By Richard Seltzer, seltzer@samizdat.com, www.samizdat.com
Reprinted with permission from Internet Search Advantage, ZD Journals. http://www.zdjournals.com
How to translate this article into French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, or GermanComment traduire en français, Cómo traducir a los españoles, Come tradurre in italiano, Como traduzir em portuguêses, Wie man in Deutschen übersetzt.
When old friends whom I hadn't been in touch with for 10 to 30 years started sending me E-mail messages--about a half dozen of these friends each month--at first I thought it amazing that all those people would be looking for me and that AltaVista Search made it so easy for people to find other people on the Internet. Then it gradually dawned on me--why should they look for me? Just like me, they probably each have a hundred or more people they once were close to (old roommates, business associates, and so on) but lost touch with. And why, out of all those others, should they actively come looking for me? With a few quick queries, I soon figured out they weren't looking for me at all. They were looking for themselves. They had gone to AltaVista Search and done what most people do. They had entered their own names as queries. They found themselves at my Web site because the content there includes my writing, which mentions many of my old friends' names, typically in the list of thank you's at the end of my books. Searching for themselves, they chanced upon me. Delighted at that unexpected occurrence, they sent me E-mail messages.
So when the number of long-lost friends starts to decline, I should create a new page at my Web site where I mention acquaintances I haven't mentioned elsewhere and would like to get back in touch with. In other words, instead of trying systematically to find other people on the Internet, I'll set things up to make it easy for those people to find themselves in documents at my Web site. I call this method of finding people the flypaper approach.
It's a neat reversal of my expectations. I connect with the people I want to find by making their names and their subjects of interest findable at my site. The same approach can also work well in the world of business if you're trying to connect with potential customers or employers.
Flypaper for business contacts
If you want to connect with a particular person at a particular company, and your phone calls and E-mail messages are going unanswered, create a Web page that mentions that person and/or company. Say all the good things you've been meaning to say about how you could benefit from working together, and so forth. Put the person's name and the company's name in your Web page's HTML <META> tags and in the first line of text, so AltaVista Search's ranking algorithm will place your page high in the list of matches. You don't need to link any of your other Web pages to this one. Just go to AltaVista Search, click on Add URL at the bottom of the page, and enter the URL of this specific page. The next day, your site will be in AltaVista Search's index, ready to be found by your target the next time he or she uses AltaVista Search to search for himself or herself. When that happens, the odds are good that the person will get in touch with you, and suddenly your position in the upcoming dialogue will be greatly improved, because the person contacted you instead of vice versa. Of course, this approach is not guaranteed, but it's certainly worth a try.
As more and more companies and people come onto the Internet, the odds are that this approach could lead to the kinds of business contacts you want. Of course, the same approach can be effective in trying to recruit particular individuals to come to work for you, as well as trying to get particular employers to come looking for you.
Flypaper for writers and publishers
The flypaper approach changes how publishers and writers can and should find one another. In the traditional mode, acquisition editors spend years building contacts with just the right people so they'll be able to find talented writers and sign up promising books. In the new mode, these same editors can find writers and books--the new products that their companies depend upon--far more quickly by scouting the Internet. The individual writer, too, has far more opportunity than in the past. Instead of submitting a manuscript to publishers (typically one at a time), the writer can post the material on the Web and publicize it free of charge (making sure that it's indexed by AltaVista Search). This approach increases the chances that an editor will find the writer. Even if that doesn't happen, the work doesn't just gather dust. Rather, it reaches an audience, perhaps leading to correspondence and acquaintance with like-minded people, and the writer's work can improve from the feedback online.
I've experienced several recent instances when being found by people using AltaVista Search has led to interesting business opportunities. For instance, Ebooks Multimedia in San Francisco, publisher of interactive CD-ROMs for children, was looking for content that it could turn into a product. Using search engines, Ebooks found my book The Lizard of Oz at my Web site. I self-published this book 22 years ago, and it had simply been gathering dust. Within a week of Ebooks contacting me, we had a signed contract, and Ebooks is now at work on the project.
A little later, a movie producer in Iceland looking for new material found my never-produced screenplay Spit and Polish. That discovery isn't likely to lead anywhere, but it's an opportunity I would never have dreamed of pursuing actively myself. And just a couple of weeks ago, I received an E-mail message from a woman who found a stage play of mine, Amythos, at my Web site. She works for a professional theater in Spokane, Washington, and is interested in producing this play, which I wrote 25 years ago and which has never been staged.
In all those cases, instead of my having to identify prospects, write query letters, and submit manuscripts--which takes time, effort, and money--people who were looking for that kind of material found me. And because they made the first contact, the conversation started at a different level. They had a particular need and had already determined that my work might fill that need.
I found the most dramatic instance of the flypaper approach totally unexpected. It was a kind of opportunity I would never have dreamed of. A Garry Trudeau fan was looking for a copy of Bull Tales, Trudeau's first book, published when he was an undergraduate at Yale. This fan found the book mentioned at my Web site, where I have a list of every book I've read over the last 39 years. He sent me E-mail to find out if I still had a copy. He also noticed at my site that my daughter (now a sophomore at Sarah Lawrence) has an interest in acting. It turns out that he is the writer/producer of several popular TV shows. She was in Los Angeles over the summer acting in a movie written and produced by my sister, Sallie. After a few friendly E-mail messages, I wound up trading my copy of the book for my daughter to get an audition for a possible part in an episode of one of those TV shows. Nothing immediate resulted, but my daughter learned a lot from the auditioning experience and made contacts that could prove important in the future.
These experiences taught me that you shouldn't presume that other people won't be interested in your material. Don't presume that you know the markets and the potential buyers for all of your material. By making lots of material available on the Web and making sure that AltaVista Search indexes your material, you open up possibilities that you probably never dreamed of.
General flypaper: the first step in building a Web audience
The basic idea is that people using search engines look first for themselves and then for the subjects nearest and dearest to them. Hence, you can use a targeted approach or a general approach to attract the people you want to get in touch with. With the targeted approach, to reach a particular person and/or particular company, you create a simple Web page that mentions that person or company. For example, as I mentioned, my Web site contains a list of every book I've read for the last 39 years. It's just a list. When I posted it, I doubted that anyone would be interested in it. But AltaVista Search draws lots of traffic to my site. I've received E-mail messages from authors, agents, and publishers who found the list either looking for themselves or looking for books they've been involved with.
I've also received lots of satisfying correspondence from people who love to read. In particular, I got E-mail from Dean Rink, a producer for PBS who was getting ready for a lengthy stay in Antarctica as part of the Live from Antarctica 2 program. He was planning on doing a lot of reading there and was looking for recommendations of good books when he stumbled across my list. Like me, for many years, he had been keeping a list of the books he reads. We ended up swapping lists of favorites and reactions to particular authors. I posted the correspondence at my site, and others joined in. As a result, I've discovered powerful and fascinating books that I otherwise would probably never have heard of.
An application of the flypaper approach
If you work for a school, create a Web page that lists all alumni and their years of graduation and other public information about them. Click Add URL on the AltaVista Search page, and you'll soon receive E-mail messages from some of them. As you begin to draw an audience to your site with flypaper of this kind, you need to give them reasons for coming back. They'll become a loyal audience of your site, and you'll be creating a new online community. Offer to add their E-mail addresses and other relevant information if they link to your site. Add a letters-to-the- editor page with selected correspondence or create a forum to set up regularly scheduled chat sessions with a host and pre-arranged speakers.
Building interactive Web sites without interactive software
Recently, while mentioning flypaper in a presentation about AltaVista Search to a group of educators at the NERCOMP conference in Sturbridge, Massachusetts, it dawned on me that this approach can also turn static text pages into opportunities for online interaction. Before the Web, the Internet was very interactive, consisting largely of E-mail messages and newsgroups. The early Web itself was an anomaly--just connecting people to documents rather than people to people. That is changing now with new and better ways for people to interact, rather than just read, at Web sites (chat, forum, and so on). But, thanks to AltaVista Search, static Web pages, too, can become interactive. Instead of carefully polishing every text you write and getting official approval/blessing for every document you wish to publish on the Web, post your work-in-progress. Post your reactions to what you have read and unpolished notes from meetings. If a thought is important to you, it may well be of importance to others. And if AltaVista Search indexes the full text of your pages, interested people will find those pages and, by extension, you.
Posting a document as a work-in-progress begs for comment. Promising to post in the same place the most interesting and relevant reactions (sent by E-mail) provides further encouragement to open up a dialogue. It takes no special software to get a discussion going--just interesting and provocative content and the willingness to talk about your work before you completely finish it. What was just an article or a memo becomes a seed for discussion by a spontaneous community of people interested in learning about and understanding the same subject, sharing experiences and insights. This kind of experience is what formal education sometimes strives for, but very rarely achieves.
So get to work. Set out your flypaper. Then, send me an E-mail message to tell me what you catch and how you benefit from it. This new approach will take you to new territory. We can gain a lot by sharing our insights with one another. You can reach me directly at seltzer@samizdat.com.
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