Publication
Date: July 3, 1997
Seeing 'Chat' as a
Business Opportunity
By
Sue Mellen
Across the
IT world, the debate continues: Has the
Internet met expectations as a
superhighway to business profits? For all
too many businesses, the World Wide Web
has been a shining yet tangled mass of
opportunities that lures the ever-hopeful
into its realm, only to devour dollar
after endless dollar.
There is
good reason for this disappointment, says
Nathan Wagoner of Duck Soup Information
Services, based in Alexandria, Pa.
Wagoner, who works with businesses to
establish graphical, synchronous
communications sites, says the Internet
fails when treated as little more than a
string of advertisements that users view
inactively and in isolation. The promise
of the Internet, he says, has always been
as a communications medium, where
communities can develop around the
ability to share ideas and information in
real time.
Wagoner is
one of the developers of The Palace, the
ground-breaking software that has been
used to create synchronous
"Palace" sites cropping up
across the Internet. Businesses are
slowly learning that two-way, real-time
communication is the route to building
dedicated internal and external business
communities, says Wagoner.
"America
Online recently released figures showing
that one-third of its annual income comes
from people using chat rooms. We are
discovering that people who use
simultaneous communications stay online
longer and come back (to rooms or sites)
more often. You might say that it (chat)
is a sticky medium. People in chats are
staying around longer, and they obviously
have money to spend. Those are important
factors when you’re talking about
business investments," he says.
Wagoner
sees several reasons for corporate
reluctance to embrace synchronicity. For
one thing, IS administrators continue to
hold what he calls "a long-standing
prejudice" against multimedia
platforms because of their tendency to
gobble up bandwidth. But that concern
holds little validity in the current
environment, where new bandwidth-widening
tools are expanding the communications
infrastructure, Wagoner says. Still, the
very nature of synchronous communications
fills some corporate offices with
trepidation.
"I
understand the reluctance from a business
standpoint because you can’t control
what goes on. But there’s a huge
mass of people out there and there’s
nothing for them to do but chat.
That’s a great business
opportunity," Wagoner says.
Several
major corporations, including U.S.
Robotics, Compaq, Intel and NEC, have set
up Palace sites of their own. Compaq is
further strengthening its hand by
installing Palace software in its
high-capacity, multimedia systems. But
Wagoner says even the initiated fail to
grasp the full potential of the platform.
"NEC
is hosting stand-up comedy and Compaq had
one of the originators of ‘Star
Wars’ available for the grand
opening of its site. All of this is a
little silly. Compaq could be running
basic PC courses, answering product
questions or offering free trials of new
products at specific times. Companies
have to realize that they already have
communities of users out there. They just
have to give them good reasons to keep
coming back," he says.
Some
companies have begun to look toward
synchronous communications as a means of
both building communities and cutting
costs internally. FORE Systems, Inc., of
Warrendale, Pa., a manufacturer of
asynchronous transfer mode (ATM)
switches, is working with Duck Soup to
build a Palace site where its salespeople
can hold meetings, get technical
briefings by sales engineers, and find
immediate answers to all kinds of
questions. According to Shea McKinney,
FORE’s Webmaster and manager of
electronic commerce, the systems will
solve some major problems for the
fast-growing, seven-year-old firm.
"We
grew by 72 percent last year. We’re
now in 40 countries, with one-half of our
sales revenue outside of North America.
With our sales force spread out this way,
we have a lot of trouble maintaining
communications and control. It seems our
marketing people spend a lot of time and
money flying around to meet with the
sales force. But we’re a fairly new
company, so Wall Street is keeping a
close eye on our bottom line. We were
looking for a way to get our travel
expenses down," he says.
FORE’s
new system, which will be complete before
the end of the summer, will allow
salespeople around the world to attend
auditorium-style briefings combining
PowerPoint visuals with a streamed audio
component. The session moderator will
field questions on the spot, giving all
attendees the benefit of the answer.
Sessions will be recorded for future
reference. And salespeople will be
required to log in before each session,
giving managers an additional measure of
control over the troops in the field.
Wagoner
believes that an increasing number of
businesses will discover the value of
synchronous communications as they
struggle to bring together their
far-flung internal and external
communities/customers. "We’re
not talking about creating communities;
communities create themselves. The
important things is for businesses who
already have communities to realize that
there are new ways to bring them
together," he says.
Sue Mellen writes
from Tyngsboro, Mass.
Related
article: VRML: Creating New Realities
Nathan
Wagoner is a featured speaker at DCI's
Internet Expo. Please see the online brochure for the latest
program and registration information.
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