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are a business person or a creative person or both, you’ve been trained to
control your environment. Having everybody talk back to you all the time seems
both overwhelming and chaotic and precisely the opposite of what you were
trained to do.
For instance, one of the most central effects that the Internet has had in business
is to give individuals the ability to look inside companies in a way they were never
able to previously. So, when a company put up a site on the World Wide Web for
the first time, the senior management had to decide who controlled the
information about the company: was it the marketing department? Or customer
service? Or sales? Or information technology, which traditionally controlled
everything about computers? This led to internecine warfare inside a lot of
companies because each department viewed it as crucial to their particular
mission and didn’t want to give up control to another department. Each had a
legitimate need. Many companies still haven’t resolved this conflict, haven’t even
understood that it gets resolved by understanding that the issue is interaction and
that the customer has the right to interact. Have you tried looking up the email
address for any real human being on any corporate Web site? In my experience,
90% of companies still won’t tell you how to send an email to one of their
executives. Companies act like they are scared of their customers. That’s not
Internet Attitude.
Real timeliness: The Internet happens in real time. This was a big challenge for
my colleagues in the publishing business, where life is defined by how long it
takes to produce and distribute your publication: daily newspapers, weekly or
monthly magazines, or even books, which take at least a year. Unlike older
media, there is no logistical reason – other than the time spent thinking about or
creating the communication – for Internet communications to take time to
produce and distribute. Real timeliness takes the concept of interactivity and
cranks it up a notch. Not only does Internet Attitude call for letting customers look
inside your company, but it sets an expectation that you will actually respond to
customer communication right away, in real time. I bought a pair of shoes from
Rockport.com and they didn’t fit. I sent an email to the address shown on the
Rockport.com Web site for authorizing returns. I never got a response. My wife
took the shoes to the shipping store, so I got a credit on my credit card. But I’ll
never buy from Rockport.com again, since they don’t apparently read or respond
to email to an address they publish on their Web site. They should not have
created a Web site unless they were prepared to respond to customers in real
time. They don’t have Internet Attitude.
The technology of the internet – computers and communications integrated and
broadly available – can lead to threats as well as opportunity: invasion of privacy,
widespread spamming, computer viruses. Part of Internet Attitude is to recognize
that we are in a major transition as a society and to embrace the threats as
equally as the opportunities, to understand that we will ultimately figure out how
to handle the impact that the Internet will have on our society and not to run away
from it or try to stop or slow down the change because of the threats.
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