The "Long Tail" of the Blogosphere

Blogs have already started to change the news media: Now it's time for marketers to adjust their strategies. Marketers and media types are joined at the hip, thanks to a shared economic bond. Both are in the eyeball business. The marketers want to reach em and the media's got em. Through its ups and downs, the laws of supply and demand have kept this dynamic, well-oiled economic machine humming along, generating profits on both sides of the fence. Until now. Seemingly overnight, the fundamental underpinnings of the basic media/marketing economic model are on the verge of collapsing because of an explosion in user-generated content. Blogs have flooded the media space with so much content that the marketer and media species -- who depend on the old dynamic to feed them -- need to adapt quickly. So far, the media seem to have the upper hand. It's no secret that blogs are all the rage right now. They have democratized media by empowering anyone with a passion or voice to develop an audience. According to Google News, last month alone there were 5,240 articles that mentioned blogs -- nearly double the number of press stories that mentioned Britney Spears! PubSub, a service that monitors blogs, is tracking 3.75 million of them. And over the last several months, particularly during the campaign, we witnessed a number of landmark events like Rathergate that have only helped blogs move further into the mainstream. Still, despite the noise, many of the marketers and media execs whom I talk with still pooh-pooh blogs. They view blogs as media-driven hype and question the value of their small, niche audiences. Some even call it a fad and observe that many bloggers are only talking about blogging. Very few marketers are willing to sponsor or have their PR agencies invest significant time generating earned media coverage on blogs. But this will all change soon -- at least I hope so. Are the criticisms valid? Sure, but they are short-lived and colored by the supply/demand economic model that has kept us all well-fed since the dawn of marketing. But here's the rub: The reason blogs are so important is because they are influential. They're establishing a new media economic system that is akin to the one that has decimated giants in other industries. It's called the law of "the long tail." In a landmark really simple syndication (RSS) is starting to move mainstream as a tool that empowers consumers to TiVo the Web and assimilate all the content they care about onto a single Web page. In a recent report, Mary Meeker of Morgan Stanley noted that Yahoo!'s recent adoption of RSS content on its My Yahoo! customized page will drive blog readership and usage. In a nutshell, RSS has lowered the barrier to entry, making it even easier for the small fries to compete with the big fish.

1. Taken in all together, the result is that big media will increasingly adapt and embrace blogging in order to maintain their dominance. As a result, marketers too will need to adjust their strategies -- everything from where they elect to place their PR messages to where they allocate their media budgets. Here are several short-term ways the long tail is already causing the media to adapt:
2. Publishers and advertisers are experimenting with unique custom blog sponsorships. Steve Rubel is a PR strategist with nearly 16 years of public relations, marketing, journalism and communications experience. He currently serves as a Edelman, the largest independent global PR firm.
   
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