Snakes And Widgets

Markets can be pesky things to pin down these days. Some just don’t fit our traditional expectations.
I’m not about to identify exactly which, for business sensitive reasons I hope you’ll respect, but suffice to say I’ve found markets which just don’t appear to follow the classical long tail model.

Instead of a big fat head and a healthy long tail, I’m discovering markets with tiny weeny heads and a long, long, long tail. Let's call it The Snake.

I wonder if Snakes are the shape of things to come, a sign of the hollowing out of the centre and dominance of the edge that Stowe talks about?

In other words I’m wondering if it’s possible a long tail with little sign of a hit at all may become the norm. Increasingly the value for people in these networks (communities of purpose) is the value they create for themselves – from content, the sharing and developing of services etc.

Scale doesn’t matter to them.

What’s clear to me is that in order to be found useful by these communities of purpose we (those to whom scale does matter) have to offer services that can be adapted in order to be adopted.

Widgets are the latest best-guess at these. So I want to say it out loud: Widgets should not be regarded as just part of your marketing strategy. They just might be the most valuable component of your entire digital strategy.

They have huge value in a long tail world. They just might hold your own value in the world of The Snake.

The next Chinese Year of the Snake is 2013. Maybe by then it really could be?

David Cushman

Comments

[Richard M Marshall]

I like the analogy very much, but I'm wondering whether worms are a better analogy. Outside of Indiana Jones movies I don't think you get lots of snakes all sliding around each other in bundles. But worms yes, big handfuls of wiggly worms. That's where content is going, I'd say.

Trivial example: last Saturday's Dr Who finale part 1: combining worms from Dr Who, Torchwood and Sarah Jane Adventures.