Full Sterne Ahead
by Jim Sterne
May, 1999
Full Sterne Ahead contains the mostly monthly musings of Jim Sterne, author, speaker, and Web marketing consultant to business and industry.
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Welcome to the May, 1999 issue of Full Sterne Ahead.
This month I pick on brain-dead e-mailers in When Will They Ever Learn?, point to a boon for small business sites in Resource
of Note, ponder the Cluetrain in While I Was Out, look into the
refrigerator in the Crystal Ball, find streaming multi-media in
My In-Box, suffer from expectation inflation in The Big Idea,
and consider one of the ballsiest marketing moves in recent
history in Don't Try This at Home.
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WHEN WILL THEY EVER LEARN?
--------------------------
Reproduced in its entirety:
-----
From: auto.reply.msg@cwix.com
Date: Mon, 15 Mar 1999 00:58:17 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: E-mail Address Changed Notice
To: jsterne@targeting.com
Effective Monday, March 15th, the MCI2000 or MCIone
e-mail address to which you have sent your message will
be changed.
In an effort to protect the privacy of our customers, we
are unable to provide the new e-mail address to you directly.
We would suggest that you contact the individual by another
method to obtain the correct address.
-----
If there is anybody out there who knows which message they are
referring to, or to whom I may have sent a message that might
hang out at MCI2000 or MCIone... don't tell me - I don't care
anymore.
I enjoyed the following from a company that's spending big bucks
to be the Amazon.com of furniture:
-----
Date: Thu, 18 Mar 1999 18:54:41 -0500 (EST)
X-Mailer-Info: www.collegesucks.com/customcgi
To: jsterne@targeting.com
Organization: Furniture.com
From: Anne Harris
Reply-To: sales@furniture.com
Subject: Buy a Bed, Save $100 on a New Mattress
Dear Customer,
At Furniture.com, we've made completing your bedroom easy. And, through March 31st, you can save $100 on a new
mattress when you purchase a bed from Furniture.com.
etc...
-----
I wrote Anne back and suggested an alternative server that
might not be so opinionated about higher education.
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RESOURCE OF NOTE
----------------
This is the sixth edition of Full Sterne Ahead, and the obvious
Resources of Note are no longer springing fully formed from
my forehead. These days I ponder and ponder... and then slap
myself in the forehead when I remember a site that deserves
more than a passing click.
Such was the case while I wandered through the show floor at
Internet World and ran smack into the good Reverend Ralph Wilson.
If you work at a large company with a large budget for
consulting, drop me a line. If, on the other hand, you're
like the rest of us -- trying to do the most with the least
and being forced to create an e-commerce site with a frozen
orange juice can, a length of kite string and a solar-powered
business calculator, then you need to know about Ralph. Yes, he
is an ordained minister. Better yet, he offers heavenly advice
to small business people and the site developers who love them.
The Web Marketing Info Center (www.wilsonweb.com) provides
links to a couple of thousand articles and resources on marketing
a business on the Web, and on promoting a site.
Web Marketing Today is a free e-mail and web newsletter that
comes out twice each month and reaches 63,000 subscribers. (OK, so color me green.) It's the grand-old-man of how-to marketing newsletters on the Web, started back in 1995.
The E-Commerce Research Room is to e-commerce what the Marketing Info Center is to marketing and site promotion, with over 2,000 articles and resources about selling stuff online.
Business models in various retail and B2B sectors, reviews
of store building programs, reviews of merchant credit card
accounts, reviews of SSL security, information on credit card
transactions, hints on site designs to increase sales and completed
orders, and, as they say -- more. While some sections of this area
are free, most are reserved for paid subscribers to Web Commerce Today: Web Commerce
Today is Ralph's pay-for-it e-mail newsletter,
published twice a month, which focuses on how-to subjects for
merchants and developers for $49.95 a year.
Joe Bob says: check it out.
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WHILE I WAS OUT
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Besides running into Ralph Wilson at Internet World, I ran
into the Cluetrain. Or did it run over me?
Those of you who remember my tip of the hat to Rage-Boy
Chris Locke (www.rageboy.com) will understand why
I stayed firmly in my coat-and-tie, dark-blue-suit persona
as I joined in a Roundtable discussion of The Cluetrain
Manifesto (www.cluetrain.com).
Rage-Boy himself couldn't make it -- something about trade
shows being the tool of the devil. Ah -- here it is:
"Unfortunately, RB won't be there, as he believes industry
conferences are inherently evil. Plus he says he's afraid he
might OD on product literature and take out a couple of innocent
keynoters."
I, however, who lives for the smell of the greasepaint and the
roar of the crowd, was invited to join a couple of the other
Cluetrain authors and several other clued individuals to discuss
the mysteries of why companies insist on being closed-minded.
Conclusions? The only way the Cluetrain Manifesto can have
an impact on the world is if The Word is spread. So here I
am, doing my bit to spread The Word. I leave it to you to
determine if your company even allows these sorts of words
to be uttered, much less spread.
So go read as much of the thing as you can tolerate in order
to get the gist and the tenor, and then come back.
Sort of like the high school kids got a hold of the PA system
and read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas allowed, right?
Nevertheless, there is message in the madness. A good, solid,
valuable e-message that needs to be heard.
I just can't read it without remembering a bit of graffiti
in a public washroom on the edge of the Grand Canyon:
In red ink: Rage Against the Machine!
In black ink: Silly boy. You're *sitting* on the machine.
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THE CRYSTAL BALL
--------------------------
I'm currently hosting a study group on the PlanetIT Web site
www.planetit.com and a question came up about designing
your site to cater to the bandwidth of your audience.
Having just been exposed to the inimitable Jack Powers, chief
speaker-selector at Internet World and producer of the Internet
Appliance Database (which should be up soon) (www.in3.org),
I couldn't help but ponder the Web page formatting dilemma
we'll all be facing soon. I wrote:
We also have to look out for the various ways people are going
to view our sites. It's not just Mac or PC anymore. It's not
just three versions of Netscape and Internet Explorer. Soon,
more people will be surfing our sites from:
television sets
www.webtv.com
desk telephones
www.hightech-store.com/unidenp200.html
mobile phones
www.nokia.com/phones/9110/index.html
pagers
www.PlanetWeb.com/products/consumer/index.html
and, yes, even refrigerators.
www.electrolux.com/screenfridge
Hold onto your hats, kids, we're going for a ride!
Make sure your seatbelt is low and tight across your
lap and your pages are truly cross-platform.
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MY IN-BOX
--------
Whoa!
My in-box got a big surprise this month. I received a
RadicalMail.
OK, OK, so Mark Gibbs from Network World sent me a way-cool e-mail with the subject "I've been thinking..." using HTML,
with a dark blue background and an animated gif of himself
rubbing his chin in that pondering way. That made me smile
and nod in recognition of his new-found plethora of spare time.
Does the man never sleep?
But the RadicalMail I got made me sit up and imitate Sparky --
the dog that looks into the gramophone listening to His Master's
Voice.
In a nutshell, RadicalMail (www.radicalmail.com) is a
service that streams multimedia into an e-mail with no plug-ins.
The results are all-singing, all-dancing e-mails.
Dedicated to an opt-in-only model, this company makes it possible to send a 2k e-mail message that reaches out to the server when it's opened and streams whatever you choose.
It's very easy to drop a link into an e-mail and ask people to
click on it to go to a Web site. But this simply hits you
between the eyes.
Want to know when your favorite manufacturer comes up with a
new laptop? Want to know when the video store has a special
on Saving Private Ryan? Open the e-mail and see a mini commercial.
Now comes the part that makes my little marketer's heart sing:
Everything is trackable. They know how many e-mails they sent
out. They can know how many were opened. They know how many were forwarded. The mail can include HTML forms so they know if people clicked for more info, and how many made the
purchase - all from inside the e-mail client.
Not good for non-Americans who don't stay online to read their
mail? All in good time.
I wrote RadicalMail a note about giving e-mail the branding power
of television and they put me in their brochure. How interactive
can you get??
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THE BIG IDEA - Great Expectations
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You walk into your local dry cleaner and you're greeted like
an old friend because you've been going there for years.
Saunter into Nordstroms and get treated like the most important
customer they have, because they are trained within an inch
of their lives to do so. Walk into a fast food joint and you'll
get very efficient, very impersonal service. Head over to the
video rental store and be waited on by a nose-ringed, orange-
haired individual who didn't pass the test to work behind
the counter at the fast food place.
We have very different expectations of the various retail
venues we frequent. But not of Web sites. We have very low
expectations of the sort of help we can find in a Big Box
warehouse store. But not so with Web sites.
The fact is that CDnow and Amazon.com, and FedEx have the
level of expectation for all surfers on all sites.
I have spent 20 minutes in a major department store looking
for a human to whom I might give my money. I have been stared
at with bovine indifference while complaining about a troublesome
home appliance. I have been studiously ignored in a national
consumer electronics store.
I have accepted each of these slights with a sigh and written
them off as the slow but sure degradation of the work ethic in
America.
But show me one 404 and I'm livid.
There's a problem with the login routine? The .cgi script doesn't
work? Out of stock on an item? Server not responding? 'Scuze me while I take a moment to flame the webmaster.
It doesn't matter what industry you're in -- you are competing
with the best and the brightest. If you sell macramé drink
coasters, goat-hair ear-muffs, or home-made, French-lavender-
honey flavored nail polish, you are competing with Jeff Bezos.
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DON'T TRY THIS AT HOME
----------------------
Swatch has branded time: www.swatch.com/alu_beat/fs_itime.html
Tell me what you think: mailto:jsterne@targeting.com
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Please help. The Net is a powerful word-of-mouth mechanism, so
if you know somebody who might like to be on the receiving end,
please point them to www.targeting.com or have them send
a message to subscribe@targeting.com.
And I'll bet you know what will happen if you send a message
to unsubscribe@targeting.com.
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Full Sterne Ahead contains the mostly monthly musings of
Jim Sterne, author, speaker, and Web marketing consultant
to business and industry.
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