Deranged Penguin

A refresher course is probably in order for some with regards to the long tail. This may be new information to some, so the Cliffs Notes for the sake of this post is this: The long tail is a statistical phenomenon seen in a variety of marketplaces and social contexts, wherein 20% of the individuals/products/voices get the lion’s share of the attention/sales/ears, and the other 80% get comparatively little. Graphically, it looks like this.

That image was drawn by Hay Kranen and accompanies the Wikipedia article linked above. The green bit is the top 20% of the market (the head), while the yellow represents the 80% that are less popular (the long tail).

From the Wikipedia entry:

Given a large enough availability of choice, a large population of customers, and negligible stocking and distribution costs, the selection and buying pattern of the population results in a power law distribution curve, or Pareto distribution. This suggests that a market with a high freedom of choice will create a certain degree of inequality by favoring the upper 20% of the items (“hits” or “head”) against the other 80% (“non-hits” or “long tail”). This is known as the Pareto principle or 80–20 rule.

The Long Tail concept has found some ground for application, research, and experimentation. It is a term used in online business, mass media, micro-finance (Grameen Bank, for example), user-driven innovation (Eric von Hippel), and social network mechanisms (e.g., crowdsourcing, crowdcasting, Peer-to-peer), economic models, and marketing (viral marketing).

Why am I telling you this?

Take a good hard look at web content as it relates to MLM (shoot, take a good hard look at MLM generally) and you will find a marketplace that (should be) subject to a Pareto distribution. There are countless products that are available that utilize stacked-affiliate or multi-level compensation plans to get their product out in the world. Most have low barriers to entry (certainly less than starting some other kind of small business). They all assume a “fifteen no, five maybe, one yes” sales model. You have to show the opportunity to a bunch of people to succeed. Some of those people might become customers (the maybes). One in twenty might become a representative. There is a built-in assumption that, if you persist long enough, you will get to a place where your effort will be replicated by those beneath you. You enter the 20% by sheer determination and the law of network externalities.

And so, you see people approaching it as a pure numbers game. Their websites are static pitches, and the entire point is to drive traffic to the opportunity and gather no/maybe/yes responses. The efforts at social media marketing are therefore designed to drive traffic to the opportunity. A lot of people call this “spam.”

You’re doing it wrong.

What the long tail demonstrates is that, for better or for worse, there is value differentiation taking place in consumer audiences. The number of people who follow you on Twitter is irrelevant if they’ve all seen the pitch, twice. What’s worse, authentic leads see you as a spammer/phony/nuisance, and they decline to follow back.

“No problem,” you say, “I’ve got this thing where I get 400 followers a day.” Ahem. There’s a Spongebob episode where Squidward needs to assemble, teach, and present a band for the Bubble Bowl, a challenge that he foolishly took on to spite his rival, Squilliam. By strategic placement of flyers advertising the opportunity to join the band (buzz marketing), he gets an auditorium full of people. When he approaches the door, you hear the general gabble of a crowd of people, waiting for an event to get started, chatting with neighbors. It’s just crowd noise – you can’t pick out a single voice, or even coherent words or phrases. He enters the auditorium and approaches the stage, and meanwhile the camera zooms to the crowd: instead of actually having conversations, they’re just staring at the ceiling and babbling incoherently. You gain nothing by mechanically increasing the size of your crowd. Your ever-growing audience is too busy trying to sell something to you to listen to the pitch.

The same applies to the pitches that all look the same. Now, I understand that they all look the same because there are legal issues surrounding the marketing of a particular product. But you have to do something, anything, to change that. You really, really do. Because otherwise your carefully crafted (heh) Wall of text with funky formatting and red-text “important parts,” that stretches on forever will not be read, ever. People are great at pattern recognition. They discard certain patterns as chaff immediately.

The point is this: traffic is all well and good, but assuming that 30,000 followers = 30,000 hits = X conversions is crazy. These are not organic leads. MLM is perceived as a scam because people perceive that all of these little scary clones are up to something bogus. It doesn’t matter that you’re not. It looks enough like it that the consumer expectation trumps your good intentions.

Selling shovels

There’s an old saw that if you want to make a fortune in a gold rush, sell mining supplies. This has definitely been taken to heart on the web re: MLM. Half of the pitches I’ve encountered in my field research have been “meta-pitches.” They are not the opportunity, they are the way to turn your opportunity into a GOLDMINE using PROVEN TECHNIQUES. This is what comes of focusing on quick traffic. Rather than marketing to people, you are being marketed to. A recent episode of Strange Love Live featured some local bloggers, recently returned from the BlogHer conference. It’s worth listening to their reactions – their impression was that the entire conference was overwhelmingly tilted toward a “female head-of-household mommy blogger” demographic. And, really, what can you expect? The entire conference was aimed at selling itself (and its vendors) to the long tail. The focus was not on voice or authenticity but on monetization, networking, and ad reach.

As an 80-percenter it’s easy to be drawn to the allure of the big time. It’s easy to think that buying into a toolset will get you places faster. But there’s no substitute for authentic participation.

What works

Content, content, content. Engagement, engagement, engagement. If you are the brand, then the brand has to mean something. Long before it becomes a household name, it has to participate intelligently in the discussion of household names. There isn’t a substitute. Get out and find the things that resonate with you, and make yourself a part of the community in which those things are discussed. It’s a lot more fun, and you’ll see it come back to you in weird, nonlinear ways. That’s when stuff gets awesome.

Oh, and assume two years. That’s probably optimistic.

I did say that this was hard, right? Somewhere along the way?

For more on the long tail you can check out Chris Anderson’s book on the subject. Well worth a read.