The theory of the day is the long tail, a reworking of the Pareto Principle (i.e. 80% of the wealth of Italian landowners is concentrated in the hands of 20% of the people), which seeks to explain why hits and misses wind up where they do. In real terms the idea is a useful w to explain why, in theory, 80% of all that’s consumed accounts for 20% of all products and so on. Ironically, this is not a reflection on taste as the following video explains, it’s a reflection of the method of distribution and supply (I call it pipe size). Yet this is not what determines a ‘hit’. Not in my opinion. A hit is determined by many different things… which I will talk about in a minute.
Pipe size has to do with a number of things. We all have a certain amount of influence and as such we can distribute messages to people via our own methods of communication. When someone in the family dies or a baby comes along, the pipes of family communication get to work and the word spreads. Some us are more influential ‘sneezers’ as Seth Godin calls them, and we can have a broader impact. But it’s not a formula and neither is it a constant reason why. The concept of ‘engagement’ or ‘resonance’ as someone else I know put it, explains why things are spread around. We participate. When this occurs on a massive scale the network gets bigger, the pipes get bigger and massive demand is generated.
The long tail works as a technical explanation quite well, that is, it explains how ‘pipe size’ and demand and supply corroborate to create ‘hits’. Yet, it fails to adequately explain why hits occur. This fails in the realm of the unpredictability of human ‘systems’. Human systems form groups, make meaning and do what I call ‘engage’. William James said it this way, ‘the truth is something that happens to an idea… not the idea itself’ (that’s a paraphrase by the way). While I don’t wish to debate the idea of what truth is, I want to touch on what James was saying in my lateral understanding of it anyway. Why things become popular can be stated as: they become popular because we engage with it on a massive scale (big pipes), we spread it around and share it (talking –> see Tipping Point, Idea Virus), and we resonate or engage with it. This latter concept, the idea of engagement is the most understated yet most powerful because big pipes don’t guarantee a hit, engagement does. What level of participation do people have in an idea? A high amount, then you have success, a low amount depending on the context you have a different kind of success, or you have a failure.
Success and failure come down to audience engagement yet we cannot ignore pipe size, marketing or methods of supply. We have to consider these as important, yet the level of engagement, discussion and talk around a product or idea and the overall level of activity, is what propels a product to success. This is what the publishing, music and other industries know and exploit all the time. Consider this qoute from a well known literary Agent Donald Maas:
The fact is that roughly two-thirds of all fiction purchases are made because the customer is already familiar with the author. In other words, readers are buying brand-name authors whose work they have already read and enjoyed. The next biggest reason folks buy fiction is that it has been personally recommended to them by a friend, family member or bookstore employee. That process is called word of mouth. Savvy publishers understand its power and try to facilitate its effect with advance reading copies … samplers, first chapters circulated by email, Web sites and the like. In most cases, someone reads a novel, gets excited about it, and tells a friend. (Taken from Writing the Breakout Novel by Donald Maas).
Now we know this and we can reliably track all success (yes I said ALL!) down to people. You know why, everything social is social. Wow, it took three degrees for me to work that out but it’s true. Everything social is social. Nothing happens without people. We have fancy ideas such as those found on the shelves of Borders yet in reality the process of sharing information and excitement has not changed ever. What is hard to know is what is likely to be a hit and what is likely to be a miss. Pipe size has a lot to do with it of course. The bigger the pipes, the bigger the exposure. Yet, in this world of media falling apart and the growing disintermediation of media, the pipes are awfully big and the potential for sharing for word of mouth is the biggest and most responsive it has ever been thanks to the internet. Still this is no guarantee of resonance, or engagement, big pipes don’t guarantee success
I will finish part 1 with a story on the recent television phenomenon Flash Forward.
A colleague of mine pointed me towards twitter search a while ago and sent me a link when Flash Forward was on. I watched as real time feedback about the show, jokes and other randomness came up one tweet at a time. I saw people saying what they liked and didn’t like about the show to their friends on the twitter (sorry couldn’t resist) and then sharing with others in other networks these thoughts. Watching the conversations go through in real time showed me how unpredictable and different we really are, and how the idea of the long tail is relevant. Now on to Part 2… Coming Soon: Engagement and why things become popular!
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