Last week at  Search Engine Strategies show in New York City, Yusuf Mehdi,  the Search Boss at Bing, admitted that Microsoft neglected the long tail of search “We missed the boat early on that the focus was about the long tail,“. He went on to say “… it turned out the long tail was much more important.” This, of course,  caused a ripple in the media and everyone weighed in with their own angle on this revelation.

For those of us, neck deep in the thicket of search engine marketing this did not come as a surprise.  For the word on the street has always been that Google’s had (and still has) the biggest lead on indexing of the long tail keywords. Their gargantuan index has helped Google’s ranking algorithm to match the queries exactly to the desired content, much faster. It also helped small advertisers by providing them an an affordable way of  generating leads through paid search in the face of stiff competition.

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The two and half hour social media boot camp at Four Seasons, Palo Alto, drew participants from both large and small companies in the Bay Area. The group had strong representation from Business-to-Business and Direct to Consumer companies.

Not surprisingly majority of the participants were already experimenting with Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin YouTube and blogs. They talked about issues ranging from privacy yet effective communication to measuring ROI, to challenges in content generation & distribution and wondered if the channel was right for them.

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