If you attend my agriblogging and farm podcasting workshop on Monday morning here at the Ag Media Summit you’ll find out about “The Long Tail.” If you’re not going to be here then go out and purchase “The Long Tail” by Chris Anderson. You might also start reading his blog.
Here’s a place where you can get a pretty good description of the Long Tail. One way of looking at it is “products that are in low demand or have low sales volume can collectively make up a market share that rivals or exceeds the relatively few current bestsellers and blockbusters, if the store or distribution channel is large enough.” Examples being Amazon and Netflix. If you don’t think this idea applies to agriculture then we need to talk.
I got my copy on the way to the airport today at a Barnes & Noble in Independence, MO. I haven’t made it very far but I know how important this book is to anyone involved in marketing in today’s world. This includes you agrimarketing professionals! Even the introduction is filled with some great stuff and I’m going to find time to bring some excerpts to you like:
The great thing about broadcast is that it can bring one show to millions of people with unmatchable efficiency. But it can’t do the opposite – bring a million shows to one person each. Yet that is exactly what the Internet does so well.
Increasingly, the mass market is turning into a mass of niches.
Seen broadly, it’s clear that the story of the Long Tail is really about the economics of abundance – what happens when the bottlenecks that stand between supply and demand in our culture start to disappear and everything becomes available to everyone.
Welcome to the 
We had a great going-away party for Steve Taylor today in Columbia, MO. Stevie “Wonder” is going off into the sunset to 
I’ve been in a lot of airports lately. Take today as an example. We got out of Raleigh okay and then had to circle St. Louis for a while. Then we got to sit on the tarmac for a while until the plane at our gate got out of the way. Then it only took 45 minutes for baggage to show up.
Ahh, the “Interim” position. Hopefully in Doug Jeske’s case it will become permanent. That would be cool Doug. Doug is the Interim President of 
company. Doug Jeske, agency senior vice president, will lead The Meyocks Group as interim president during an internal and external search for Tweeten’s successor.
Congratulations to my good buddy Rich Keller. Rich is now the Editor for 
I thought it would be appropriate to make my last post from Syngenta Media Day include an interview with Mary-Dell Chilton. Mary-Dell says she’s way past retirement age but still gets in early each day to get to work. Why? Because she thinks it’s exciting and important.
Besides the work that Gibbs & Soell did in putting together today’s Syngenta Media Day it also takes some work inside the company. The person doing that is Jane Bachmann, Scientific Communications Manager.
Roger Kemble is head of crop genetics research for Syngenta. Here he’s being interviewed by AgDay TV.