Caldwell
Internet Express Caldwell
Internet Express High speed digital communications with dedicated servers
This report has been compiled as a guideline for individuals and companies who are considering using the vast resources of the "Internet" to increase their businesses' bottom line. Every attempt has been made to keep the main body of this report in a format that is easy to understand and not filled with technical jargon. In the report's appendices there is detailed discussion of specific technologies used in the Internet.
Customers want to know what to expect from their investments in placing an Internet Web ad and how being on the Internet can benefit them. Many times it takes several hours to get a potential customer to see the unlimited possibilities of the technology and the medium, mainly because the medium is unlike any other medium they have used in the past.
The old expression that you can't teach an old dog new tricks is the dilemma many of us have. In order to compete, it is imperative that we at least understand the magnitude of the changes in today's world and be able to designate individuals in our organization to keep pace with it even if we don't have the time to do it. As you will soon see, what is being discussed here is not the introduction of a new computer or an all-in-one fax/copier/printer etc., but the revolution of how business is conducted on a level that surpasses the advent of the computer or the introduction of the fax machine.
I am very confident in telling you that there is no subject, idea, philosophy, product, or company that can't be found through access to the Internet. This statement might seem pretty bold to you right now. However, if you have a license (professional, business or personal), a credit card, belong to a trade association, gone to a doctor, have insurance, etc., your presence is on the Internet as that data exists somewhere in someone's database that is being accessed through the Internet.
Do not expect that marketing through the Internet will make you wealthy beyond dreams overnight. Just placing an Internet ad or having a home page is a very small part of the effectiveness of the Internet's use. This report attempts to take a conservative tack on how to find that market for that idea or product you have. It will show you ways in which to lower your operating costs and increase your bottom line. It will discuss ways to move key information between you and customers and vendors within seconds, not days.
The Internet has already made and will continue to make many individuals large fortunes, but in many instances not in the ways they first envisioned. That is one of the incredible dynamics of the Internet, the access to people, ideas and information is constantly changing one's perception. There are today and will be tomorrow millions made overnight by having the right idea at the right time exposed to the right audience. I will attempt to give you specific examples of Internet Marketing Success and how to use the incredible capabilities of the Internet.
The last point I want you to keep in mind as you ponder the pages in front of you is that you do know people who use the Internet everyday, even though you may not personally have the time to. We would hope, however, that after reading this report the utility of access to the Internet might become more readily apparent.
When you call your stock broker for information, that person might have no Internet skills but your question about a company is handed off to a "back room researcher" who does. When your daughter does a research report at the library, more than likely that card catalog is connected to other libraries via the Internet. Your friend who sold you your home owner's insurance is probably accessing data being provided through the Internet. Actually, it is almost impossible not to know someone who isn't using it directly or indirectly on a daily basis. It is the backbone of our information society and what is now being coined by elected officials as the Information Superhighway.
Consumers, the Internet and the World Wide Web
In the 1970s it was the mainframe. In the 1980s the PC and in the first part of the 1990s, the office network. All of these platforms drove massive product development and growth for the technology industry. The Internet, with its interconnection of millions of computers, has risen from this evolution of technologyto become the greatest resource available to businesses today.
What motivates consumers to shop on the Internet and the Web? There are as many reasons as there are people, but most shopper shave cited the speed of the transaction, convenience, selection and price. This is similar to the roles of merchants who market their goods and services through the medium known as television via such shows as the Home Shopping Network. More are finding out that finding the service and product is incredibly easy once they know how to use global search indices such as Lycos or Yahoo. Also attractive to on-line users is the immediate and interactive delivery of information and digital products that can be had from home, work or on the road.
Obviously, those who have the tools and knowledge to access the Internet represent a huge market as the enclosed examples and statistics will testify. Some sites are getting inquires from users at the pace of over 10,000,000 per week, having to keep replicating their systems over and over again to keep up with the volume.
Why has all this happened and why all of a sudden isn't there a newspaper, TV news broadcast or magazine that doesn't have at least one mention of the Internet? The answer is much simpler than most try to get you to believe. Actually there has been a convergence of several types of communications technology, software and deregulation that has for the first time permitted a user-friendly, reasonably responsive, global method in which thoughts and ideas can be linked to each other.
These thoughts and ideas are linked together like the pages of a book that make reference to other books. Instead of having to go back to the library however to check the reference book out, a person can now click on the book's name and even though it is physically stored on another computer in Australia, bring the information to the screen within seconds. The world is truly getting smaller.
Although the Internet is what most popular media call the system of interconnected networks, the part that will most likely become part of your everyday life is termed the "Web". The Web is the inter-linking of sites, ideas, libraries, companies, cultures, etc. and with the point and click of a computer's mouse button it is all available. It is possible to surf the world's computers today with no more technical knowledge than how to turn on a computer and use your index finger.
Advantages of World Wide Web Presence
How you can make money and how you can save money are two very important questions. If a company can improve the way its daily processes are conducted, and save money, increase speed and improve efficiency at the same time, it hardly matters if that business is "making money" directly on the Internet.
Consider the possibility of a business eliminating 30 to 50 percent of its routine use of the fax machine. Documents typed via various word processor formats can be electronically transmitted via the Internet as an attachment to an E-mail message without having to print the document. I am in constant communications with several individuals at a time working on different projects in other cities. I never have to pick up the phone or run to the fax machine. Additionally, I am accumulating a historical "read file" of each project's progress.
As the pace of business moves more quickly, the use of overnight and express delivery has increased. This has placed a drain on the profitability of many businesses as they have had to use the same services as their competitors in order to stay competitive. With E-Mail and electronic document transfer via the Internet, profit is returned to the bottom line. A 100 page document can be transmitted to an office in Germany in minutes for the price of a local phone call. What would such a document cost via international express mail service or fax machine? Even super discounted international phone connections are .65 per minute. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out the savings.
In terms of direct communications, E-Mail holds almost as great an advantage over the telephone as the word processor has over the typewriter. E-Mail is not intrusive and gives the recipient of a message control over when to answer the message as well as time to formulate a response or to collect (or type) the required attached document. With the advent of voice mail and its use as a primary form of interpersonal communications, E-Mail can be a more personable communications medium. Each message can be replied to as an attachment to the previous message with a "single" message actually having many historical sub-messages.
A reduction in 800-number costs is gained through Internet E-Mail, which is available 24 hours a day. Many companies post FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions) for use by customer service technicians and help-desk personnel on an Internet accessible system. This can reduce the labor costs associated with customer service operations and eliminate the tedium of repetitive verbal answers.
Another component is the ability to take the E-Mail messages left to and responded by customer service personnel and integrate them into a historical help desk system. Obviously, customers are going to ask many of the same questions over and over again and instead of having to re-educate new help desk personnel, they can use the knowledge base created by their predecessors. Even standard word processors can be used in this process as they have the ability to search on individual words and or phrases like an error message number.
Another way to reduce costs almost immediately is to use the Internet for voice communications between key sales sites. Most individuals are unaware that it is now possible, with inexpensive software, to use the Internet for full-duplex, simultaneous voice communications. Think of the potential savings if you have an office in Omaha and a technical support office in Hong Kong. By making use of the new technology, long distance phone costs are virtually eliminated.
Companies leading the charge in Internet Telephones are Dallas based Camelot Corp. which has pioneered the concept with its $100Personal Internet Companion Kit (PICK) and New Jersey's VocalTec which has followed with its own Internet Phone (http://www.vocaltec.com). Both products provide software that links a PC's sound card and microphone with its modem for verbal communications.
The PICK software enables conference calling, call screening, caller ID and voice encryption. Internet Phone, which claims audio quality comparable to that of modern speaker phones, lets you speak while you surf the Internet, see call waiting alerts on your screen, or collaborate on documents. Some customers are obviously signing up for Internet service for no other reason than to save money on long distance calls between certain sites.
Another excellent way to reduce costs is by using the Internet to help with your purchasing decisions. With the Internet, there are no limitations to your ability to search for new vendors. Run a search on key words in your industry, and more than likely hundreds of new sources will become immediately available around the world.
According to a recent Fortune Magazine article, on average, manufacturers spend 55 cents of each dollar of revenues on goods and services, from raw materials to mail. Shrinking that bill by 5% can add almost 3% to net profits. The same arithmetic applies to service businesses.
Cutting purchasing costs has surprisingly little to do with browbeating companies. Purchasers at companies like AT&T and Chrysler aim to reduce the total costs - not just adjust the price - of each part or service they buy. They form enduring partnerships with suppliers that let them chip away at key costs year after year. Global research is necessary to achieve these types of enduring, strategic relationships.
For some businesses, such as computer hardware and software vendors, there is considerable demand for high-quality, easily accessible customer-support services. The commercial Internet domain system offers excellent ways for vendors to improve and even re-engineer traditional customer support while controlling or reducing costs.
Troubleshooting problems and addressing questions not covered in paper documentation can be handled effectively over the Internet. By communicating quickly, E-mail and file transfers are sometimes better for dissecting and answering a customer's more arcane and complex problems. Almost all companies involved with software make use of the Internet to distribute patches and fixes, whereas only a short time ago those same companies were expected to mail customers each and every fix. Obviously, if it is possible to avoid putting a customer on hold yet still resolve their problems and questions, customer good will is retained.
Another way of utilizing the Internet is to enhance customer service with better sales support. Some companies do not have the resources to provide a large sales-support group. It may be difficult for a potential customer to get timely responses by conventional methods and when prospective customers have questions or concerns that cannot be adequately addressed, business can be lost. The Internet can provide a highly effective and timely sales-support mechanism not previously available to small and medium sized businesses.
Many people ask "Who's making money today on the Internet?" Even though this may be a valid question many have discovered that it is more important to ask , "Who is taking full strategic advantage of the Internet by exploiting competitive advantages that save time and money today?"
To be effective a company must know what their competition is up to and where new markets might exist. Many companies today still pay large fees to research companies for such data when all these research companies are doing is using the Internet and its vast source of free data, finding the data and repackaging it. For example, one company I am aware of takes freely available SEC data, repackages it and charges companies $6,000 a year for the information.
Newspapers and reporters are also on to this cost savings knowledge, which allows smaller papers to compete with larger papers. Today, the process of investigative reporting is much quicker due to on-line technology. For example, Pulitzer Prize winning reporters used this on-line research tool to search databases of all the California county recorders' offices leading to the disclosure of the vast, hidden wealth of the Marcos family.
Similar searches are conducted each day by thousands of researchers and reporters through on-line systems worldwide. Many of the "pros" use systems such as Fed World (http://www.fedworld.gov) which is a comprehensive, user-friendly system providing access to more than 130 government dial-up systems. Everything from aviation to environmental protection to small business news is available. Federal job postings can be obtained here as well.
In addition to the places cataloged in this report that allow you to inject your product, service or company in the search engines, you will also find an excellent source for doing marketing and competitive analysis. The trick is to be creative in your searches and look for key words that a product or service would be described as. Once again, compare the problem to a company such as ours that is an Internet Provider. Our local phone company forces us to go under headings such as Computer Services although it has more to do with telecommunications and information than computers. If you did not perceive us to be a computer services type of company, you would not find us. Companies on the Internet are not constrained by this process as their name, location, product , etc. can all be used as search words to find them.
When I start to do research on a topic, I attempt to find out from the company what they describe their product as, who and where their market is and how their customers identify them. Many times this is much more complex than it first appears especially if the customer is attempting to open new markets or has new products.
Another way to maintain a competitive advantage is to use systems such as the ABAG Contract Exchange to take advantage of central sites that allow a company to electronically see and respond to requests for proposals (RFPs). One such site is the Association of Bay Area Governments that has implemented such a site (http://www.abag.ca.gov). The ABAG Contract Exchange will soon allow bidders to respond to and submit their bids via the Internet.
Another site which has been around for many years, but could only be accessed through hard copy is the Commerce Business Daily. This incredible site (http://cos.gdb.org/repos/cdb/cdb-intro.html) contains information that includes supplies, equipment and material, procurement, contract awards, surplus property sales, foreign government standards and special notices. The site is further broken out by agencies of the Federal Government, including both the military and civilian sectors. A new edition of the CBD is issued every business day. Each edition contains approximately 500 to 1,000 notices.
The following is an actual search conducted using Yahoo on the word "contracts." In my opinion, the most user friendly output generated by any of the search engines. For anyone involved in pursuing bids this search is obviously very fruitful.
Yahoo Search ( http://www.yahoo.com)
[ Yahoo | Up | Search | Suggest | Add | Help ]
17 matches were found containing the sub string (contracts).
Business: Corporations: Construction
The Regional Alliance - A new industry partnership led by major
corporations in construction. minority businesses and public agencies to help
small. minority and women-owned businesses compete openly and
effectively for public and private sector contracts.
Business: Corporations: Consulting: Electronic Data Systems (EDS)
EDS Federal Government - EDS provides on-line catalogs for several
Federal Government ID/IQ contracts (SMC, PC-1, ULANA II,
Portable-1) and our GSA Schedule.
Business: Corporations: Employment Services
Interweb Computer Services [new] - Put your vacancies/contracts on the
Interweb UK map. We want to make IT job hunting easier than ever. No
untidy or lengthy lists to read just quick results.
Business: Corporations: Financial Services: Insurance
Insurance One - Life insurance and annuity contracts
Business: Corporations: Government
EDS Federal Government - EDS provides on-line catalogs for several
Federal Government ID/IQ contracts (SMC, PC-1, ULANA II,
Portable-1) and our GSA Schedule.
Business: Corporations: Internet Access Providers: NYSERNet - The New York State
Education and Research Network.
New York State, OGS State Contracts Database
Business: Corporations: Internet Consulting
Net Ex Internet Consulting - offers full software installation and training
necessary to get Windows users connected to the internet. Support
contracts and custom packages also available.
Business: Corporations: Law: Contracts
Business: Corporations: Law: Firms
Law Offices of Dennis Spencer Kahane - Business Law: corp, partnerships
limited liability co., transactions, contracts, tm, copyrights, negotiations,
business lit. Over 20 years of law practice.
Lester & Associates - a Minnesota law firm - transactional legal services
for business clients seeking assistance in the areas of information technology
law, licensing and contracts, and intellectual property.
Business: Corporations: Semiconductors: Design Centers: Quantum Effect Design
Quantum Effect Design - a private company that contracts VLSI designs,
and specializes in RISC microprocessors. QED has attracted experienced
microprocessor designers from throughout the industry, and is uniquely
suited to doing on-time, high-performance, low-cost designs.
Business: Products and Services: Get Rich Quick!
The Secret Investment Vehicle Of The '90's! - Investing in Viatical
Settlement Guaranteed Contracts.
Economy: Economics: Journals
RAND Journal of Economics - focuses on industrial organization,
contracts, and regulation, and publishes theoretical, empirical, and
experimental analyses of topics such as market structure, entry and exit,
collusion, R&D, patents, contracting, regulatory mechanisms, and the
effectiveness of regulation. Features a searchable index of abstracts from the
past 25 years.
Economy: Markets and Investments: Futures and Options
The Iowa Electronic Market - The Iowa Electronic Market is a real-money,
futures market with contracts whose payoffs are based on real-world
events such as political outcomes, companies' earnings per share and stock
price returns.
Government: Agencies: National Institutes of Health
NIH-Guide to Grants and Contracts Database
Government: States: New York
New York State, OGS State Contracts Database
Politics: Elections
The Iowa Political Market - The Iowa Political Market (IPM) is part of the
Iowa Electronic Market. Participants in the IPM trade futures contracts
whose payoffs are based on elections outcomes. This is a real-money,
futures market conducted by the U. of Iowa Business School.
On-Line Marketing Effectiveness
To really understand the effectiveness of on-line marketing you must see it in terms of five components. They are the promotion of the product or service, maintaining a one-to-one contact, closing the sale, the actual transaction and fulfilling the order.
The promotion component involves advertising and creating product awareness. The Internet excels at this since it allows a marketer to post information to a server where it can be seen by millions of customers. To succeed in promotion, a marketer must understand the demographics of the audience, which is not the same as the audience that would be reached in print or other electronic media.He must also understand the habits of Internet users and present information to them in a way that will hold their interests.
The key is that - as with print advertising - there is no reason for the viewer to linger over information that does not hold their attention. With TV and radio, there is program content to wait around for; that's not the case on-line where you can leave an ad site with a click of the mouse button. That's why some advertisers create environments where you might like to spend some time reading interesting material or viewing graphic files.
The one-to-one contact has been and always will be an important component in any business dealing. Although the technology is changing radically which will allow both simultaneous data (including video and sound) and voice communications, a snapshot of mid-summer1995 technology will only allow for the use of E-Mail or Internet Phone as a means of free on-line personal contact.
This however is just as valuable as the use and maintenance of a customer mailing list and in some regards is easier and less expensive to collect as each individual who enters your Internet" door" leaves an E-Mail address (also known as a footprint).Companies who have customer service personnel standing by available for interactive communications once customers enter the "door" could retain greater numbers of potential customers.
The Closing Phase involves setting the price and striking the deal. Of course it can be done in a series of E-Mail messages or Internet Phone calls, and there's no reason that relentless pressure or slick smooth talk of a salesman can't be as effective in this medium as on the phone or in person. In general, though, Internet buying is more like ordering from a catalog - an activity of the buyer alone. If a client has bought something from you already, the Internet is an excellent place to take repeat orders. In this situation , the Internet is better because there is a written record of the sale and the deal struck.
In the Transaction phase, payment for goods typically is made by cash, check or credit card. Until recently, the Internet was not a place where many purchases could be consummated. For security reasons, the exchange of credit card information had to take place over the telephone. This is changing rapidly as an increasing number of companies introduce systems to enable secure credit card transactions over the Internet. Digital forms of currency are also being offered by companies like DigiCash, CyberCash and NetCash. Internet business-to-business electronic data interchange-type systems also are being developed through initiatives like CommerceNet and others.
The Fulfillment Phase involves the delivery of the ordered goods. Of course delivery can only be done on-line with digital products like software and books in electronic form, but these are becoming more plentiful. Many vendors now allow customers to download a number of software programs and demos. For large programs, customers seem to prefer having diskettes sent to them along with manuals.
Fulfillment is not just a matter of shipping alone, a good fulfillment operation relies on fast and accurate transmission of shipping and billing information. Electronic order processing can be better than systems that involve people taking and entering orders because the data entered by the customer goes directly to all relevant parties.
You must offer a fully representative product line; don't treat the on-line market as a liquidator of some products only. You must be competitively priced: on-line shoppers will not pay a premium for the convenience. You must provide excellent fulfillment service. You must use the medium to develop a relationship with your customers, using such tools as E-Mail and the Internet Phone.
Who's Who on the Web - Selected Company Statistics
Sun Microsystems
Maker of computer workstations receives 45,000 messages a day on its Internet account (and probably more as I write) http://www.sun.com
Digital Equipment Company
Sold over $15,000,000 in product via its Internet site to customers in 1994. http://www.digital.com
PC Gifts and Flowers - Stamford, Conn.
Sold more than $4,000,000 in 1994 selling through the on-line service Prodigy with only 2,000,000 members Typical "hits" per day are between 25,000 to 30,000. http://www.pcgifts.ibm.com
Easy Saver
A seller of airline tickets that would rank among the top 1 percent of ticket sellers based on its on-line ticket volume. They are available through Prodigy.
Internet Shopping Network
(http://www.internet.net/ ) - Was founded in April 1994 with a 10-person staff and by the following September ISN was acquired by the cable-television Home Shopping Network (HSN). With 600 companies listed, it claims in the summer of 1995 to be the largest electronic shopping mall in the world.
PC Financial Network
Has accounts with assets totaling more than $2.8 billion (6/95)from 100,000 on-line consumers.
Fidelity Investments ( http://www.fid-inv.com)
Number of people requesting information from Fidelity Investments over the Internet in March and April: approx. 250,000
Average number of requests, per person: 4
Percentage of overall fund inquiries that came in via the Internet:5.5 %
Web Demographics(1993 Statistics)
From January to December 1993, the amount of network traffic (in bytes) across National Science Foundation's (NSF's) North American network attributed to Web use multiplied by 187 times. In December1993 the Web was ranked 11th of all network services in terms of sheer byte traffic - just twelve months earlier, its rank was127.
In June 1993, Matthew Gray (http://www.mit.edu:8001/people/mkgray/www-home-page.html) at MIT
( http://www.mit.edu:8001/) ran a small program which automatically travels links within the Web network to try to determine just how many sites there are that offer information over the World Wide Web.
His small "World Wide Web Wanderer"
( http://www.mit.edu:8001/people/mkgray/web-growth.html) found around 100 sites that month and over two hundred thousand documents. In March 1994 his robot found over 1,200 unique sites. Even though the robot's programming was improved somewhat, and a number of factors may have affected the final count, the growth rate of the Web from the last half of 1993 through the first half of 1994 is amazing and continues to increase.
Brian Pinkerton at the University of Washington
( http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/bp/bp.html) has been maintaining a similar program called the "Web Crawler"
( http://www.biotech.washington.edu/WebCrawler/WebCrawler.html) . Its last run in mid-May 1994 found over 3,800 unique Web sites.
In May 1995, over 30,000 Web sites were catalogued, growing at the rate of 400 per day and estimated to reach 150,000 by the end of 1995!!!
Given that many sites are private and hidden behind corporate firewalls (which are similar to a computer's locked door) or not connected to the public Internet, it can be safely stated that, as of May 1994, there are at least 4,500 hypertext Web servers in use throughout the world.
Based on Web site statistics, estimates of the number of knowledgeable Web users in the world has been as large as two million. However, considering the number of hosts that frequent the most populated areas of the Web, it is safe to say that there are around 250,000to 500,000 current active Web users today.
Putting Your Catalog On-line
No matter what kind of marketer you are, you can succeed on the Internet if you take the time to get on-line and understand the channel and if you're willing to make the effort to build relationships with your customers. This section deals with one important facet of on-line marketing.
Putting up an on-line catalog can be intimidating. The number of technical options can be distracting. But on-line marketing is still marketing. It has a lot of similarities to putting out information in any other format. You have to decide who you want to reach, what motivates those people, what your goals are for the communication, and what messages you want to convey. Then you have to decide what kind of communication channel suits your purpose, the content and design of your message and how to get the information into your audience's hands.
Who Do You Want to Reach?
In any marketing activity or campaign, you start by looking at the audience and defining who you want to reach. Who would want to buy your product or service? What do you know about them? What do they read, watch or listen to? What kinds of arguments or endorsements matter to them? How can you reach them?
The Internet is not a "mass" media; it is a large number of individuals to whom you talk directly. the Internet is made up of a huge number of small niches. You don't communicate with all of the Internet; you communicate with very targeted parts of it.
If you are attracted to the Internet because you imagine you can send out one broadcast message to millions and have them buy your product, you are doomed to disappointment. The Internet is a place you can meet a lot of customers and potential customers and communicate with them one at a time. Although tools let you send many messages very quickly, the messages are still individual messages.
Similarly, putting your company's information on-line is a direct communication with individuals. Marketing on-line is more like direct sales than marketing through retailers or distributors. You have to figure out how to reach and appeal to individuals. You have to figure out how to tailor your message to the people who will be reading it. You have to encourage and answer individual responses.
Prioritize Your Potential Audiences
Ideally, you might want to reach all your customers, and all potential investors in your company.
But it's not worth your while to reach every conceivable audience in the Internet universe. Communicating with audiences takes overhead. You have only so many strategic and administrative resources to target audiences, plan messages, write and design content, keep information up to date, and answer questions. Plus, even if you're not paying postage or printing to get your message out, your company is paying for hardware, telephone lines and technical support.
Talk to Your Customers, Not the Whole World
Most marketers will probably decide that they want to reach their current customers who are already on-line. Some marketers will also want to target prospective customers who are on-line.
A good reason to start with your customers is that you know who they are. You have some way of reaching them and telling them about your on-line information. Since you already have a relationship with your customers, you know something about them and what kind of information they would like. And those customers are often motivated to give you feedback about how you're answering their needs.
When you communicate with your existing customers, you contend with only one unknown: how to use a new communication channel to speak with the people that you already know.
Is Your Audience On-line?
How do you find out if your audience is on-line? If you are dealing with your existing customers, you can ask them - on customer surveys, on order forms, on the telephone, or wherever you talk to them. A substantial portion of your existing customer base might already have an e-mail address.
You can also look at what kinds of on-line services are already aimed at the kind of audience that you want to reach. If there are professional organizations, subscription services, or Internet interest groups that already target your audience, you'll know that some of your audience is on-line now. You can see how much value is already provided by existing services and look at the number of subscribers to these services.
For example, if you were selling a service to doctors, you could find out:
Chances are that if there aren't any current news groups, mailing lists, or Web or Gopher servers that your customers would be interested in, there probably isn't a very big population on-line out there.
Help Your Customers Get On-line
What happens when you put up a service and some of your customers can't reach it because they're not on the Internet? You don't have to wait until your audience comes to you. You can demonstrate leadership by figuring out how to get those people on-line and by helping them to solve that process. You'll want to survey what information or help is already out there for your customers who want to get access to the Internet.
There are different strategies for making it easier for your audience to get on-line. For example, if you're a local company you might make an arrangement with a local service provider to give your customers a special offer, and then let your customers know about it. Or you could recommend an approach or off-the-shelf software that would work well for your customers.
Define Your Criteria for Success
The Internet can look very seductive to a marketer because it is such a large audience. But don't be seduced by wanting only large numbers. If your criteria is 10 million "hits" on your information each week - and that's your only criteria- you can put up controversial information and reach that goal. For example, you could become known as the site for nude pictures of celebrities.
If you have other, longer-term goals, you'll want to do something besides attracting the largest number of people by whatever means. When you know the kind of people you want to attract, you'll have a better idea of the kind of information that they will find valuable.
As you put information on-line, your program will grow. You'll learn from the history of that channel what kind of customers come to you, what kind of information they respond to, what kind of traffic translates into orders, and how the growth of on-line orders compares to orders through other channels.
If your criteria for success is, "I'm going to sell an unbelievable number of products this year just because I advertised them on the Internet," that's not going to happen. But if your criteria is to establish yourself, to begin doing things that show some results, and to increase those results, and to increase those results over time, you can build something of value.
Electronic Payment Systems
One type of electronic payment system is offered by First Virtual Holdings Inc., which was founded by a recognized Internet developer and an attorney/accountant. First Virtual sets up accounts for buyers and checking accounts for sellers. This method is used exclusively for the sale of information products that can be obtained via E-Mail, FTP or the Web.
The information behind First Virtual's service is its public-access information server software known as the Infohaus server. The firm claims this is the first server software that allows anyone to set up an electronic "information shop" . First Virtual gives the server software away and charges sellers $0.29 per transaction plus 2 percent of the transaction's value. Buyers pay no extra charges. Its back-end financial operations are handled by Electronic Data Systems and First USA Merchant Services, Inc.
Yet another electronic payment system for the Internet is NetCheque, which is being developed at the Information Sciences Institute of the University of Southern California. Users who register with NetCheque accounting servers can send electronic checks to other users via E-Mail or other network protocols. Signatures on checks are authenticated using a secure system called Kerberos.
BizNet Technologies has also developed its Versatile Virtual Vending system, a Web point-of-sale application for on-line businesses and catalogs that provides security through PGP encryption.
Making Your Internet Presence Known
One of the key points that seems to get lost in all the hype isthe process by which individuals know about your product or service. You can build the largest, most ornate billboard, but if you put it on a cul-de-sac, no one will see it. Internet advertising is no different.
Although this report attempts to stay away from the core technology that makes it all work, certain points must not get lost. When asking your Internet Service Provider (ISP) to help you with building your billboard, make sure it isn't being built on a cul-de-sac. This is important and can be thought of in the following ways.
The Internet is made up of a series of backbones which feed smaller regional and community Internet systems. As the Internet is no longer directly sponsored by the US government, companies such as MCI, Sprint, Network 99, etc. have stepped in and picked up the cost of providing the backbones which interconnect to each other. They in turn, lease access to their backbones (for a fee)to others who in turn provide access to the smaller regions.
Since these backbones have finite capacity (both locally and internationally),certain types of communications require larger backbones if they are to handle the data in a timely and efficient manner. As you might suspect, the more capacity the higher the cost.
Those companies such as Internet Services Group which provide Internet connectivity for individuals and small to middle size businesses, must constantly assess their capacity if they wish to provide their customers timely access to the data that is on their own computers or on a machine on the other side of the world.
Where things start to slow down for a potential customer who wants to access a company's Web page of information retrieval is usually when the "pipe" through which the data must flow becomes too small or the speed of the physical device they connect with is too slow. Technically speaking, most providers should offer you connection to the Internet and the big backbones and the world's computers through a fairly large size pipe called a T-3. That same provider should offer you a dial-up connection to their site from your home or business with at least a 28.8 kbps modem. Less than 28.8 kbps for a dial-up connection will seem very slow when transferring the intense amount of graphics which has made the Web easy to use. Less than a T-3 will make accessing your Web data from the Internet side seem slow and difficult. Just like with water, only so much water can flow through a pipe at anyone time. Even though technology is always finding ways to decrease the limitations, the Internet and its many uses take advantage of it and often fill it to capacity again. Think of it as the chicken and the egg, which came first?
To research the vast amount of information on the Global World Wide Web takes time, and as we all know, time is money. What makes us unique, however, is the infrastructure we have in place. This infrastructure allows our staff to update the databases such as Lycos and Yahoo for our clients and research information that only the price and speed of a T-3 can provide.
Although this is starting to sound like a sales pitch by having the ability to download information and move between computers around the world at 1 and 1/2 million bits per second instead of a personal computer's maximum of 28,800 bits per second, we can get our job done much faster and more efficiently. Because of this we consider ourselves better positioned to help businesses both find information and allow their customers to see them. The pipe is very wide and the data moves very quickly.
How the Information Is Really Disseminated
Now that you know that there are some technical and equipment requirements that should be met, the other thing which often falls through the crack is how does someone in New York know your company exists? Unlike the phone system where you must know the very specific location of a company and its name to call directory assistance to contact them, the Internet has in place some incredible tools to find companies, people, products and services.
The list that is attached to this report is a starting place to get your product and or service advertised to the world. Obviously, you must have an address for people to contact you. Many smaller businesses use a Web page under a commercial domain of their access provider. Bigger companies acquire their own domain name and register its address at the same "address" as the provider and still others get their own servers, domain names and Internet addresses.
Think of the above as similar to the phone and mail systems. With the mail, wouldn't it be difficult to deliver a letter to your house if three other houses on your street had the same house number? Wouldn't it be difficult to call you (and only you) if100 other people had the same phone number? Since most of us don't really want to go back to the day of party lines most of us would probably want a system that allows the customer to send us mail and communicate to only us. The Internet does just that through a sophisticated hierarchical system of structure known as domains.
Now that you have the knowledge that a unique system of addresses does exist, you now can understand how someone finds your product. By using computers which have been established for no other reason than to index and find information, as long as your product, location, company name, etc. is placed into it, whoever types in that word or words will retrieve a list matching that query. How big a system is it? Suffice it to say that some of the better known systems that do this get over 10,000,000 inquires a week. Someone is looking for something, right?
The following list is a good starting point for making sure that your information is known to the world. Be patient with some as they are extremely busy and require over 2 weeks before the data entered in the form is actually injected into the index. The good thing, though, is that unlike the library card catalogs, as long as you know the word it does not have to be on any particular shelf in any particular library.
The following page is the form which is used here to establish a "presence" for our customers on the Internet. It isa very dynamic list with new additions each week. Even after completing the list of insertions for our customers, when a new search engine is found, we update the search index.
As a service to all of our Web Presence Account customers, we will list your Web pages in dozens of Indices that will allow other Internet users to find your site by listing key words or categories that correspond to the topic of your Web page. Including, but not limited to the following:
Yahoo: <http://www.yahoo.com>
Starting Point: <http://www.stpt.com>
EINet Galaxy: <http://galaxy.einet.net>
WebCrawler: <http://webcrawler.com>
Lycos: <http://www.lycos.com>
Harvest: <http://harvest.cs.colorado.edu>
NCSA What's New: <http://gnn.com/gnn/wn/whats-new.html>
What's New Too!: <http://newtoo.manifest.com:80/WhatsNewToo/>
Infoseek: <http://www.infoseek.com:80/Home>
Whole Internet Catalog: <http://gnn.com/gnn/wic/index.html>
World Wide Web Worm <http://www.cs.colorado.edu/home/mcbryan/wwwwadd.html>
Open Text Web Index <http://www.opentext.com:8080/omw-submit.html>
Apollo <http://apollo.co.uk>
JumpStation <http://js.stir.ac.uk/jsbin/submit>
Netcenter <http://netcenter.com/yellows/whats-new-form.html>
NIKOS <http://www.rns.com/www_index/new_site.html>
TheYellowPages.com <http://theyellowpages.com/feedback.htm>
DBSG <http://tempest.ucs.indiana.edu/htbin/get_www_site/add_site>
Battle Among the Giants for Internet Share
Almost every day in the financial sections of any newspaper or magazine, there is yet another article about some company and their push to acquire or develop Internet related infra structure. One of the very recent battles in the high stakes game of information service delivery was IBM's hostile (turned friendly) takeover of Lotus Development Corporation. Many feel that IBM spending$3.5 Billion (1/3 of their cash reserves) to acquire Lotus and a product known as "Notes" was a risky venture.
While IBM recognizes the global requirement for business communications and connectivity, the risk was spending such a large sum of money on a commercial product whose equivalent functionality was already available to the world's community for free. In other words, the "Web".
IBM obviously feels that it can compete and profit from the technology which has been developed in universities around the world and is presently accessible for free. One individual was quoted assaying that "Web technology is a Trojan horse for groupware companies like Lotus and Microsoft" while another stated that "IBM better not look back. The Internet's World Wide Web may be gaining on you."
How is this information important to you? If IBM is taking such a huge risk at trying to implement and commercialize (and make a profit from) a technology that seems rather unknown, maybe they have figured out where the world's businesses are headed. IBM's Chairman Gerstner said he considers Notes (a Web like product)a key to the Industry's next phase, "in which all the computing power is linked together."
I can remember not that long ago that teletype machines were the primary electronic transmission medium for long-haul communications. They were necessary as many parts of the world didn't have reliable phone systems in place. Even the famous US-Soviet "hot-line" wasn't a phone but a teletype machine.
Then came the fax machine after the phone systems became substantially more reliable. Anyone trying to conduct business (either out of a home or an office) without a fax machine today, would probably be thought of as rather archaic. Soon, within months, anyone without Internet access will be thought of in the same way. Fax machines will eventually disappear as did the teletype, and it isn't that far in the future. As always however, there will be those managers who will be pulled kicking and screaming into the process.
An example of this was my recent invitation to present our Internet services to what I imagined would be a friendly audience at a "high tec" global, company based here in Irvine, Ca. I had been informed prior to the meeting however, that part of the audience (sales) was not receptive to using the Internet and to anticipate some "hostility". Being prepared as such, my stated objective during the introduction was simply to be as informative as possible and reply to their concerns about the Internet and what it could or could not do.
Even though the room contained staff members whose business card shad titles such as CFO, Sales Manager, Marketing Manager, International Sales Director, etc., statements such as "we don't need Internet to save costs as we have 800 numbers", "all our engineers in the field (around the world) have the most recent copy of the manuals" and "e-mail isn't necessary as our sales staff don't have computers" and "communicating via the fax is all we need" shows the amount of fear of new technology. Seemed like the only friendly face in the crowd was the CFO.
Statements like the above are obviously statements by individuals who are terrified by new technology. Honestly, I don't believe anyone in the conference room was stupid.
How do you overcome this type of fear? The answer isn't easy. Sometimes industries collapse because of it. Sometimes entire levels of management are eliminated during acquisition processes because of it. Sometimes departments and people have to be eliminated. My experience tells me that in most instances it takes a very high level decision to make technology decisions effective. I wish I could be more optimistic but most of the time the solution is not a pretty one if change has to be made.
The Rest of the World
Internet connectivity for the rest of world is greater than many suspect. Most recent figures show over 180 countries directly connected to the Net. Only during the month of June did the Peoples Republic of China allow the first commercial operations to begin in the cities of Shangai and Beijing. Although in its infancy, anything that has to do with one fourth of the planet's population has great potential when nothing existed before.
I don't want you to get the impression that all the general population of those 180 countries have access. Nothing could be further from the truth. What is imperative to understand, however, is those that have access, probably hold key positions in their respective country's industry or government. Those 2,000 initial, commercial customers in China are probably some very well connected consumers of information. Many times just having access to a few key players is the key to conducting business in overseas markets and the Internet is a forum to open those doors that never existed before.
Statistics as recent as January of 1995 indicate the following number of host computers connected to the Internet. What is untold in the statistics and what is in most instances impossible to tell, is the number of individuals with indirect access to the host. In the US, this same host might have hundreds to thousands of dial-in users, dozens of other computers (servers) directly attached to each server with hundreds of computers connected to each server. Numbers can be very misleading, but in this case the total number of users is actually much greater.
Ponder the following:
Number of Host Computers directly connected to the Internet (1/95).
North America 3,372,551
Western Europe 1,039,192
Pacific Rim 192,390
Asia 151,773
Eastern Europe 46,125
Africa 27,130
Central and South America 14,894
Middle East 13,776
With the above numbers, it must be realized that those computers connected to the Internet in Costa Rica are not connected with the same capacity to move information as those connected in Los Angeles. In fact, many US corporate computers are connected to the Internet with more capacity than are entire countries.
The connectivity is the key, as messages can be sent and received where before it took days if not weeks (if at all) by other non-electronic based means. In many places today, even highly advanced countries such as the Czech Republic in Eastern Europe, still have severe difficulties with available phone circuits. However, Internet traffic flows freely.
Other Internet Statistics and Facts
Since Prodigy (an on-line bulletin board system that recently allowed access to the Internet) announced it was offering full Internet access and a Web browser to its users on January 17,1995, the sign-up rate has been 12,000 per day. Most are new users, adding to its already existing base of 1.2 million customers.
Forrester Research Inc. - Predicts that on-line direct sales will grow to $4.8 billion in 1998 as a result of the dramatically increasing number of on-line consumers and sellers.
130 countries, some 4,000,000 directly attached computers, 50,000different networks and upwards of 35,000,000 users. (1/95 statistic)
1,500 Commercial Domains (example: http://company.com) register a month - 6/95 statistic.
32,000 registered domains at the end of January 1995.
California leads the pack with the most commercial name registrations, followed by Colorado, Massachusetts and New York.
Internet Demographics (Updated 6 June 1995)
The latest information about who's using the Internet comes from the 2nd WWW User survey conducted by the Graphics, Visualization & Usability Laboratory at Georgia Institute of Technology. Run during October and November of 1994, it gives updated information on the age, affiliation, education, occupation, gender, and geographical distribution of Internet users. Here we've captured a few salient pointers (and added some highlights). Make sure you stop by the full site and check it out.
Age: Median: 29, Oldest: 73, Youngest: 12.
Affiliation: 51% Educational Institution, 31% Commercial
Education: 34% Bachelor, 23% Master Degree
Location: 72% North America, 23% Europe
Occupation: 27% Engineer, 26% Student
Gender: 10% Female, 90% Male
The Full Site Complete with survey methodology information.
Shopping and Search Behavior additional survey results of attitudes.
7.8 million at the "core" can server information
13.5 million are potential direct "consumers" of information
27.5 million can at least send and receive Internet e-mail
Wired vs. Unwired Households Internet US
Average Household Income $66.7K $42.2K
white-collar Worker 59% 34%
Telecommuter 41% 19%
self-employed 31% 14%
College Graduate 81% 33%
Own a CD-ROM Drive 40% 6%
Bank by modem 12% 1%
Purchase On-line 24% 2%
Miscellaneous Statistics
Percentage increase in number of hosts in Europe, March, 1995:11%
Time, in minutes, to download America On-Line's web browser (at14.4 kbps): 25
Average number, per hour, of new subscribers to Netcom over thepast year: 11
Percentage increase in number of hits on FEMA web server in the week following the Oklahoma City bombing: 150
Number of web pages indexed by the Lycos Internet catalog: 3.6million
Number of WWW servers known to Lycos: 23,550
Number of subscribers to NiftyServe: 1 million
Number of subscribers to CompuServe in Europe: 300,000
Percentage of NSFnet traffic from WWW during March, 1995: 19
Number of users on the Internet: No one really knows
Number of Internet Draft documents issued in March, 1995: 142
Number of new domain requests, per working hour, handled by InterNIC
Registration Services in March, 1995: 37
Number of Massachusetts localities with domains registered inMarch, 1995: 92
Number of Norwegian television shows with a WWW home page: 4
Rank, by traffic volume, of rec.games.trading-cards.marketplace:12
Percentage increase in number of hosts in Europe during March,1995: 11
Conclusion
The on-line medium will be its very own unique type of business which will quite separate from traditional print, film or retail mediums. For bigger businesses, the best approach is to create a separate electronic business unit that can draw from the assets of the company but is not limited by them. Don't just scan in the catalog or download the text of a publication. Instead, create new content that makes the most of the medium. Don't think anymore in terms of 8.5" x 11". Your documents and medium include computers, graphics and text on computers in other parts of the world, sound, video and simultaneous voice communications. The technology is in place. Its limitations are being pushed outward everyday. What they said was impossible yesterday is reality today. I can remember lecturing not that many years ago that phone lines couldn't sustain data communications beyond 9,600 BPS. 28,800BPS is now quite common over the same lines!
Be prepared. Create new content that makes use of the medium. The rate of growth is staggering. The numbers are real and the potential is mind boggling!
On-line Catalogs
Computer Literacy Bookstores - (http://www.clbooks.com)
Macmillian Publishing - (http://www.mcp.com)
Faucet Outlet - (http://www.faucet.com/faucet)
DeLorme Mapping - (http://www.delorme.com) - Provides mapping software and databases for business, educationand government.
Canadian Airlines - (http://www.cdnair.ca)
Selected Commerce Directories
Commercial Use of the Net - (http://pass.wayne.edu/business.html)
Business and Commerce Site - EINet Galaxy - (http://www.einet.net/galaxy)
Internet Business Directory - (http://ibd.ar.com)
Interesting Business Site(s) - http://www.rpi.edu/~okeefe/business.html
Open Market Commercial Sites Index - http://www.directory.net
Thomas Ho's Favorite Electronic Commerce WWW Resources - http://www.engr.iupui.edu/~ho/interests/commerce.html
Yahoo's Business Resources - http://www.yahoo.com/Business/Miscellaneous
History of the Internet and Hypermedia - Timeline Summary
1945
Vannevar Bush (The Science Advisor to President Roosevelt during World War II) proposes MEMEX, a conceptual machine that can store vast amounts of information, in which users have the ability tocreate information trails, links of related texts and illustrations, which can be stored and used for future reference.
1960's
Packet-switching networks Paul Baran, RAND: "On Distributed Communications Networks" no single outage point
1965
Ted Nelson coins the word hypertext.
1967
ACM Symposium on Operating Principles Plan presented for a packet-switching network
Andy van Dam and others build the Hypertext Editing System.
1968
Doug Engelbart demonstrates NLS, a hypertext system.
Network presentation to the Advanced Research Projects Agency(ARPA)
1969
ARPANET commissioned by DOD for research into networking
1970
ALOHAnet developed by Norman Abrahamson, U of Hawaii
1971
15 nodes (23 hosts): UCLA, SRI, UCSB, U of Utah, BBN, MIT, RAND,SDC, Harvard, Lincoln Lab, Stanford, UIU(C), CWRU, CMU, NASA/Ames
1972
1973
First international connections to the ARPANET: England and Norway
1975
1975
ZOG (now KMS), a distributed hypermedia system, debuts at Carnegie-Mellon.
1970's
Store and Forward Networks used electronic mail technology and extended it to conferencing and HM Elizabeth, Queen of the United Kingdom sent out an e-mail
1976
uucp (unix-to-unix copy) developed at AT&T Bell Labs and distributed with UNIX one year later
1977
THEORYNET created at U of Wisconsin providing electronic mail to over 100 researchers in computer science (using uucp).
1978
The Aspen Movie Map, the first hypermedia video disc, shown at MIT.
1979
1981
BITNET, the "Because Its Time NETwork"
1981
Ted Nelson conceptualizes "Xanadu", a central, pay-per-document hypertext database encompassing all written information.
1982
INWG establishes the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and Internet Protocol (IP), as the protocol suite, commonly known as TCP/IP, for ARPANET.
This leads to one of the first definition of an "internet" as a connected set of networks, specifically those using TCP/IP, and "Internet" as connected TCP/IP internets.
1983
Name server developed at U of Wisconsin, no longer requiring users to know the exact path to other systems.
1984
Domain Name Server (DNS) introduced. Number of hosts breaks 1,000
1984
Telos introduces Filevision, a hypermedia database for the Macintosh
1985
Intermedia, a hypermedia system, is conceived at Brown University by Norman Meyrowitz and others.
1985
Janet Walker creates the Symbolics Document Examiner.
1986
OWL introduces GUIDE, a hypermedia document browser.
1986
NSFNET created (backbone speed of 56 Kbps)
1987
NSF signs a cooperative agreement to manage the NSFNET backbone with IBM, MCI, and Merit Network, Inc.
1987
Apple Computers introduces HyperCard, the first widely available personal hypermedia authoring system.
1987
Hypertext '87 Workshop.
1988
Internet worm burrows through the Net
1989
1989
Autodesk, a major CAD software manufacturer, takes on Xanadu asa project.
1989
Tim Berners-Lee proposes World-Wide Web project.
1990
1990
ECHT (European Conference on Hypertext).
1991
1992
Autodesk drops the Xanadu project.
1992
1993
April 1993
International Workshop on Hypermedia and Hypertext Standards, Amsterdam.
June 1993
Mosaic 1.0 for X windows released by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications.
August 1993
First World-Wide Web developers' conference in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
November 1993
Hypertext Conference in Seattle, Washington.
June 1994
World Conference on Educational Multimedia and Hypermedia in Vancouver, Canada.
1994
Communities begin to be wired up to the Internet, US Senate and State of California provide information servers
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