31/08: Have we gone from The Information Age to The Recommendation Age
I just finished reading my good friend Chris Anderson's book titled The Long Tail on my overnight flight and was very excited to see how it turned out. I remember spending time with Chris on Sundays at a San Fran Starbucks, trying to assemble the mountains of information he collected for the project into a readable book.
I highly recommend the book. In a nutshell, CA describes how our traditional views of supply and demand economics need to be updated to a world where anybody can produce a good, and anyone can buy it. If you think of books, the typical Borders contains a massive 100,000 book titles within its walls. Amazon’s online inventory contains 3.7 Million titles. In the book world, 25% of book sales are from products that simply aren’t available in offline retail stores. Chris provides example after example of where this new long tail of products is creating a whole new approach to business.
One item that stuck with me while sipping double-grande lattes with CA was this term, The Recommendation Age. One could argue that we always lived in a recommendation age, with word of mouth referrals pointing us to the hot restaurant or jazz bar. But the Information Age exposed us to information from a fire hose. With a few clicks, we can be at the digital storefront of almost any vineyard around the globe, no longer stuck with what our local wine shoppe chose to carry. But now with access to all of these options, we can’t choose. We now look to recommendations to help narrow the field, where previously we let the shoppe owner do that.
As we continue to help clients unlock their information and bring it to the web, we need to think about how they present it to their customers. Sometimes a well formulated recommendation for a good Malbec is better than a list of 10,000 wines.
One item that stuck with me while sipping double-grande lattes with CA was this term, The Recommendation Age. One could argue that we always lived in a recommendation age, with word of mouth referrals pointing us to the hot restaurant or jazz bar. But the Information Age exposed us to information from a fire hose. With a few clicks, we can be at the digital storefront of almost any vineyard around the globe, no longer stuck with what our local wine shoppe chose to carry. But now with access to all of these options, we can’t choose. We now look to recommendations to help narrow the field, where previously we let the shoppe owner do that.
As we continue to help clients unlock their information and bring it to the web, we need to think about how they present it to their customers. Sometimes a well formulated recommendation for a good Malbec is better than a list of 10,000 wines.
