Keyword Wars - Is the Long Tail massifying?

When talking to a fellow trendwatcher the other day, we were discussing Tag Clouds and Folksonomy basics. It wasn’t until then that I started thinking about the true impact of keywords and their power as tool to measure popularity. Well, the discussion soon led to another – the innocence of UGC and the impact of conscious keyword insertions vs. the impact of unconscious keyword insertion.
We can consider two different sources for keywords online. One is based on the users placing keywords to tag items and to populate articles according to evaluated relevance or for mapping purposes. Considered a pure UGC and Web 2.0 tool, this is broadly used online as tool for measuring the impact of events/brands/news/etc… online, as users create a relationship between the various Tags. Those tags will also be used by other users to generate interest. In a stresstetained world, we have little time for research and social bookmarking websites, based on conscious user input, as well as tag clouds, satisfy the need to be updated on what’s popular.
This basically leads us to a point where we must consider – if users are basically accessing the contents most tagged or seen, then we can safely assume that the Internet is becoming a mass vehicle like the Television, in which users are gendering in big information and entertainment centers. It’s massification applied to the long-tail, which is conceptually quite scary.
On a second thought, we can also consider on the validity of the users conscious input. If the web previously had popularity measurement based on an Adam-Smithian hand and on user input, now we have a popularity that is auto-populated by the affluence of users to a given link, tagged and manipulated by other users – the online opinion leaders. So is information online unbiased as we believed it was in the beginning?
And now enters the second source of keywords – the search engine source. The placement of keywords to search for something in Google can be considered, to a certain extent, an unconscious act – we are satisfying a need for information and not placing purposely a tag on an article, thus categorizing it within our tastes and objectives (who isn’t interested in some Celebrity Status?)
The result can be studied with a simple tool – Google Trends. It lists every search done in a country and gives you the top ten updated on a certain time basis. For example, if a scandal occurred with Obama, believe me - you would see a jump on the search concerning Obama. But this tool isn’t just a way to find out what’s moving the world at a certain point – it is also a powerful tool to study keyword insertion patterns and the way the online world reacts to offline inputs.
What we find when comparing these two sources is that conscious vs. unconscious acts on keywords determines the path the web is going down. Sure, oldbies can defend that Web 2.0 is still very folksonomy focused – depending on the good will of users and their unbiased opinion – but I disagree to a certain extent. With the rise of the Generation C and Online Oxygen concepts, the online world is undergoing a massification that we cannot avoid. The long tail is definitely swelling. But when some acts are done in an unconscious way – “unconscious” being the placement of keywords without the categorization purpose – we obtain a truer observation on reality and on wild popularity growth.
I cannot say that this has a direct implication for the marketers. It is more of an wake up call to what is happening with consumers and with Internet. Think of your consumers to a deeper level – how do they engage, how do they react and how conscious are their acts when they are interacting with brands.