Have you ever heard of or seen the “the long tail” below?

It’s a statistical phenomenon that has been popularised by Chris Anderson to describe the impact of the web on the business world. I’ve just finished reading the updated version of his book called “The Long Tail” (surprise surprise!).

To quickly illustrate the “Long Tail” concept, I’ll use Amazon.com – one of Chris’s examples in the book.

Amazon.com sells books (and many other things, but we’ll leave at that for the moment). It sells the bestseller titles (the “head” – green in diagram) that you’ll find in any of your local bookstores, but it also sells thousands of other titles (“the long tail” – yellow in diagram) that you will not be able to find in a store because:

1. Stores have limited shelf space and therefore have to allocate this space to books they think will do well
2. Demand for the book was small in comparison to the bestsellers (maybe it wasn’t fantastically written, maybe the topic was too specific, maybe the marketing of the book was terrible etc…)

Why then, is Amazon selling loads of these lesser known titles, the ones that hadn’t enough demand or were too specific for the book stores?

1. Amazon is not limited by shelf space because all of its inventory is online and directly links to publishers’ and distributors’ shelves rather than its own.
2. The web has enabled them to reach a market size that is simply impossible for a physical bookstore. All of a sudden the small demand that made it unfeasible in the market size of a physical store with restricted space, becomes feasible online with a world wide audience.

So that is the concept of the long tail. Thousands upon thousands of options, all previously unavailable to you, now only the touch of a button away… Feeling daunted?

The antidote for feeling daunted is one of the really interesting ideas from “The long tail” – the importance of the “filter“.

If you now have thousands of book options, how on earth do you decide what you would like to read? How do you sort through “the junk”? (Remembering that your “junk” might be your friend’s “treasure”!) How do you find something that is useful and relevant?

That is where search, social media and recommendations become so important.

What I love about Amazon is that when I login, it provides me with a whole host of recommendations filtered by what I’ve bought in the past and related purchases from all of Amazon’s customers.

By allowing me to search I can filter my results by topic, author, title, price, relevance, age of book…

By providing uncensored comments of others, I can filter my options by gathering other’s opinions and not just what a publicist thought.

I love this concept of filtering!!

When you are daunted by information overload, how do you filter it? If your customers are daunted by too many options, how do you filter it for them?

If you’re selling products, then learn from Amazon – they know what they’re doing.

If you’re in the service industry though, how is it relevant?

Here’s what I think:

Whether you are an accountant, lawyer or web strategist, your role is to be the filter. To take all of the inputs of your experience, knowledge and client circumstances and make the best recommendations and give the best advice you possibly can. Every client has a long tail of options – your role is to filter these options and help your client find the most useful and relevant for their situation.

The role of the trusted advisor is now very much the role of the filter.

It will be really interesting to follow this “filtering” concept. If anyone has any thoughts around it, please leave a comment or get in contact.

Thanks.

Sydney managed web strategy: Having trouble cutting through all the options on the web? Give Bluewire Media a call on 1300 258 394.

March has seen the launch of the brand new online face of St Patrick’s College, Shorncliffe. Last year, the school decided they needed to have a website that reflected their values and the high quality of their education. So, Bluewire Media came in to take them through an internet strategy designed to discover the best way to do just this.

The new website’s “go live” date, St Patrick’s Day, was well publicised in the school’s frequent newsletter, so the launch was a busy day — the stats showed over 300 different people went on to check it out on the 17th alone!

The website is designed to provide prospective, current and ex- parents, staff and students information about the school’s facilities, activities, curriculum, enrolment process and community involvement. In particular, the site will showcase recent events at the school. St Patrick’s also plan to begin dispersing their weekly newsletter just through the website and do away with paper copies that get scrunched and lost in the bottom of school bags!

Visit the St Patrick’s College website

See what else Bluewire Media has let loose online in our Web Design Portfolio or call us on 1300 258 394.

In a busy week for Bluewire Media Developers, two projects wrapped up on Wednesday with the new St Patrick’s College and Summit Events Centre websites launching within hours of each other.

The Summit Events Centre is the only high-end, 100% customisable and versatile, fully serviced events and function centre in Brisbane and without a website they weren’t able to show off their world-class venue to the searching community.  That’s where Bluewire Media stepped in to help, putting together a website to match their stylish venue and show off the Summit’s classy packages & services. Check it out - Visit the Summit Events Centre

Stay tuned for more website launches or check out more of our previous work in our Web Design Portfolio.

I haven’t had a report card since school days, but I came across these ‘Grader’ tools which essentially rate your marketing effectiveness.  I was curious to see how we fared…

Twitter Grader: Helps you determine how influential you are on Twitter.  You simply enter your Twitter handle & it analyses your followers, number of tweets, retweets and mentions.  @Bluewire_Media got 94/100 so not bad. http://twitter.grader.com

Blog Grader: supposedly judges your blog according to length of posts, frequency of posts, reading time per post, but it was a bit difficult to make sense of the results.  It gave us a 21 (but didn’t say what it was out of…) so I left a bit confused. http://blog.grader.com

Website Grader: assesses content, site structure, inbound links, traffic, social popularity, readability and frequency of updates to give you a rating out of 100.  Bluewire ranked quite well for this and got 98.4/100. http://websitegrader.com

Gobbledy Gook Grader: was invented by David Meerman Scott as a tool to assess whether your copy contained any over-used, cliched, jargon or hype filled words — aka goggledy gook!  Luckily we got a score of 100/100 for our home page copy.  http://gobbledygook.grader.com

How does your website fare…?

PS. Since first drafting this article, I’ve discovered that these tools are provided by Hubspot. Interestingly, their CEO is Brian Halligan – author or Inbound Marketing – the next book on my “to read” list since it was recommended by both David Meerman Scott and Verne Harnish.  Small world.

Managed Web Strategy: If you’d like to get your Grader scores up in the  nineties, give Bluewire Media a call on 1300 258 394

We’ve just won an International web design award for Outstanding Achievement for the Queensland Fertility Group website!

The Interactive Media Awards are judged using five specific criteria:

• Design
• Content
• Feature Functionality
• Usability
• Standards Compliance & Cross Browser Compatibility

Particular merit was given to usability & functionality, a nod to the features designed to make the customer experience as pain-free as possible.

Web Design Award For QFG

Some highlights are:

• The Website’s location finder, which tailors a visitor’s experience to information about services in their area – including personalised specialist information, promotions & news features,
• Online registration for free seminars with automatic reminders,
• Popular homepage promotions,
• Appointment requests; and
• The Information Pack order form.

The success of Queensland Fertility Group’s website is based around a strong connection with their customer’s needs, and an ongoing commitment to delivering them in simple, intuitive ways.

Web Design Brisbane: To find out more about how to tailor your website to your customer’s needs, call Bluewire Media on 1300 258 394.

• Site search trends for e-commerce websites — Vandelay Design
• Negative space in logo design — Logo Design Love
• Ten commandments of social media — Noupe
• Twitter rated 2009 word of the year — Sydney Morning Herald
• Complete beginners guide to interaction design — The UX Booth
• You can’t innovate like Apple – Pragmatic Marketing
• 3 Steps for Effectively Using Social Media for PR – Top Rank Blog
• 7 Steps To A Google Top Ten Rank – SEO Design blog
• 5 Impressive Real-Life Google Wave Use Cases – Mashable
• 7 Simple Truths of Social Media Marketing – Duct Tape Marketing

 
You may now update your Facebook statuses…

I’ve just finished reading Steve Krug’s excellent book on web usability called Don’t Make Me Think. It’s often the case that people (clients and web designers alike) know their websites too well. So well they can’t see them from an objective viewpoint anymore. That’s why I really like Steve’s reasoning for doing user testing:

“Testing reminds you that not everyone thinks the way you do, knows what you know, uses the Web the way you do.

“I used to say that the best way to think about testing was that it was like travel: a broadening experiene. It reminds you how different – and the same – people are, and gives you a fresh perspective on things.

“But I finally realised that testing is really more like having friends visiting from out of town. Inevitably, as you make the tourist rounds with them, you see things about your home town that you usually don’t notice because you’re so used to them. And at the same time, you realise that a lot of things that you take for granted aren’t obvious to everybody.”

User testing, no matter how little you do, quickly confirms what you thought you were doing right, and also flags some serious flaws in your design. The insights you can gain from watching someone use your site is invaluable and will help inform your decisions on how to improve your website: its overall performance and the impression it leaves on people.

Creating websites that don’t make users think is at the core of what we do here at Bluewire. Usability Brisbane: if user testing is something you’d like to explore, call Bluewire Media on 1300 258 394.

• Redesign: When to relaunch the site and best practices — Smashing Magazine
• The top 10 web applications for web designers in 2009 — WEBDESIGNDEV
• The lazy designer’s guide to success (according to Pentagram’s Michael Beirut) — Azure
• On web typography — A List Apart
• The death of the boring blog post — Smashing Magazine
• 10 useful bookmarklets for web designers and developers — Inspect Element
• What Chrome OS means for Netbooks and why Microsoft needs to be scared — CrunchGear
• Google is keeping ChromeOS simple. Maybe too simple — TechGear

 
Reward the ‘mo bros’ out there this Movember…


Left: Mustache bandages

 

 

 

 

 
Left: Unisex mustache hoodies

 

 

 

 

 
Left: Famous mustache pencils

 

 

 

 
Left: Mustache onesie

 

 

 

 

 
Left: Mustache coffee mugs

• App to find nearest toilet? Data flood unleashed — Sydney Morning Herald
• The Font Kingdom: Search, explore, create and download fonts for free — Tech Crunch
• Getting started with content management systems — Smashing Magazine
• The process toolbox: Prototyping — Erskine Labs
• 5 simple but useful CSS properties — Web Designer Wall
• Long tail user experience: how to cultivate (or dissolve) a community — UX Booth
• Top 20 essential Firefox add-ons for web designers — Six Revisions

 
For that special geek in your life… FashionablyGeek.com should have some stocking fillers that will take their fancy this Christmas!

• 15 great free online file sharing alternatives — Hongkiat
• The case for content strategy: Motown style — A List Apart
• Free and commercial stock photography sites — Smashing Magazine
• 12 reputation management tools to track your name — The BINC Blog
• Panasonic gets savvy to social media — Digital Media
• Microsoft takes more steps towards cloud-based future — The Guardian
• Lance’s Twitter invite stops traffic — The Sydney Morning Herald

Lo-fi escalator animation. Great imagination!