The long tail describes a wider range of products that are more specific getting sold less often, rather than the ‘head’ being more common/generic products being sold more often. A great image create by leftclick can be seen below:

Effectively the dinosaur represents a curve on the graph, where there more generic or common a product, the increase of the results. On the other end the more specific the term, the less results occur. Following the example by leftclick, how would you leverage the long tail in web 2.0?

If you were in the hotel business and you had a resort you could describe yourself as a ‘hotel’ or perhaps even the location your hotel was. This would be a very generic term, and really ‘the head’. If you were more specific, you could use key works such as ‘accommodation’, ‘Queenstown’, ‘backpacker’, ‘wheelchair access’, ‘pets allowed’ and the results would be fairly narrow. Putting this keywords into Google may give you the results of a few million (the head), to a few hundred or less (the tail).

The more specific your key words, the more specific your audience – leveraging the long tail can yield lower costs in advertising while also increasing your conversion rate.

By doing the following you can target advertisements on the long tail in the example above. This also means you will have lower costs (because there is less competition) and have higher conversion rates (because the target audience is looking for services similar to what you offer).

Another great tip is from leftclick is focused pages, targeted at these specialised search terms. What this basically means is, don’t rely on your advertisements bringing in visitors, create pages or content so the search engines results will list the page (in in turn bring them to your site). In the above example creating an online guest book, or encouraging user reviews (even better if they blog about it and link to your site) are a few good ways to create content.

So what if your a site like Amazon? Similar approach works but there is a few more tips which you can use. If you have a large product range, once the visitor is on your site you might want to direct them towards more generic items you have for sale. The products are more popular and as a first time vistior you might be more interested.

Perhaps you’ve become a member of a site like Amazon and bought a few items. Soon you wont to direct your members towards a little more ‘specific’ material. This will have the opposite effect in that existing members who have seen the common/generic stuff can get pushed towards the more specific terms. By doing this you are encouraging existing users to branch out more.

iSnack2.0

Vegemite's next generation product - iSnack2.0

The new product from Kraft did engage the community by asking them questions about the old classic Vegemite. In fact over 300,000 people engaged in an online survey to come up with the new product (How Do You Like Your Vegemite Census – 2008). Further on from the survey they opened up a forum to the public where you can share how you eat your Vegemite. I’ve copied a few responses that caught my eye below!

• Vegemite with Spaghetti Bolognaise
• Vegemite with Pancakes
• Vegemite with Tomoatoe Sauce (Toast)
• Vegemite in Mashed Potatoe
• Vegemite with Bananas
• Vegemite Gravy

So getting back to the survey and the new name. Over 48,000 names for the new product were suggested from Australia and New Zealand combined and a Web Designer from Western Australia won it. Now I think engaging the community is great, but perhaps this is an example where there also needed to be a voting system in place as I don’t think this is a good title. I’ve mentioned before that “web 2.0″ (by the way that is where his inspiration was from) is a buzz word and is a trend that is dropping. The lower case i follow by an upper case letter and the rest of the word is also a fad to going on at the moment (think of all the Apple products).

More to the point, where do you draw the line between technology / food / consumer engagement / common sense / control and how will the success of the product be monitored (sales naturally I imagine as money wins?

The new label and product will hit our shelves October 5th which I’m sure will have a take up as people will be keen to taste the new product, I just feel that product such as Vegemite which has become an Australian icon has taken the wrong move with its product name. On the other side, it is a great example how a company has engaged its consumers to come up with a new product and meet the needs, the survey itself was a good idea.

Anyway let me know what you think about the new name and if you are keen to try the product!

Firstly, where I can I’ve tried to take away results relating to the Star Trek Enterprise, so if you wondering why you see those in graphs…. there you go. So lest take a look at blog posts referring to Enterprise 2 compared to “web 2 on Technorati.

Keyword popularity across the Blogosphere over the last 18 months provided by Technorati