Digital Solid: Marketing Technology ROI

In my observation about NetFlix as a purveyer of long tail media, I hinted at all of the other ways that online marketers are prospering with this new business opportunity, made possible by word-of-mouth, suggestive selling and virtual — instead of real — merchandise inventories.

I’ve since realized that so much of marketing technology can be heaped under this category that I need to add it as a tag, along with my intentionally general tags of direct response, database marketing, etc.

True, the term long tail has more than a whiff of a meme ready for replacement, much as how push technology in the early 1990’s crystallized into RSS, and how the overworked online communities, the other buzz of the 90’s, turned into what we’re now calling online social networks.

Regardless of what the phrase long tail becomes, it certainly has legs (why am I thinking of a lizard?). This Google Trends graph shows that in terms of searches and news coverage, it also has a fat end.