Barry Diller took a few shots at some of the things being spun by new media disciples. He may have even upset a few in the comments he made concerning "the long tail."
"It will not be a long tail. It will be the very short tail, creating very large audiences on occasion, where people make things that resonate with people."
There is a great point that Diller makes here that will be good to pursue a little, and that is what happens if an online marketer makes a big splash suddenly? What i
f you suddenly draw a big audience to something you've done? Are you prepared to take advantage of that with something that keeps a portion of them coming back?
It's the challenge that Diller throws out - and is true for the most part - that those that create sudden audiences don't know what to do with them - thus the "very short tail" he mentions (I know there's more to it than that).
But for us online marketers, we need to think much more in terms of what happens when we hit something that really works, and have plans in place to get the most out of it we can.
To this day I hear from fellow marketers that should have known better that they ran out of bandwidth, or the system crashed because the response was much higher than expected. Have backup plans in place that assume it will take off. There's no reason to leave money and frustration on the table because you're trying to pinch a few pennies.
I'm probably as tight as anybody in business spending, but there are crucial areas where none of us can be, and that's in having plans and money in place to grab our chances when we get them. There will be no "tail" that does us any good if we don't.
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