) and work outwards.
A company that did that would quickly gain a lot of trust in the marketplace.

Comments

[Don Arthur]

Trevor - I agree, blogs aren't like old media. You shouldn't be looking at a blog's reach and the demographics of its readers (even if you could measure them). The conceptual tools you need come from places like social network theory.

It's important to know how information propagates across networks of bloggers. Some blogs are arranged into fairly tight, self-contained networks. If something interesting flows into one of the centrally placed blogs it will almost certainly end up spreading to the others. Some of these networks are little ghettos -- information goes in, travels around, but isn't likely to escape.

The really interesting blogs are the ones that form bridges across separate networks. A theorist like Ronald Burt would say they occupied 'structural holes' (pdf). For example, blogs that form bridges between online communities and mainstream journalists are important. If I was in PR I'd be very interested to know which blogs journalists are using for story ideas. I'm willing to bet they're not always the most popular blogs.

A blogger like Irfan Yusuf is interesting partly because of the way he moves Liberal Party gossip out of what's largely a face-to-face network into the blogosphere. Irfan's importance has everything to do with the networks he bridges. As an Australian Muslim he's got contacts in the Islamic community. As a former Liberal Party member he's got information about party members. The combination of both these perspectives is what made him attractive as newspaper columnist -- so now he's part of a broader media network.

[Kevin Dugan]

It amazes me how in one breath, "A-listers" talk about how one customer can make a difference (read: Kryptonite).

In the next breath, they gush about the 10s of millions of blogs and the 900,000 blog posts created each day.

If blogs are micro media, "killing old media dead," why are we trying to strap old media metrics to blogs?

Millions don't matter. It's the right blog getting picked up by Google at the right time just as the right editor is searching for something. Right?

If you're writing about a * very * specific topic, like http://foodmuseum.typepad.com/potato_museum_blog/
potatos, you won't be running through your free server space anytime soon. But if you have a client in agriculture whose product is used in potato farming, this blog might be your first read.

It's getting crowded in the blogosphere with all these big heads drinking their own wine.

[Don Arthur]

So Trevor, are you arguing that most of the product information that moves from blogs to consumers is happening via blogs in the long tail?

I wonder if this holds only for some kinds of product information. The examples you use are cases where the consumer already knows the name or maker of the product they're interested in. They're thinking of buying so they go to Google and try to find a credible source of information. If that's what's happening then you might expect searchers to land on less popular blogs a high percentage of the time.

But interestingly, most consumers searching for a specific product are probably going to land on the same posts - the ones that Google ranks highly. These posts might be on 'long tail' blogs but the posts themselves will form their own distribution with their own tail. For a given product, some will be much more important than others. From a PR perspective you could run into problems if just one post carried damaging information - so long as it ranked in the top 5 on Google.

For other product purchases high-traffic blogs might have more influence. For example, there are some products you don't know you want until you see them. Nobody Googles for these. Blogs that specialize in posts on new technology or fashions will have more influence if they have a larger regular readership. For marketers it might be worth focusing on a small number of popular bloggers.

[David Phillips]

Flackers and publicists do not need to know much about the long tail. They use a big advertising/publicist hammer – job done.

Winston Churchill famously said that to really know what is going on is undignified but essential, you have to keep your ear to the ground. But he was interested in winning wars not trying to out shout Nazis. It is hard work, it does need commitment and there is a cost.

On the other hand, we have seen so many occasions when the 'little man' bit the big corporation using the power of the Internet that only a fool would ignore the long tail.

Five years ago the same dilatory approach to the Internet caused havoc.
Cyveillance reported that Disney, Barbie, CNN, Honda, and Mercedes topped the list of brands most associated with pornography on the web. PairGain technologies was at on the receiving end of a share scam when Gary Dale Hoke used a Yahoo chat room to create a market feeding frenzy and suspension of trading in their shares in 1999. McSpotlight gave MacDonald's a tremendous headache, from which they suffer to this day. Tommy Hilfinger was labelled a racists in chat rooms, discussion lists and Usenet which nearly brought his business down. The Seattle riots were co-ordinated by Usenet .... and so on.

That was five years ago in the days of steam driven Internet.

If I can take my cell phone into an office and film people, papers and presentations and publish them in near real time on a Blog, what are the opportunities and what are the threats

Pity the poor client who is being advised that these lessons need not be learned for the era of blogs, wiki's and podcasting.

[Trevor Cook]

Don - I'm not arguing that most of the information flows through the tail. I don't know, I don't think it matters. What I'm saying is that just about any blog can have an impact, depending on what the searcher is looking for and that with googling people might look at a few pages of results. That might mean a couple of dozen blogs come within view. Some of these will be 'popular', others won't be. And the searcher won't care much. She won't say - 'oh this blogger has 2,000 links so I'll 'trust' what he says'. She especially won't trust that blogger if the blogger seems to be reporting back on a junket to HQ. Especially also if that blog seems to be a money-making exercise with ads on it. What she's looking for is personal experiences and she'll read a range and make an assessment based on a range of factors.
I think if PR says oh its too difficult to monitor everyone and respond to everyone then they'll miss the point of how the blogosphere works and how we all interact with the web in this new environment.
The bloggers you want to influence are the 'authentic' ones. The guy who buys an ipod and loves it or has problems with the service. The woman who took a holiday to SF and gives some reviews of the restaurants she ate at.
I don't think its that difficult to monitor blogs to see what people are saying, and not that hard to respond to them, at least some of them. I think those responses can make a real impact