THE JOY OF BEING FOUND -- WANT TO CONNECT WITH OLD FRIENDS, CUSTOMERS, EMPLOYERS? TRY USING FLYPAPER

by Richard Seltzer, B&R Samizdat Express

From Internet-on-a-Disk #18, September 1996

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When old friends who I hadn't been in touch with for 10-30 years startedsending me email -- about half a dozen of them each month -- at first I thought: isn't that amazing that all those people would be looking for me? And isn't it great that search engines like AltaVista make it so easy to find 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 who they once were close to (old roommates, business associates, etc.) who they've lost touch with. And why, out of all those others, should they actively come looking for me?

With a few quick queries I soon established that they weren't looking for me at all. They were looking for themselves. Yes, they had gone to search engines (most to AltaVista), and there they had done what most people do at those sites -- they had entered their own name as the query. And since I have a lot of content at my Web site -- including lots of mywriting -- many of my old friends are mentioned somewhere there, typically in the list of thank you's at the end of a book. Searching for themselves, they chanced upon me; and delighted at that unexpected occurrence, they sent me email.

So when the number of long-lost friends finding me starts to slow down, I should create a new page at my Web site (http://www.samizdat.com) where I mention folks I haven't mentioned elsewhere. In other words, instead of trying to systematically 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 -- what I call the "fly paper approach."

It's a neat flip of your usual expectations -- you connect with the people you want to by making their names and their subjects of interest findable at your site. And the same approach could also work well in the world of business, when you are trying to connect with potential customers or potential employers.

Unintentionally, I've seen several business-related instances of this phenomenon over the last few months.

Ebooks Multimedia in San Francisco, maker of interactive CD ROMs for children, was looking for content that they could turn into product in time for this Christmas. Using search engines, they found my book The Lizard of Oz at my Web site. This is a book that I self-published22 years ago, and which had simply been gathering dust. Within about a week of their first contacting me, we had a signed contract, and they are now at work on the project.

Soon thereafter, a movie producer in Iceland looking for new material found my never-produced screenplay Spit and Polish. That's not likely to lead anywhere, but it's an opportunity that I would never have dreamed of pursuing actively myself.

In both those cases, instead of my having to identify prospects, write query letters, and submit manuscripts -- which takes time, effort, and money -- they found me. And because they made the first contact, the conversation started at a different level -- they had a particular need, and they had already determined that my work might fill it.

The most dramatic instance of this principle was totally unexpected -- a kind of opportunity that I would never have dreamt of.

A Gary Trudeau fan, looking for a copy of Bull Tales (Trudeau's first book, published back when he was an undergraduate at Yale), found it mentioned at my Web site in a list I have there of every book I've read over the last 38 years. He sent me email to find outif I still had a copy. He also noticed at my site that my daughter (now a sophomore at Sarah Lawrence) is into acting. It turns out that he is the writer/producer of several popular TV shows, and she was in LA over the summer acting in a movie written and produced by my sister Sallie. After a few friendly email 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 is likely result, but she learned a lot from the auditioning experience and made contacts that could prove important in the future.

Another close relative has been looking for a new job. She did all the traditional things -- checking newspapers and job-related Web sites. She's had some interviews, but none of the opportunities looked particularly tempting. Then, out of the blue, she got a call from a headhunter who had found her resume on our Web site. A company located far closer to her home than her present job was looking for someone with her credentials. She's gone for a couple of interviews and it looks very promising and tempting. Regardless of how it turns out, this is another instance of how effective it can be to make yourself findable on the Internet.

So how could a business use the flypaper approach? Instead of (or in addition to) pounding on the doors of prospective customers or partners, set up pages that mention them and the topics that are of most interest to them. If possible, mention the names of the keyindividuals. You needn't link from your home page to those flypaper pages at all , but do link from the flypaper back to either your homepage of other pages you'd particularly want those folks to see. Just be sure to submit the individual URLs AltaVista and other search sites.

Then the odds are good (and getting better all the time as more and morecompanies and people come onto the Internet) that some of them will find you while looking for themselves or looking for the topics of most interest to them, possibly leading to the kind of business contact you want.

And, of course the same approach could be effective in trying to recruit particular individuals to come and work for you, as well as trying to get particular employers to come looking for you.

So get to work -- set out your flypaper. It needn't take much time or effort, but the payoff could be significant.

Can we help you build an Internet business? Richard Seltzer is an independent Internet writer/speaker/consultant. Click here for details. or send email to seltzer@samizdat.com

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