NAMS 35^th National Conference

March 20-22, 1997

Monteleone Hotel, New Orleans

Internet- an Advertising and Communication Tool

The Internet is THE hot topic. On the TV news, in the press, in magazines commentators, authors, "people in the know" talk about it, write about it, postulate about it. Fortune 500 companies have staked their corporate lives on it, WEB TV as an example. The accolades spew forth. Why even the President campaigned with a promise to provide government support to an electronic super highway! Truly this internet thing has been made out to sound like the a modern day Ponce de Leon’s fountain of youth, or Cortez’s "El Dorado". We all know that neither Ponce de Leon nor Cortez ever truly found what they searched for. But in the process of searching they did discover Florida, much of the southwestern United States and collected about all the riches from every native willing and unwilling to part with it. I also think that along the way these two explorers made more than a few other opportunists filthy rich.

Now I just don’t see marine surveyors getting filthy rich period, with or without the promises of the internet aficionados. So Perhaps a better analogy is Dorothy in the land of OZ, where the yellow brick road didn’t truly lead to Kansas. Now join me on an adventure down our yellow brick road and perhaps we will learn together how to avoid a few "lions and tigers and bears, oh my…!"

Advertising Vision Statement

I remember well mulling for days, weeks even, whether to invest in a fax machine. If I needed to fax someone I could always go to the currency exchange and for $5.00 per page receive a fax or, heaven forbid, send one for $8.00 per page. I mean the mail is good enough, isn’t it? What if I spend all that money on a fax machine and a telephone line for it and then no one sends me anything?

Well I attacked that decision in the same fashion as so many others:

How many faxes am I sending? How many am I receiving?

How many of my clients have fax machines? How often do they ask me to send it by fax? How many of my competitors have fax?

Did you have a "handle"? How long did you keep using your CB? You know it was fun to listen to the chatter and banter on the radio. It was also fun to be a part of it! But CB never grew into a necessity. I didn’t HAVE TO HAVE a CB to survive, or to function at play or work. It was always an OPTION and as such it was and is a novelty in my life.

The personal computer never was an option, it was purchased as a tool. And as a tool its function is to ease my day - to - day business life. Five years ago the BBS, bulletin board systems operated by computer and peripheral manufactures, were THE place to go to get driver updates and product support. A few professional groups I belong to operated BBS where professional information could be researched, Email exchanged with members, and Chat rooms entered live or to post messages with questions soliciting answers or help from other members.

The online services were much the same with CompuServe the most popular. It had great depth of information and services for the computer "geek", but with an accompanying difficult screen command system that a geek found elementary and a novice found impenetrable. So Prodigy with its graphic based system was a novice’s dream come true. Then came AOL (America Online), improvements to the Windows operating system and four major players in the online service arena:

CompuServe
America Online (AOL)
Microsoft Network (MSN)
Prodigy

These online services operated much like BBS’s with the members exchanging information primarily among each other and getting information from major companies through their sites. If you knew someone it was by their screen name and email address. You could chat (talk) with anyone that was a member of your service, but not with someone on a different service. Originally you could only email members of your service, later you could email anyone with an internet email address (no internet browser service) and even later you could browse a portion of the internet.

Sounds sort of like the scarecrow before his visit with the wizard!

The homepage is, essentially, like a commercial site on an online service. But on the internet there is NO MEMBERSHIP. Your homepage can be viewed by AOL, CompuServe, MSN, or Prodigy members, or by ANYONE with access to the internet. We’ll get into this more a little later.

There is much "to do" over secure transactions on the net. Do you, or I, really trust that our credit card numbers won’t be used by some opportunist to buy the latest big screen TV? The internet aficionados write that transactions (sales) occur everyday on the net. I have friends that bought all of their Christmas presents entirely on the net. Now I don’t like to think my friends are the subject of a PT Barnum epithet (they do look like distant cousins of the scarecrow), yet they report no credit card abuse from any transaction. Do you recall if the scarecrow looked any different after the visit to the wizard?

As a matter of fact I’ve join my friends and have committed net charge. I report to you that it was painless and to date I have suffered no ill side effects!

How Did the Web Get Here?

Remember Dr. Cray? Well then let me refresh your memory. Dr. Cray was from Minneapolis and he is the inventor of the super computer. He got tons of your tax dollars (an opportunist?), opened a company called Cray Research, and sold these huge behemoth computers that filled climate controlled rooms to ten major Universities. These ten computers were linked together over the internet to become the super computer.

The Super Computer was not the only denizen of the internet. The government, ours and others, had been communicating computer to computer for years. Universities all over the world communicated computer to computer too. But these were climate controlled rooms of computer, Sun Sparc stations talking to UNIX main frames using software with names like FORTRAN! " lions and tigers and bears….oh my!"

Each of President Clinton’s campaign platforms included agenda items for the "information super highway" or the electronic super highway in my example. His vision was to open the internet to every American household. This is a reality today, five years ago it was not.

Now it costs you about $2,000.00 for a multimedia internet ready PC. This is expensive for the average household. It is a far cry from a climate controlled room of computer, expense wise, but taken into context it is still expensive. If your PC is a business tool this cost is a little more palatable. Web TV, at about $400.00, is akin to the purchase of a TV set and at this price President Clinton’s campaign promise just might become a reality.

So with all I’ve said so far, are you convinced this ain’t no CB craze? "That’s a big 10-4 good buddy". Well thanks for the vote of confidence! But you’re really not alone. Many people hold the opinion that the net or WEB is just a fad and that after the dust settles, things will be the way they used to be. You know we’ll all be watching the radio!

I believe we’re in the infancy of the WEB as a commercial venue. Just like fax machines, not everyone has one and not everyone thinks they need one. But there’s one thing with the WEB, its growth in the past five years has been , mathematically, on the orders of magnitude, rather than mere multiplication.

Do I dare not "catch the wave"? Yes lion, I’m sure the wizard can give you courage!

Advertising Goals and Objectives

The business school pundits say you have to weigh advertising decisions in the form of goals and objectives, thus my title. I, being of non-business school stock, tend to want everything brought to "the least common denominator". So when I think of advertising I think of my goal as increased sales and my objective as increased revenue. Now to some that may seem to be the same thing, but the least common denominator is AT WHAT EXPENSE!

How many marine surveyors advertise in print medium? To answer a question with a question, Have you got ten fingers? Then you’ve counted too many!

The problem with advertising, in my eye, is that I don’t know how to measure the effectiveness of it in relationship to its cost. Lets take for example yellow pages advertising. Most surveyors can be found listed in the yellow pages, some even have bold listings or display ads. These ads are expensive! Have you ever tried to determine what return you are getting from that ad? I set up a section on our assignment sheet that asks the customer how they found out about us. This one questions answer tells me: if the boat show booth did it, the yellow pages ad, the homepage, or what made that customer aware of my company’s existence. What’s the number one answer to this question? "I heard about you from one of your customers."

Does this mean that I shouldn’t advertise? Not really. What it means is that people react or place orders based upon a combination of experiences, or more accurately a culmination of experiences, and ALL of your activities are forms of advertising. So the more experiences someone has with you the more likely that person will place an order with you. This theory is the same as the department store window displays, television commercials, etc. The so called shot gun effect where, hopefully, one pellet hits the mark out of the 200 or so in the shell. A very wasteful and crude method, but effective just the same.

The web is a place designed with voyeurs in mind. A nameless place where one can visit every store and never fear being approached by a salesperson. The most important measure used in conventional print, radio or TV advertising is numbers. In print it is circulation, in radio and TV it is number of listeners or viewers. Even in a department store you can count the number of people coming in the door!

The WEB has software tools that you can use to monitor the "hits" or number of visitors to your homepage. You need to do two things to accomplish this, one is to request logs of the hits from your homepage service provider and second you need the software to interprete the logs. If you’ve been to a page on the WEB that had a window stating the number of visits, this is one type of software that measures the frequency of viewing. The logs from your service provider will tell you generally who visited, how long they stayed there, and what they viewed on your site.

Sounds great huh? But, what difference does this information make? Well in my opinion, not too much! You see the software runs about $250.00 or more. The logs aren’t too bad, about $3.00 per quarter from our service provider. So I opted for the logs, which I manually view through a FTP (file transfer protocol) browser once a week. This activity sates my appetite for knowledge that someone out there is at least LOOKING at my site.

Here is where the real common denominator enters in, revenue return on the expense dollar invested. Our homepage is designed for the viewer to call or fax our 800 telephone numbers to place an order. We have given the viewer the opportunity to contact us through email, on each page and our email activity has increased. But, today, you can’t order our services over the WEB.

Why not? Well the WEB homepage is written in something called HTML or hyper text markup language. This programming language is used to author a WEB site. There are software packages available, such a Microsoft Front Page 97, Adobe’s Pagemill , and a host of others that do a great job of helping you put a site together with picture, sound and even video. But we’ve run into a slight difficulty with authoring secure forms or:

Let’s get back to the least common denominator again. I truly think a business decision cannot be made without employing this evaluation tool. But I also believe that I cannot afford not to be on the web. Here’s why:

Today’s Advertising Situation

Take a look at who’s here, AT&T, General Motors, Ford Motors, to name a few

Some of our larger boat builders, Sea Ray, Bayliner, Regal, to name a few

Probably the most unique advantage to advertising on the WEB is hidden directly above. Whether you’re a Fortune 500 or Marine Surveyors YOU have an equal opportunity to access a customer. This is not true of most other advertising media where the price is tied to the audience size. The Super Bowl 30 second spot at one million dollars just doesn’t equate to the equal footing of the WEB.

The WEB is a BIG place. Millions and millions of visitors a day wandering around trying to find millions of homepage’s. This place is easy to get lost in! If the customer has my address, also known as a URL (Uniform Resource Locator) then I am easier to find. But wait a minute, a URL can be something like this:

http://www.contera.com/sams/greatlakes/jsmithsurv

(as a fictitious example of a SAMS great lakes member homepage)

A novice customer may have given up trying to load this URL, or thought the URL was no good because the browser said it couldn’t be found, when the only thing wrong was that the address was missing the colon after http. Some smart WEB wizard thought of this and invented bookmarks, or once you find a site you like you save the address. In fact when your customer saves the address, the bookmark will contain that "easy to remember name you gave to your homepage". You know something like "The World’s BEST Marine Surveys" !

Another tack to take on the URL dilemma is to order a virtual address from your site provider. A virtual address is one like this: http://www.daviscoltd.com. We do not maintain a WEB server at our location, as the address might imply. Our actual address is something similar to the first example. But to make it easier for customers to find us we purchased our virtual address. When we get into costs later you may agree that the cost is worth the simplicity and thus the advertising benefit.

In order to find things on the WEB, most people go to a search engine. A search engine is a software program that can search for keywords. All online services use a search engine, AOL uses Webcrawler, others use Yahoo or Excite or any of many others. In our instance a customer could search on Davis and Company. On Yahoo, the last time I looked, the search would result in something over three million possible matches!

Based on the foregoing I hope my potential customer will execute a more narrow search, maybe Marine Survey. Yahoo will return about 63,000 "hits" (possible matches) on this search. Excite, using the same criteria, will return about 147 "hits".

So why such a big difference? Well you have to register your site with each search engine. Once you accomplish this, you need to specify what key words should be used in order to find your site. If you don’t have much WEB experience this could be a long, and with the wrong key words, fruitless process. There are opportunists that will register your site for you. The fee varies with the type of services purchased.

The search engine results on Yahoo, probably the most popular engine on the WEB, create a new definition of "shot gun effect". I’m afraid my pellet (homepage) is akin to a grain of sand on the beach rather than one of 200 as in my previous example. How do I overcome this disadvantage?

Remember, everyone on the WEB sails the same ocean (internet). So we have all these boats (homepages) and just like at the start of a sailboat race no matter the size of the boat (Fortune 500 or Marine Surveyor) it just looks like a bunch of masts with white sails bobbing about.

However, the search engine opportunists have something called banner advertising or homepage links that you can buy from them. These are like spinnaker sails on only some of the sailboats in the race. They really make you stand out from the rest of the crowd. They make your page more visible than the rest. The fees vary from opportunist to opportunist.

But before you run off to buy that banner ad on Yahoo, remember "the least common denominator". Maybe Yahoo isn’t the place to advertise Marine Surveyors. Maybe these sites are a better choice:

NMMA (National Marine Manufacturer’s Association) signed a strategic alliance in October 1996 with Marine.net and will be promoting their members on "The Internet Mall".

The Marine web: www.marineweb.com

The Marine Trader online: www.traderonline.com/boat/

And there must be many more, these are just readily found examples. At least with marine oriented sites you have narrowed the customer field to a more realistic number. Here may be where your shot gun pellet (homepage) has a chance to score a hit.

Available Communication Options

Before you decide to author a web page, check out what is already there. Surf the websites of other marine surveyors, boat manufacturers, marine malls, brokers and others. What have each of these sites got in common? What reads well? What visually presents well? What loads on your computer well? What would you do differently? Make notes of your answers to these questions in a two column plus, minus format. Then review your answers and make an outline of what you think your homepage should look like.

Notice I said look like. The site will also contain written content about you, your company, the services you offer, and the prices you charge. Are you going to write this yourself? In our instance we wrote the first version. Then we hired a professional copywriter to edit what we wrote. The final product is much more professional and reads more "Madison Avenue".

Now that you have both the visual format and written word together you need to assemble it into HTML format. You can do this yourself using one of the program I mentioned earlier or you can hire someone to do it for you. Your homepage can be as complicated as you wish, or be only one page long. The fascinating part about HTML is that one page can be as long as you decide you want it to be. There can be no end, just continuous scrolling through all your chosen graphics and verbiage!

The WEB is a place of seemingly limitless information. The research capabilities are astounding! A few examples:

Use Webcrawler and search CFR, you can access all the boating regulations

http://www.navcen.uscg and you have the US Coast Guard

http://www.boatfacts.com.cgi-bin/boat/engines/cgi?screen=engsearch1

brings you to a FTP site for reportedly all types of marine engines

http://www.cat and you have data on all Caterpillar engines, specifications too

http://www.filnet.com/~amp and you have "Power Boat Guide" online

http://databoat.com and you have data information on various boats

The WEB changes, grows, and for all practical purposes lives and breathes something like the wizards contraption did in the Emerald City. There seems to be little reason to leave the comforts of home or office in order to research a topic, item or product. Almost any library in the world can be accessed from the WEB.

This is a fantastic tool! I write a memo, confirm a policy or devise a plan and then Email it to anyone or more than one in the company. I have a record of when they received it, when they read it and if they want to comment or advise the effect they merely click a button!

In the office delivery is instantaneous. Once the recipient turns on their computer they are advised if any mail is waiting. In the field they have to log on to the WEB to retrieve their mail. But even this can be automated to be contemporaneous with the start up of the computer. WEB mail delivery can never be instantaneous, unless the user is connected to the WEB all the time. This type of connection is called a T-1 line or more recently an ISDN line can be used. Both of these options are expensive and most marine surveyors are going to access the WEB using dial up connections.

Any Email message can include attached files, perhaps as we do from some branch offices a report for review, or final assembly and printing. Photographs can be scanned into your PC and attached as a file. These can then be viewed by the recipient on screen or printed.

The service implications are not lost on deaf ears. A complete report, including photographs and all supporting documents could be Emailed to a client in the same time it takes to send a fax of just the report!

The problem is that most clients do not have access to internet Email. The reasons are numerous but a few key ones might be:

Network security

The cost of connecting all those PC’s (rather pricey and complicated)

Time constraints- the phone and fax consume many working hours in each day, email would consume more of what little time is left

I’ve returned many times to "the least common denominator" as my decision tool. So I’ll use my rationale and cost figures for our recent homepage venue on the WEB. We hired an outside firm to author the site using our company brochure and handout material as a guide. The outside consultant we used, after much interviewing, was a start up company operated by recent college graduates. They had the wizard skills to author the site and their opportunist fee was a mere $1,500.00. We had the site edited by the Copywriter for $800.00. We later added our summer newsletter to the site and our February Boat Seminar for an additional cost of $600.00 for a grand total of $2,900.00 in professional fee for the site as you see it today.

We shopped around for services to host our site and found plenty of range in prices! We chose a company largely based upon its service to us during the selection process, i.e. returning phone calls, answering questions knowledgeably and promptly.

The day - to - day operating cost boils down to the following: Our service provider requires that we have a dial up access account. The charge for this is detailed below. This charge is per month and allows us to access the WEB just as we did before using AOL (except we get online now!).

The second charge is to host our homepage, our virtual URL, and usage. Usage is the volume of visits to the site and email processed by the server. So far we have been within the service minimum charge. Hopefully this will change as our advertising program reaps the rewards it is intended to.

Recommendation

I personally think everyone should at least start with a dial up account and an email address. This does not have to be with a online access provider. I can be with a local internet access provider where you’ll get online the first time you call and be able to "catch the wave" every time. Even though insurance companies don’t currently provide much internet email access to their personnel, this will be changing in the future. I have a few friends at Fortune 500’s that will have internet mail access later this year. Don’t let the small dial up account monthly fee keep you from joining the other "surfers". That email address just may be your pipeline to future sales!

Is a homepage in your future? Is it here for you today? Whatever your answer the time you just spent could save you dollars or protect you from the wiles of an unscrupulous opportunist.

I’ll meet you in Kansas….come on toto, surf’s up!