MARKETING

As you read these lines, a whirl of commercial activity is taking place in hotels throughout the United States. This is where much of the Web money is being made, with salespeople trained to sell the dream.

They’re selling Web software and Internet malls. Most of all, they’re selling hope.

In one room are the people selling software, the promise of what their software will mean to your life. The only thing you have to do is figure out how to work with your computer. Make it productive with their software, and your future is limitless.

In the next room is a seminar for an Internet mall. These people tell you that you don’t need a computer to profit from the Web. If you just join their dream of becoming the number-one shopping place online, your future is limitless.

One sells a future based on computers, the other sells a future without a computer. Understand this and you understand the two main hopes driving the growth of the Web:

1. I hope I can figure out how to use my computer productively enough so that eventually I don’t waste all my time figuring out new software. Incidentally, I would eventually like to start making a living doing this, although I understand I must spend years of my life in a musty garage fulfilling the dream. That’s okay. I have a garage.

2. I hope I never see another computer in my life.

People don’t want more computers, software, or information. They want time. Let’s walk through these two seminar hotel rooms and discover just what is driving this initial attempt to integrate consumers to the online marketplace.

In Room #1 are the software people. You know the software people. Everything about them is impeccable. Dashing suits, tons of schmoozing, and every talk a "Power Talk." Software people arrive with entourages, like prizefighters. Strolling behind them are the disheveled, prerequisite programmer type (the guy with the complexion and physique of a Calvin Klein heroin-type model), and the long-haired, Mac graphic artist person (hates tobacco companies and smokes expensive cigars.)

The cool and the creative stroll into the room. The suits go up front to talk. The techie looks bored, the Mac graphics guy attempts to be creative. It is so hypnotic, lulling us like a film.

The speaker demos the software, which is in its last alpha version until it goes beta and then, maybe then, it is ready. The audience are invited to become willing beta testers and help the software become reality. All they have to do is buy it first, before the product is completed.

Eventually the computer breaks down and we all chuckle, knowing that they never work. The talk wanders into a foolish attempt to define what happened.

Talk about willing suspension of disbelief? Only in computers can an idea with no actual existence be sold to a huge audience. If you don’t believe me, look up Java and Push Media. We cannot advance without more hype.

The key speaker then walks to the podium and closes with the computer-centric mantra: "Imagine yourself, five years from now, looking back on the time that you made a change. You are looking back to this date, September 27, 1997, in this hotel room, as the moment your life changed by choosing our software."

Software people always tell you that joining them is joining history. Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and the legion of Microsoft millionaires make this dream an easy one to buy. Even if most software companies are gone within a few years.

Vaporware (n., vap-or-ware): 1. Sell the nonexistent. 2. Sell the hope that the nonexistent software will help you sometime in the future. 3. Maybe five years, maybe tomorrow, who knows?

Hope is sold differently in this room. People who like computers buy the software dream. People who don’t like computers buy the Internet Mall. The speakers here are more friendly, and look more normal. You don’t feel like you need a Ph.D. to understand what they’re saying.

Yet the rules are the same. Keep it hypnotic. Make it technical enough that no one really understands what they’re talking about. In this crowd, just talking about Web browsers and FTP will achieve that goal.

The dream of making millions is easy to sell because the Web is so intangible. It is so hard to describe, so mysterious, yet it has that aura of computers attached to it. These people figure a mall would be a great way to penetrate this market without having to be a computer nerd.

What they’re looking for is a way to join all of this with a business that doesn’t demand that they know how to work a computer. This is the driving fear of many consumers today, and one that the software people like to ignore.

VaporSites (n., vap-or-sites): 1. Big promise, little delivery. 2. The next great bandwagon to jump on. 3. Maybe five years, maybe tomorrow, who knows?

Maybe it’s not even a mall, but a Consumer Matchmaker Service that’s needed. One where the computer is barely even noticeable.

In the software vision of Push Media, each individual will create his/her own mall based on his/her own special interests. Businesses will pipe down to them information that they have requested. The problem with software people is that they never bother to explain how those requests will be created. They trust the multibillion-dollar companies to take care of that.

The Internet malls do a fantastic job of building that customer base. Like software, they make most of their money in the early years. But when maintenance costs start rising and the consumer base does not flock to it as they did in the first year, the profits plummet. This happened to IBM and to Industry.net. Software is very similar.

The hope both of these are selling is really the hope of the Web. If I can get software that works for me and I don’t have to pay attention to it, great. If I don’t ever have to deal with a computer again, even better.

Removing the computer from limiting access. Making it so easy to use that they never notice what is going on. If your television loses its picture for a few seconds, you lose your train of thought.

Online, our efforts are like television in the 1960s. The picture doesn’t get lost as often as it did in the 1950s, but it’s still a little boring because everyone is approaching it the same old way.

Step away from the personal computer era of self-determination and software. Steer clear of the get-rich-quick schemes with little or no effort required.

But there is a way to work less and make more if you learn to manage your time. See, it’s not really about computers. It’s all about time. More free time.

The promise of a million dollars is not the driving force of the consumers coming online. Getting more time to do what they want, and less of a computer learning curve, is essential. They would rather have a million hours to do what they want than a million dollars.

The fact is, no one gets one million hours. You would have to live to well over 100 just to get a million hours to live!

Exaggerations and promises leave people feeling empty, and that emptiness can be disastrous. Once you break with hope, you have lost. Hope is hard to rekindle. Remember this in your Web business. Most people talk about getting away from customers and the rigors of business by going virtual.

People are still people. Treat them right, and personalize it, and they will return. Treat them like units, or pump them full of your dream, and they will deflate.

The fact is, you have to create your own dream. Be inspired by software developers and the Internet malls. To create something, you have to look at this great big emptiness and say, "Maybe this is possible."

Just be careful when you sell others on what is possible. After all, they’re buying hope. And it’s what they’re buying, not what you’re selling, that makes all the difference.

Michael Declan Dunn is a Web publisher/trainer/designer online with a newsletter called The Web Letter; email him at dunn@webletter.net for more information. Stop by his other Web site, A Cybrary of the Holocaust.