Take A Functional Perspective On Using the Internet For Your Business  

Many business people have become almost intimidated by the Internet and all the hyperbole surrounding it.  Not to have a cutting-edge web site or to be doing significant business on the web, it seems, are almost embarrassments to be concealed.

With its stunning growth and general public acceptance, the Internet has indeed become a leading marketing medium and change agent.  Its benefits are obvious.  The question is just how, when and to what extent your business should seek to exploit them.

One way to demystify the enormity and diversity of the Internet and use it effectively is to take a functional perspective.  The key is to understand – and separately manage – the three distinct functional roles the Internet plays in today’s E-business world:  communications medium, distribution channel and research tool.  Each carries its own specific benefits and limitations.

The Internet is first about communications, offering an immediate, worldwide, 24 hr/day means of communications that is both economical and efficient.  It can be tracked, is not time dependent for receipt and provides total control of content and timing.  As such it’s excellent for active communications, such as e-mail, with specific, known audiences.  Likewise it serves well in a passive communications role, such as a web site, where the world community can access information on demand.

But Internet communications is far from perfect.  First, not everybody is connected.   And adequate bandwidth, while slowly improving, is either too expensive or unavailable for most individuals and small businesses.  Content, while rich and enormous, falls under freedom of expression, and thus is mostly unregulated.  This lack of quality control allows lots of meaningless, faulty, deceptive, even objectionable content – essentially noise – to crowd out the relevant, valuable information people seek.  Then there’s sending unsolicited e-mail to large general audiences – the crime of “spam.”

As a distribution channel, however, the Internet is beginning to shine.  With its remarkable utility, efficiency, and economy, it’s becoming the tool of choice for purchases of well-known, precisely definable products, for delivery of electronically formatted goods and services, and for building and maintaining close, efficient, interactive customer-vendor relationships. 

Yet it’s limited here too.  Internet sales must be pull-through, or customer initiated.  Active, push-through sales (think banner ads) remain an experiment in progress.  The Internet doesn’t fare well for selling abstract, complex or taste-driven goods either, since “not-sure-what-I-want” customers can’t easily touch, sample, ask questions or compare as they would when shopping traditionally.  Perhaps worst of all, there’s no one to “close the sale” in cyberspace.

Meanwhile, the Internet has earned recognition as a powerful research tool.   It’s ideal for finding and retrieving specific, well-defined content of all sorts, accessing background on large, well-known companies and other entities, or locating and collecting archival and other public domain information.

But the benefits of Internet research are also finite.  One can never know just how complete or universal a given search for information has been.  Significant amounts of data still aren’t accessible via the web, and not all key individuals and organizations are necessarily on line either.  Neither is the ‘net ready for prime time as an active research tool – that is, to ascertain various trends, preferences, and perspectives of general populations with known statistical accuracy.  The reliability of self-selecting research (in which web site visitors or e-mail recipients decide whether to complete and submit a survey) is severely limited.  The reason:  respondents are neither fully known nor necessarily representative of the surveyed population.

by James R. Helbig as published in ICCB

9/19/2000