Getting Found in the Long Tail: Recommendations

(Continuing the conversation started here.)

While ensuring that searchers can find you in the Long Tail is good, being found by someone who is already predisposed to a connection is even better.

Long_tailrecs What I mean by this is the following: a visitor who finds your wares via a direct link already knows what he or she is seeking. However, the abundance of the Long Tail means that there are myriad things in the tail that someone might love, only if he or she knew it existed! How do enable this kind of discovery? Recommendations and collaborative filtering.

An example might be handy. So, I think Liz Phair’s first album, Exile in Guyville, is the bomb-diggity. (Also, although I now live on the West Coast, all Chicago natives, regardless of current residence, are required to love Exile, lest their 312 credentials be immediately and unceremoniously revoked.) Now, if I go onto Amazon and look up Exile in Guyville, I find the following:

Veruca

Liz takes me to Veruca Salt.

Veruca Salt takes me to Nina Gordon.

Nina Gordon’s last release incents me to go to her home page, where I find Nina Gordon doing an acoustic cover of N.W.A’s Straight Outta Compton. (Fantastic, and fantastically NSFW unless you’re wearing headphones).

So, our traversal down the Long Tail went like this:

Liz Phair > Veruca Salt > Nina Gordon > Nina Gordon’s cover of Straight Outta Compton

Now, never in a million years would I have gone to Google and done a search on “sultry-voiced chanteuse doing an acoustic cover of an anthem of gangsta rap.” Yet, that’s exactly what I found…and I love it.

The key point here: if your niche in the Long Tail is truly one-of-a-kind, it may be so unique that no one would ever even dream to search for what it contains. The only way someone will find it is through collaborative filtering (a la Amazon) or through word-of-mouth recommendations from a trusted source that traverse the tail.