Listen Carefully If You Want To Know How The World Wide Web Is Altering Business And Society.

It's no secret that the convergence of technology, products and services is transforming industries, redefining markets and creating new opportunities for success, and in some cases, failure. But what may not be fully understood is what's behind this digital phenomenon and who is really influencing the development and direction of the World Wide Web.

To provide some very enlightened perspectives on the subject, the planners for Annual Conference 2000 put together a panel that included a leading digital strategist, an online financial-news columnist and a dot-com marketing executive. The moderator for the panel, Chunka Mui, is a partner with Diamond Technology Partners, head of intellectual capital and innovation, director of the Diamond Exchange, a think-tank for senior executives, and executive editor of the business magazine Context. Adam Lashinsky is the Silicon Valley columnist for TheStreet.com, the online financial news publication based in New York. Michael Beckerman is vice president of marketing for MVP.com, a sporting goods and outdoor merchandise Internet retailer.

Mui began by telling a listening story about a client, a major brewing company in the United Kingdom, who wanted to develop a Web presence. "One of the first things we did was go online," Mui said, "to see what was out there. And we found roughly 2,000 Web sites that dealt with the client's brand, mostly from customers or small pubs that claimed to be the official Web site of brewery X. It was no surprise that the initial reaction of the client was to demand that they be stopped. That's our brand, they said. But when we visited a few sites, we found they were almost all positive. Fortunately, the company quickly came to the realization that rather than the knee jerk reaction of suing them and taking the sites down, there might be some way to harness the power of those sites."

The point of the story, Mui said, is that you have to know what's on the Web and what kinds of conversations your customers are having with each other. "And more important, you have to develop a pipeline into that discussion. That involves your ability to listen and to learn."

Citing another example, this time of the entertainment industry's attempts to block a 16-year-old from creating his own Simpson's Web site, Mui said, "I would think that is perhaps a losing battle because there are a lot more kids out there than lawyers. The high profile ones you can get to at this point. But remember, there are 70 million Gen Y kids out there and every year over the next 20 years, three or four million will reach adulthood. They are your future customers, your future constituents, your future business partners, your future employees. And they have radically different notions of how they want to communicate and a radically different notion of what is technology versus what's just part of the environment and the way we live."

In today's environment, Mui said, "every kid, every person has a soap box as big as you do on the Internet. If you go to Yahoo, you'll find 22 sites devoted to boycotts of various companies and 133 devoted to individual companies. And they are usually not on the positive side of communications...How many of you in this audience have customer sites like this devoted to you? How many of you don't know whether or not you do?"

The Internet is really the platform for business today, Mui argued. It makes it possible for everyone to talk to everyone else, not just to retailers but also to suppliers, dealers and others. "That sort of throws the whole notion of control of communications out the window," he said.

It's going to be more difficult to manage in the new environment, Mui added. "Customers are going from stationary to mobile so when you're interacting with them, you won't know whether or not they're at home, at the office, in your store, or waiting in line and calling in. They're going to be dealing with you with a range of different devices and information appliances, going from a sporadic kind of activity to always being connected."

The most important thing is you have to listen to customers, Mui said, and you have to figure out how to interact with them.

Michael Beckerman was up next with his perspective on the changing nature of public relations and communications in a startup environment, which is what MVP.com, a 1999 entry into the dot-com world, is all about.

"To understand the role of public relations in the world that I live in," Beckerman said, "you need to understand a little bit about MVP.com." The mission statement of MVP.com is to be the premier source of sporting goods, both for the outdoor and fitness consumer. "We're competing against the bricks and mortar environment and we're using the virtual world and the Internet as our source of competitive advantage."

Is it cheaper to shop at MVP.com? "No," said Beckerman. "You're going to shop with us because our customer service is superior and the breadth of product assortment is better than you're going to find down the street in your favorite sporting goods shop. That's what we're about."

Within Internet space, Beckerman said, there is "a plethora of different customer touch points that are shaping consumer perspectives as to what our brand is about. Our brand is really no different from what is happening in bricks and mortar land. So my job as the marketing guy at MVP.com is to position our brand so that we have a compelling story for years to come.

"The role of public relations," he said, "is no different from the offline world but there is more complexity and more opportunities in the online world when it comes to immediacy."

MVP.com, Beckerman said, is closely associated with three famous athletes: Michael Jordan, John Elway and Wayne Gretsky. "One of the great challenges from the PR side," he said, "is that we use the athletes as a podium to amplify our message, but our message is not solely about these athletes." (As an aside, Beckerman acknowledged that keeping the athletes on message is something that the public relations department has to work at.)

In terms of lessons learned in launching MVP.com, Beckerman said, they try to go big, focusing on the Big innovative ideas. But at the same time, they think small. "Our customer doesn't want to work with a big monolithic company that looks rich and out of touch with the consumer base. So at the same time we're at the Super Bowl, we're in Baltimore, Austin, Sacramento, doing some grass-roots marketing, talking one-to-one to our customers, taking advantage of the virtual space in which we work."

In the dot-com world, Beckerman said, "we live hand-to-mouth. Which means our company is no different from anyone else's. When I'm pitched an idea, I ask, What's the return on investment? How do we measure that? We're also dealing in a medium that can look at our sales geographically every 20 minutes."

As far as the notion of being fast, a must in the dot-com world, Beckerman said, "We change our home page now once a week. We'll get in the groove where we change it every 48 hours. It's going to be appointment shopping where people know when we change our home page, when we change an offer. That's the kind of consumer behavior that we want to be able to train."

Beckerman admitted that when the dot-com market went south in March, all of a sudden the questions were not about the role of Michael Jordan but about profitability. "The media started to become more educated and more cynical. They started to challenge us more intellectually and less emotionally. Twelve months ago, you could package a dream and sell that dream. Now you need to talk about your business plan."

The final panelist was Adam Lashinsky, who Mui said was "the token journalist in a room full of PR and communications professionals." His assignment was to give a journalist's perspective on the changing nature of public relations and the media online.

Lashinsky said that unlike other journalists who work online, he has managed to hedge his bets a bit. "While I think the Internet is changing the way everybody does their jobs, my larger thesis, which I've written many times and which always angers people in the dot-com community, is that in the not-so-distant future the Internet will cease to be an industry. It will simply be another medium that we all use to do our jobs."

Companies that can't use the medium won't thrive or survive, he said, but neither will companies that are strictly Internet companies. "That doesn't bode well for all sorts of companies including a competitor, Industry Standard, which is devoted to covering the Internet industry. If there isn't going to be an industry, I don't see how that very successful magazine and media group survives in the future."

Lashinsky said his background as a journalist included covering manufacturing for Crain's Chicago Business for five years and a year writing about the unwinding of the Japanese economy while working for Nikkei Weekly, the English-language version of Japan's main economic daily. From there he went to the San Jose Mercury News as their first high-tech stock columnist.

"I got the job," Lashinsky said, "because I was able to convince them that you don't need to be a technology person and have a Silicon Valley Rolodex. I know finance and I said I would approach the beat through the financial community, the investment bankers, the Wall Street analysts, the venture capitalists. The response within the financial community and Silicon Valley was overwhelming," he said.

"I was a little concerned when I arrived in Silicon Valley in 1997," he said, "that this tech thing had already taken off, having missed the beginning of Apple, MacIntosh and Newton, along with several generations of Intel microprocessors. But then I decided that maybe there's more to go with this thing they called the Web."

At the time, there were four public Internet companies that you could follow, Lashinsky said, Yahoo, Lycos, Infoseek and Netscape. "Only one has survived as an independent company," he said. "But we had no sense in 1997 just how badly Yahoo would beat the competition."

Lashinsky moved to TheStreet.com in 1999 because they needed a Silicon Valley person but he said, "I've worked very hard to keep my tentacles in the traditional media including print magazines, radio and television. When people ask me how does it feel to be an online journalist, I tell them I'm still a print journalist. I write my column for TheStreet.com very much the same way I wrote my column for the San Jose Mercury News."

The big difference, he said, is that if there is a breaking story you can get it posted much quicker than you could at the Mercury News or Crains.

Another difference is in researching a story. "I no longer have to ask a company for a news release or an analyst for a report that would be faxed or mailed. I can get everything I need by visiting various Web sites."

Lashinsky added that he is not "dubious" about the information posted on a company's Web site. "On the contrary, companies that do a good job of posting information on their Web site have exactly what I want. If I want the quarterly earnings release or the latest product release, I know exactly where to get it."

The same is true of the SEC Web site that Lashinsky said is his number one resource on the Web. "You used to have to go to the SEC offices to look at documents. Now you do it over the Internet."

Although he doesn't think the Internet will ever replace print media, Lashinsky has found the dot-com world a great place to be a journalist. "You can put up news almost instantly and get reader feedback just as quickly," he said.

At the same time, he acknowledged that the rush to get something online has its drawbacks. Recalling the Emulex case, Lashinsky said TheStreet.com was one of the guilty parties that posted a fraudulent press release without checking it out. "We all know that responsible parties should not put out something that isn't checked for accuracy. Unfortunately, the media doesn't always follow that rule."

Still, Lashinsky finds appealing the idea that you can get news out very quickly and also constantly try new things. "We don't change our Web site every week or every few days, we change it every few minutes."

Wrapping up the panel discussion, Mui said he didn't think the enthusiasm we're seeing now for dot-coms can last. "Your skepticism about the online world is justified. There are too many messages and too many sites."