Fish Out of Water

One of the inevitable consequences of spending hours on the world wide web is that we internalize the structures of cyberspace. The way we experience cyberspace changes how we think about the world.

We used to say things like "his life is an open book," or "he spelled everything out from a to zed." That way of framing the world had percolated through our psychic processes every time we read a printed book. We didn't even question the way those metaphors framed our reality. They were so much a part of us, we took the frame for granted and concentrated on the picture in the frame. But the picture -- its shape, its dimensions -- were determined by the frame.

Now we find ourselves internalizing metaphors from our experience of clicking through cyberspace. When I hear someone typing at a keyboard while they're talking to me on the telephone, they're "multitasking." Although the word "broadcast" derived originally form how farmers scattered seeds as they walked the rows in springtime, it became synonymous with radio transmission. Now the Internet has backformed "narrowcasting" from the word to mean targeting very specific segments of the population.

This excursion into semantics is fundamental to an exploration of doing business on the Net. How we frame the world -- the shape of the containers that hold our thoughts -- determine our actions. We don't see them because they're like water to a fish. When the fish is thrown up on the beach and begins using rudimentary lungs instead of gills or stubby fins as legs, it becomes aware of the water in contrast to the air.

We are all like fish learning to walk on stubby fins in the rarefied air of cyberspace. Anyone who wants to do business on the web these days needs to have the courage to enter this unknown world and confront how we are being transformed by this new technology.

The most successful businesspersons in cyberspace will be samurai who have become supremely conscious of who they are and how they operate.

Doing business on the World Wide Web requires that we become aware of how it is different -- as well as the same -- as doing business over the telephone or face to face.

None of us has all the answers to marketing on the Web. But as we share our experience, we will find answers together.

It Feels Like Cheating

A local school district told me that the large corporations that hired their graduates were pleased with every aspect of their education but one: the young people knew how to think alone but didn't know how to work cooperatively in teams. The virtual workplace requires cooperative teamwork, they were told, and the teachers had better get busy showing them how to do it.

How can they teach what they don't know?

In my day, we were taught to work independently because that's what teachers knew how to do. My "intuitive exploration" of "cooperative learning" was called "cheating" and got me a reprimand. Behaviors that used to be condemned as a moral lapse are now celebrated as the wave of the future.

The following observations are islands in the clickstream. I invite you to share your insights with me by email so I can include them in future articles and turn islands into steppingstones to the far bank.

The Rate of Change is Changing

Exponential change is no joke. It means things are changing at a faster and faster rate everywhere at the same time.

A financial manager and investment adviser I know recently returned from a national meeting. He said everyone felt the same way: "So much information is coming into our computers these days that knowing what to do with it is like trying to get a drink from a fire hose. We don't even know what's important any more, and if someone tells us, we aren't sure what to do with it."

A few months ago I was called by a land developer who had heard me discussing the Internet on a local radio program. He wanted to market time share condominiums over the Internet and asked me to outline the options.

My research included searches of Internet sites and on-line services like America Online as well as numerous conversations with marketing pros. As I sat down to put it all together in a final report, I received an urgent call from a local consulting firm.

They had been asked by a software company to help them bring a web page builder - a user-friendly HTML editor -- to market. They had just raised about $US 10,000,000 in a stock offering and estimated that they had two months to capture "mindshare" in the growing market of those who wanted to build their own web sites. Other companies were developing similar products and GIVING THEM AWAY FREE over the Internet in order to hook people into their product as Netscape has done so well. (As Bill Gates noted recently, there has never before been a marketplace in which the primary products are given away free in order to build a market for ancillary or subsequent sales.)

So I became part of a team that dropped everything and used every approach to marketing that we knew to get that software reviewed, bundled, downloaded and purchased. At the end of two months they had built a niche and were not -- for the moment -- in danger of going bankrupt. Some lessons learned:

(1) Because we did not have time to try different methods and evaluate their effectiveness, we used every conceivable channel to market the product. The most efficient feedback loop was still too long to enable us to learn what worked and do it more and what didn't work less. We had to try everything and bank our knowledge of what seemed to work for the future.

(2) Only a team of diverse people was up to the task. We were a virtual team for two months, coalescing around a single task, then dispersing again into the ether of cyberspace.

(3) Each member of the team needed to be comfortable with ambiguity and a high degree of anxiety because there was no way to know what we didn't know. THE MUTUALITY OF OUR TEAMWORK GENERATED THE SECURITY WE NEEDED FROM THE INSIDE OUT THAT ENABLED US TO BE EFFECTIVE IN RAPIDLY CHANGING CIRCUMSTANCES.

An Internet guru told me, "The most important knowledge I have is the knowledge of what I don't need to know. I need to know where the knowledge is and how to get it when I need it."

Once that software project was out of the way, I returned to the report for those developers.

In the two months that had elapsed, the relationship of online providers like AOL to the Internet had changed so radically that the report I intended to write two months earlier -- although current at the time -- was obsolete. Microsoft, for example, had cancelled plans for the Microsoft Network to compete with AOL, changing it into a site on the WWW. Developers who thought they had a commitment from Microsoft were left high and dry.

If all those smart people at Microsoft had to turn their truck around in the middle of the road, the rest of us had better get used to knowing that we can't know what is going to affect our plans. Business news is brimful every single day of new alliances among big players trying to hedge their bets and cover their butts. We all have to do the same thing.

Band-Aid the Bomb

Another lesson:

The site the developers intended to build was near an area in the South Pacific where nuclear testing had taken place. Any net-savvy surfer using search engines would find numerous sites dedicated to documenting the history of those blasts and their consequences. Anyone using the Net, that is, to explore vacation opportunities would encounter some negative political agendas.

Marketing on the Internet in this case meant a strategy for "brand defense" to combat the negative spin of political controversy. That would not have been essential in a world of print media in which information was neither linked nor easily accessible.

Learning from O. P. E.

When the World Wide Web began to capture our attention, traditional print media panicked and stampeded onto the Net. Newspaper articles reported that newspapers were dead; books were written about the end of books. Of course, more printed text shoots off our printers and fax machines than ever.

Many moguls who rushed to build web sites are now abandoning those sites. Why? First of all, there were too many virtual newspapers and the audience was still too small. Most of us don't want to read our newspaper on a flickering monitor on the desk. Newsprint is still portable and cheap.

Lesson: Every new technology is used at first as if it is the technology it subsequently replaces. The first motion picture cameras, for example, were set up on tripods in front of plays in traditional proscenium arch theaters. When Alexander Graham Bell was asked about practical uses for the telephone, he thought it might be used to call ahead to the next town to tell them a telegram was coming.

Most of us are not going to be Bill Gates and build Microsoft. We need to step back from that panicky feeling of being left behind and see the big picture. Entrepreneurs need prudence as well as courage. Whatever we can learn from other people's experience is money in the bank.

Global Means Global

Many businesses going on the web give lip service to "the global marketplace" but still act local.

Most web sites use English. We rarely find Japanese, German, or Spanish, the languages of the biggest markets in the world. If we intend to market to a global marketplace, we had better make it possible for non-English-speakers to do business with us.

Awareness of the global village percolates slowly through our habitual ways of thinking. I am still surprised when I receive email, for example, from a UN official who read my Japanese article about the relationship of Japanese culture to Internet culture. He planned to be in Tokyo and wanted me to meet him at his hotel for a conversation. I received a similar invitation from the London office of Hill and Knowlton to come to a meeting after work in a Kensington pub. They assumed I was right around the corner.

I couldn't make those meetings but I could initiate a conversation via email about working together in cyberspace.

Lesson: the global village is more than a metaphor. Our encounter with diverse cultures can be as shocking as the effects of exponential change: Again, we don't know what we don't know and most of the time we don't even know THAT we don't know. So we need to use everything -- other people, web sites, software applications like intelligent agents -- to filter out relevant information and turn it into knowledge.

The only real capital in the virtual world is knowledge, not information.

Lesson: Living in the virtual world is more like networking than building a bunch of talking billboards. Those who grasp that networked computers facilitate communication, not just the dissemination of information, will meet real people in those imaginary gardens and form real relationships.

Ultimately the Internet is not about technology. It's about people.

The Wisdom of Longinus

Some things DON'T change.

A couple of thousand years ago, Longinus was reflecting on good literature. It must do two things, he concluded: it must teach and it must please.

Successful web sites must be informative and/or entertaining or both. Information must be provided up front to hook people into coming back again and again.

The WWW is littered with ghost sites. Often these sites were well designed for their time. They consist of static text and images and dated information. A year or two later, surfers who want java applications, applets, the animation of shockwave, find them as stilted as stick figures. Unless sites are updated to meet changing needs and tastes, they die a lonely death.

Many businesses budgeted for the initial costs of a web site with little thought given to how much it cost to sustain the site over time. 75% of all web sites are upgraded within one year. Only sites that provide real value -- current and compelling information or genuine entertainment -- will keep people coming back

. What Road Do You Want to Take?

That's the question the caterpillar asked Alice. She didn't know. Well, the caterpillar said, where do you want to go? Poor Alice didn't know that either. She only knew she wanted to go somewhere. So the caterpillar told her to take any road. "They ALL go somewhere," he said.

If you intend to develop a web site for marketing your product, ask yourself first, what is your ultimate intention? Do not ask that question as you sit alone at a desk with pencil and paper: use colleagues and associates to brainstorm with you, even if they constitute a virtual board of directors for only one session. If you don't know who to use or how to arrange for a strategy session, let me know by email. It can be done as easily in cyberspace as in your Capetown office.

Who is your targeted audience? Increasingly sophisticated measures of hits and clicks enable you to know exactly who is visiting your site, how long they stay, what they look at and what they ignore. It is foolish to pay high prices for an audience that surfs right over your ad. How many click through to get information about your product? How many contact you to learn more? How many didn't even realize they were a target audience because they were learning so much from your site?

Be Prudent, But Get on the Train

The managing director of Hensley Segal Rentschler recently told marketers at FutureFocus '96 that the Internet will fundamentally change the way they do their jobs. "Within the next few years," he said, "the Internet will develop into the backbone of the industry and will be an invaluable marketing communications tool for the remainder of our careers."

A recent survey conducted by Nielsen suggests that, compared with the adoption rates for key technologies in the past, the Internet is entering the mainstream far more quickly than analysts had expected. Check out a detailed executive summary of the survey without charge at Commerce Net (http://www.commerce.net) or Nielsen Media's web site (http://www.nielsenmedia.com).

Let's use the net to gather information about the Net and also to partner with one another. Let's use each other to do more together than any of us know how to do alone.

1995

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