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Table of Contents
Defining "Internet marketing" by Richard Seltzer
Book Review: Weaving the Web by Tim Berners-Lee
Experiment in participative democracy: car recalls by Richard Seltzer
Alternative to ISBN for electronic booksIn the physical world, there are many, very separate job functions, of which marketing is one.
On the Web, everything that affects the visitor is marketing:
The Internet marketing plan is not an add-on. It should not be developed in isolation or put together after other business decisions have been made. It should be at the heart of the business plan.
Branding rules should not be developed and enforced separate from the Internet marketing plan. Graphics and logo-oriented branding programs -- legacy programs from the old era of print-based marketing -- have no place on the Web. And efforts to translate those rules into cyberspace often lead to page design templates and practices that wind up blocking search engines, and hence reduce the traffic to the site. Efforts focusing on attracting and serving the audience should come first.
Likewise, the design of the site should not be determined by what is possible with the latest technological gimmickry. Just because it can be done and is technically impressive does not mean that it should be done. The design must serve the needs of the audience. That includes, above all, making sure that all the content can be fully indexed by search engines, so the target audience can readily find the site.
Web visitors, except those who arrive randomly -- having clicked on a banner ad in a semi-conscious daze or having clicked on a link by mistake -- arrive with expectations. They may be looking for information or an opportunity for social interaction or might want to shop. In any case, they expect easy navigation within a site, clear explanations of what's what so they don't have to waste time, and quick satisfaction of their immediate expectation or at least handy customer service contacts that can help them get it.
When I pick up a brochure, I expect nothing, and rare is the occasion when I hesitate for more than a second before throwing it in the trash.
When I arrive at a Web site, I arrive with a purpose in mind. Yes, I'm impatient. Yes, I can with a click go somewhere else. But because of my expectation of satisfaction, I am willing to suspend disbelief for a brief while and poke around a bit to see if I have in fact made a mistake or if what I want is really there.
The concept of visitor expectations -- making sure that everything you do to attract visitors sets the right expectations, and also making sure that the satisfaction is easy to find, and that help is also easy to find -- should be foremost in the mind of Internet marketers. This is extremely difficult, and in many ways unrelated to the activities of marketers in the physical world. It is also a remarkable opportunity so long as you approach this task with the right attitude. Your job is to serve and to satisfy. The role of your Web site is not as a replacement for printed marketing materials, rather, from the perspective of visitors, it should do something. To visitors the site itself is a service or product that they are paying for with their time and attention.
To be effective, the person in charge of "Internet marketing" needs to be able to control or at least strongly influence all factors related to the visitor experience and coordinate them. That person needs to be more of a ringmaster than a traditional marketing person, with heightened sensitivity to the interests, concerns, and expectations of the audience and how to bring together the full resources of the company to meet them.
Do that right and many target visitors will find more useful information than they anticipated and will linger and explore, or they will become engaged in useful and pleasurable activites that they hadn't imagined. They will want to return again and again and spread the word. They will want to help you succeed, because they value your service. And if you provide ways to let them help you (through online discussion, affiliate programs, etc.), they will become not just visitors, not just customers, but volunteer partners, increasing the value of your business.
(Weaving the Web is available from Amazon.com. This article was heard on the radio program "The Computer Report," which is broadcast live on WCAP in Lowell, Mass., and is syndicated on WBNW in Boston and WPLM in Plymouth, Mass, and is also available as RealAudio at www.thereport.com)
In retrospect, the growth of the Web seems almost inevitable, arising from characteristics of how the mind works and how people can interact with one another's ideas. In that sense, the story of its creation reminds me a bit of Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle. In Vonnegut's novel, an illogical belief (Bokononism) is so in synch with the human mind that it spreads from person to person, like a force of nature.
Tim Berners-Lee tells his story in the first person, as autobiography, because the story of the Web is the story of his life. He conceived it, implemented it, and now heads the effort to shepherd it forward and help it thrive despite challenges from big business, big government, and clueless interpreters of the law, worldwide.
Over the years, the idea of the Web slowly formed in his mind. "Inventing the World Wide Web involved my growing realization that there was a power in arranging ideas in an unconstrained, weblike way. And that awareness came to me through precisely that kind of process. The Web arose as the answer to an open challenge, through the swirling together of influences, ideas, and realizations from many sides, until, by the wondrous offices of the human mind, a new concept jelled. It was a process of accretion, not the linear solving of one well-defined problem after another." (p. 3)
"Suppose all the information stored on computers everywhere were linked... Suppose I could program my computer to create a space in which anything could be linked to anything... Once a bit of information in that space was labeled with an address, I could tell my computer to get it. By being able to reference anything with equal ease, a computer could represent associations between things that might seem unrelated but somehow did, in fact, share a relationship. A web of information would form." (p. 4)
The power of this idea directly related to its simplicity and to the lack of central control.
"The art was to define the few basic, common rules of 'protocol' that would allow one computer to talk to another, in such a way that when all computers everywhere did it, the system would thrive, not break down. For the Web, those elements were in decreasing order of importance, universal resource identifiers (URIs), the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), and the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML).
"What was often difficult for people to understand about the design was that there was nothing else beyond URIs, HTTP, and HTML. There was no central computer 'controlling' the Web, no single network on which these protocols worked, not even an organization anywhere that 'ran' the Web. The Web was not a physical 'thing' that existed in a certain 'place.' It was a 'space' in which information could exist." (p. 36)
When he looks ahead to the potential future impact of the Web on the world, he gets mystical.
"If we succeed, creativity will arise across larger and more diverse groups. These high-level activities, which have occurred just within one human's brain, will occur among ever-larger, more interconnected groups of people acting as if they shared a larger intuitive brain. It is an intriguing analogy. Perhaps that late-night surfing is not such a waste of time after all: It is just the Web dreaming." (pp. 201-202)
He now approaches this life-long challenge with a sort of religious awe and sense of responsibility toward humanity. The mindset in some ways is similar to the corporate culture of Digital Equipment under the guidance of Ken Olsen, where rule number one was "do the right thing."
"I feel that to deliberately build a society, incrementally, using the best ideas we have, is our duty and will also be the most fun. We are slowly learning the value of decentralized, diverse systems, and of mutual respect and tolerance. Whether you put it down to evolution or your favorite spirit, the neat thing is that we seem as humans to be tuned so that we do in the end get the most fun out of doing the 'right' thing." (p. 205)
The Web has been an important part of my life since 1993, so many of the events recounted in this book sound familiar, though I remember them in a different context. It's illuminating to see them all unfold through the perspective of the Web's creator. It's also disorienting to re-experience the central story of your own time presented as history -- to read about these events from the perspective of their long-term meaning -- with a beginning, a middle, and an end -- rather than as we heard about them or encountered their effects day-by-day, as disconnected happenings in an open-ended, continuing present-tense, with many possible outcomes. And it's gratifying to discover that behind it all at the beginning and guiding now -- collaboratively, unobtrusively through the World Wide Web Consortium -- is someone motivated and inspired by an optimistic vision based on faith in the human spirit -- a vision of the future totally different from the dark satiric world of Kurt Vonnegut.
"This system produced a weird and wonderful machine, which needed care to maintain, but could take advantage of the ingenuity, inspiration, and intuition of individuals in a special way. That, from the start, has been my goal for the World Wide Web.
"Hope in life comes form the interconnections among all the people in the world... We find the journey more and more exciting, but we don't expect it to end..."
Tim Berners-Lee concludes "The experience of seeing the Web take off by the grassroots effort of thousands gives me tremendous hope that if we have the individual will, we can collectively make of our world what we want." (p. 209)
I just saw a TV segment (NBC, evening news, January 14, 2000) about car recalls and how they are ineffective because 1) people with used cars never hear about them and 2) people who do hear about them often ignore them, even when safety is involved.
In typical TV news style, they just pointed out the problem, like telling an anecdote and left the impression that there was no practical way to solve it.
But it seems like the solution is obvious.
All states have annual automotive inspection systems. In most (all?) cases, the inspection info is gathered and distributed over computer networks.
Why not simply feed the recall data to the state inspection systems. Then when you go in to get a new inspection sticker, info about recalls related to this particular vehicle appear on the screen and can even be given to the motorist as a printout. Ideally, the inspection people could also check the vehicle to see if the fixes had been done yet.
As a further refinement, the states and/or the federal government could mandate that certain serious safety-related changes must be made for a car to pass inspection.
I believe that this is an important and feasible change that could save lives and prevent injury and property damage. But I'm not sure how to go about bringing this to the attention of people who could do something about it. I don't really know who those people are.
Any suggestions?
This felt like it could be an experiment in participative democracy. With everyone who is anyone presumably accessible over the Internet, why not just send this message to all the likely and appropriate political figures?
For Massachusetts, I went to the official home page of the State of Massachusetts www.state.ma.us. From there it was easy to click to get to the organizational listing from Massachusetts government, from which I easily found the email address of the state senator for the part of Boston where I live, Marion Walsh. The state representative for this ward and precinct, however, David Donnelly has no listed email address, just phone and snail mail. Governor Cellucci was a bit of a challenge. From the organizational listing, I clicked on Governor and Lieutenant Governor, which took me to a brochure-ware page, saying nothing, but with a link labelled "Contact." That provides a lot of snail mail addresses and phone numbers, but at the bottom of the page, they do finally give the governor's email address.
Thanks to the Library of Congress' Thomas site thomas.loc.gov, it was very easy to contact senators and representatives in the federal government. Congressman Joe Moakley, and Senators Kennedy and Kerry all have email addresses.
I contacted all of them, and also NBC (feedback@msnbc.com) since it was their news segment that had prompted this train of thought.
I also contacted friends who have a long-standing interest in grassroots democracy. And a couple of politicians with whom I have a passing acquaintance (David Cohen, mayor of Newton, and Mark Lawrence, president of the Maine state senate) in hopes that they would have useful advice.
It will be interesting to see who responds, and what, if anything comes of this effort. I'll post updates here.
"Bill Bradley" campaign
led me to a page at the site of New Hampshire Public Radio that had links to all the campaign sites, www.nhpr.org/newsroom/politics/nh-prim/webprim.htm (I was a bit disappointed that Foster's Daily Democrat, a newspaper in Dover, NH, www.fosters.com, that I had helped to get online back in 1995, as a pilot project in participative democracy with Digital's Internet Business Group, had decided to do anything special for the primary this time around.)
Much to my surprise, three of the five major candidates were virtually unreachable through their campaign Web sites. Both of the democrats (Gore and Bradley) and the Republican frontrunner (Bush) had one-way sites: just places to put brochureware, places for people to read their ads and their messages. Sure, they made it easy to volunteer and to donate money. But there was no simple email address to let the candid know your opinions and to send your suggestions. Yes, there were little forms that you could fill out, but those were primarily intended to capture your snailmail address and phone number, for later fundraising followup. Bradley's site even made it clear that any response to online comments would be sent by snailmail. Gore had a "Townhall" space, but with no means to submit comments and participate. I was, however, able to glean an email address from one of the selected email comments that they had posted. I submitted brief notes to those three expressing my disappointment that their Web sites were sending the wrong message: that the candidates were not particularly interested in listening to the public. I asked them to please let me know if and when they changed their sites to make email addresses clearly visible. It will be interesting to see if any respond.
On the Internet, the way you set up your Web site says who you are and what you believe much more loudly and clearly than any text. The two candidates who did make it easy to reach them were McCain and Forbes, neither of whom I would have previously considered to be Internet-savvy or Internet-sensitive. Now I'll have to give them both serious consideration.
Reply from Alfred Thompson act2@ACThompson.net, Tue, 18 Jan 2000:
FYI -- I started my own experiment with using the the Internet to contact presidential candidates. I was unhappy with the public issues statements that I found on their web sites. So I sent email to all six republicans (I know that the Democrats are hopelessly on the wrong side of this issue) asking them to tell me how they are different from the Democrats and from each other. I used the fill in the boxes at two sites and real email addresses at the other four. I sent these last night.
I received one response (Gary Bauer) so far. It looks like the issues statement from the web site which is not as much as I want but more than the others post. And it's a timely response. I am hoping to see who is really serious about the internet as a means of reaching people.
I believe that it would be good to get away from numbers. The unique identifier for an ebook should be easy to construct and easy to understand. Ideally, it would not require any central registration, and should hence be free.
I'd suggest a format similar to and related to URLs, especially since every vendor is likely to already have a domain name.
Consider:
domainnameoforigin.domainnameofpublisher.author.title.edition.format
The edition identifier could be a date, a letter, or a number -- that's entirely up to the publisher. If a single electronic book (entity) contains more than more title or more than one author, separate the elements with an underscore.
Don't worry about the length of the identifier. Today's systems are not as constrained as the systems of 20 years ago (good old Y2K). Make the identifiers meaningful, and avoid having to create a bureaucracy to assign them. For instance,
gutenberg.samizdat.baum.wizardofoz_landofoz_dorothyandthewizardofoz.1.txt
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