Beeing unique

Tails, long and short, niches large or narrow. These are all words that flow around in the buzz words soup. Seth Godin talks about Tribes, which, in my view, is just a fancy way of defining your place in a niche or to create you own niche. Niches are cool, and there is a reason for it.

In the end all of this talk about The Long Tail and Tribes comes down to the idea that any of us, as an individual, can put in more effort into something that is irrelevant for 99% of the world, but incredibly valuable for the rest 1% than any company or organization will ever be able to. And that 1% may be more then enough to satisfy our needs, whatever those are.

This is so obvious! isn’t it? If yes, why didn’t we talked about this so much back in the “Pen & Paper” era? Because it was too expensive and risky to target such narrow niches. No book store could afford the Long Tail approach and much to rare were the opportunities when we could gather enough people at one place to forge our mighty community (don’t really like the word tribe).

But now we have the mighty internet, the all reaching web with it’s websites, blogs, microblogs and all variations of this sort. Any of us can have a small piece of the web that can be reached by anyone in the whole world with more ease than picking up the phone.

And this gives us the power to be unique and be great at it. Most people may think that we’re not for them, but if there are 10, 100, 1000 people out there that share our uniqueness, then we are in business. And business != $$$, it may be just fun, or ego, or need to be with your peers.

You have not eqxcuse of not being yourself and expressing it any way you can. The only hurdle left is to let people out there know you exist. Google / MSN / Yahoo / etc are all good friends, but these are not enough. You need to build your community. Or if you are just a person that want’s to be part of something, you need to be able to find your community.

But how do you do this? How can you shout out far and wide that you exist?