Simulring: Now you can get all your phones to ring at once. Bobby 3.2: Test your HTML code for accessibility Elite: Track Client Time online. Workscape: Tools for HR Management. Activewords: Turning your entire desktop into a searchable tool Instantis: Instant site database integration with no programming Quidditch: Get all your fall text books for Hogwarts now	Outbox Web Marketing Newsletter, Volume 1, #3 , March 26, 2001 Copyright 2001, Paul Stokstad. All rights reserved.
	Week three. This week's topic is: The Couch Participant Livin' Da Vida Local In the fifties a book was published entitled "The Ugly American," which chronicled the boorish behavior of overbearing, unsophisticated, ethnocentric Americans in Hawaiian shirts on vacation in Europe and elsewhere. It was a shock for the jingoistic American culture, which was at that time so certain of it's supremacy in every way except maybe in fine wines (and who drinks that heathen stuff?!), to think of itself as ugly. Now that's all history (to some degree). People in the U.S. now admire all things foreign. Everyone strains to speak the native language where possible, and while in Europe even I was flattered by the assumption by some of the French that I must be Canadian. Not that the French of France admire Canadian French, but it still stretches French credulity to think that an "American" (i.e.- someone from <<les etats-unis>>) could actually produce a velar fricative. God bless all of those 1966-68 high school French classes for finally paying off. Still, it shouldn't be 30-plus years before the marketing world figures out how to act online. In this (new) foreign country, the marketing crowd often seems a bit ugly and insensitive. Sure, people like to go to McDonald's in Paris, but really, they are going as tourists to the U.S., in the form of an American Franchise. But when you want your McDonald's franchise to GROW in Europe, you have to start doing things the European way, like providing mayonnaise with fries, something you won't see much in Peoria, or even less in Kickapoo, that Peoria suburb. The fact is, in some ways, the web is a completely alien environment to the traditional marketer. To start with, the buyer or consumer is in almost total control of the interaction. The almighty power of the mouse is stronger than the power of the pen, the pixel, or the plug (e.g. - banners). The web surfer can ALWAYS leave. No one is married to you. The "why stay" question is important. If you have material that people really want to see, you can often afford, in a traditional marketing environment, to slip in some ads on the side. But the question on the web is, why are people visiting you in the first place? Do you suppose that the material that you have put up there is so crucial and so essential to the surfer that they can't go somewhere else? It's an unusual situation when you have the only example of what you are talking about. And it's going to be rare when you have the "best" example. All we can be certain of is that for some reason, someone is looking at your page. And if, while that happens, there are a large number of flashing banners competing for his/her attention, you can lose their attention due to some side trip on a banner, or you can lose their respect and interest because you are obviously in the flashing banner business rather than really in love with your own content. In this foreign country, few are conducting themselves based on what I consider to be the great secret of the web. Few seem to have picked up on the real muscular "ap" that can drive traffic to their site. And those that have, I believe, are the ones that will survive into the next world of web civilizations. To me, it's not those that just consider the user that will survive, it's those that EMPOWER the user. I would suggest that the secret, hidden quality of the online community is the desire to the community to EXPRESS itself. That people online are not just hanging out there as passive participants in a consumer model. Certainly (to backtrack a bit), we have to look at the web surfer as an info-consumer, as someone looking for information or entertainment a lot of the time. But a major impetus for online participation, I believe, is the desire to EXIST, to MAKE A DIFFERENCE, to BE INVOLVED. I believe that people like the fact that their name (or their handle) shows up in a talk group, that THEY can initiate a search on what interests them, that they can post pictures, add opinions, join surveys, learn how to do things, chat, sell, bid, comment, produce, write, direct, whatever! Maybe it's just me. Obviously I would be considered the web version of an exhibitionist, at least verbally (and minus the prurient element), since I have a website,a newsletter, two or three complete books, my poetry, fiction, stand-up comedy, and even my Mom and Dad's poetry online. Maybe it's just certain kinds of people who are dying for self-expression, publishing books that (maybe) would never get published, sharing poetry that no one otherwise would read. But I don't think so. I think that this is an enormous, hidden driver behind much of the popularity of the web. Hence all of the chat, online gaming, discussion groups, opinion polls, etc. So, I think that certain groups are doing it right. I think that Apple is right on target with all of the I-movie and Video-CD burner products, which are empowering all of us to become desktop videographers. How big could this get? Just look at yourself. I doubt that many of you were online five years ago. I bet that many of you weren't using even using a computer ten years ago. Remember the typewriter? How about those sleek IBM Selectric's that used to cost a couple grand, and now are relegated to typing the occasional envelope? You can hardly give one of those away now. So, I'm telling you, in a few years, we will all be doing short videos to archive conversations, discussions, opinions, hellos to Gramma, etc., and sharing them online. You are going to have a camera hooked up to your computer and pop video out at will. You may very well carry a camera with you anywhere and capture video and send it anywhere. You may very well activate a public camera to record what's going on wherever you are in order to explain your day later. Anything can happen. But I don't think that you can go very far wrong online if you empower people to participate and express themselves online. The coach potato was, I contend, never that happy to be completely a potato. He was just waiting to sprout into a participant. The advent of the channel changer, that allowed the birth of the archetypical couch potato, too lazy to even get up and change channels, was actually the beginning of the end for the television-only household. Putting the viewer in charge of what they were viewing was the beginning of the end for the vapid shows and loud-commercials-down-your-throat marketing. The couch participant, online, is completely in charge of where he/she's clicking and why. And now, even the entertainment media are stepping up to the mark to provide customer-chosen content, via customer-controlled show-selection tools such as TiVo and UltimateTV. Certainly there are times when I don't want to work, or info-consume, and want to potato out. Usually I go to the immersive movie house world. But that is all by choice, and in a small town like mine, often means a one-hour drive to the multiplex. Even so, most of the time, I want to stand out from the crowd, not to be exceptional so much as to express, to show up at the plate and take a swing at life. I think that is a healthy expression of my uniqueness and individuality. And I do not feel at all diminished by the fact that there are millions of others with the same urge to express. I seriously doubt that a single one of them will come up with what I come up with. And if they did, I would love to meet such a wacky character. In any case, the fact that there may very well be millions of people that are too educated and too opinionated and too much in need of self-expression to sit quietly on the sidelines anymore means that the consumer culture may be eroding. Instead, an expressive, participative, creative, gifting culture seems to be emerging. To me, that is the real news. The real news about the Internet is the Internet itself... The emergence of a collaborative, informal, organic growth of interconnected information sources into one of the biggest expressions of human intelligence ever seen. The businesses that facilitate that expression are the ones that, to me, deserve to prosper. So, the Microsofts, The Netcapes, the Intels, the Oracles, everybody making server or client software, routers, authoring tools, all of them are great helps to this central drive to communicate. Many of those guys have and will continue to make it big. The companies that help people talk to each other and express themselves are, I believe, swimming out into the fast current of where the river is flowing, and will be, for the most part, swept to success most quickly. You can visit this new country in your old marketing clothes, carrying a few cans of spam in your briefcase. But if and when you realize how things work, you will do well to do what the web does... create connection, and empower self-expression... And you will soon fit in, and prosper. In that spirit, I welcome, and will include in the archive of this article, your comments? Paul Johan Stokstad March 26, 2001 Next Week: HTML 101