Copyright 1995 Richard Seltzer
This is chapter 8 of a book entitled The Way of the Web. Permission is granted to make and distribute complete verbatim electronic copies of this item for non-commercial purposes provided the copyright information and this permission notice are preserved on all copies. All other rights reserved. To correspond with the author, send email to seltzer@samizdat.com Comments welcome. You can buy this book on diskette from Amazon.com.
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The answer dawned on me a month ago when my five-year-old son Timmy brought home a particularly good picture he had made at Tot Spot. My wife was ecstatic -- so proud of him that she immediately hung it on the kitchen wall, and he was delighted to receive such recognition.
What was happening? She posted it where it can be seen by and shared with others. And by so doing she expressed pride and joy in what he had done and affirmed his worth and importance and the value of what he had done. That same model can work on the Internet.
Shortly after that, my 14-year-old son Michael wrote a particularly good science fiction storyfor a school assignment. He's a bit jaded now when it comes to posting things on the kitchen wall, so I posted it on the Web instead. Over the last month, an average of 2-3 people a day have taken a look at it, and now he's busy working on sequels and coming up with ideas for how to get feedback from readers.
Yes, the Internet can be used for publishing -- simply putting text in electronic form and making it easy for people to retrieve it. But remember that regardless of whether anyone pays for the information, publishing is a two-way proposition. The reader obtains the information, and the creator gets the satisfaction and recognition of having his or her creation posted where others can see it and read it.
Consider the example of Hillside Elementary in Minnesota. A year ago that was one of the first elementary schools on the Web. One of their first projects was setting a sixth grade class loose to use the Internet for research and then publishing their papers on the Web. At the time, I was particularly impressed that instead of footnotes the students included hypertext links to their on-line sources. That looked like an excellent example of how research papers could and should be written in the future. Now, however, I realize the importance of the fact that the papers were made available over the Web and that all the students had their own individual home pages, complete with pictures of themselves or pictures that they had drawn and whatever they wanted to say about themselves. They were given recognition on a global scale. Anyone anywhere in the world with access to the Web could see them and their creations. The success of their site would not be measured in "hits" per day, but rather the motivating power of knowing that what you do can be seen by people you've never met, by people on the other side of the world. In this context, sheer numbers mean nothing, and the potential to be seen and read is everything.
We should keep in mind that people are motivated at least as much by the need for recognition and self-esteem as by economics. There are good reasons for hanging photos and plaques to commemorate winning teams and academic achievers, just as businesses post the names and/or photos of the employee of the week, as well as for rewarding people with important-sounding titles and printing them on business cards. And there are valid reasons for having individual home pages that are not directly related to costs and revenue -- that provide recognition and motivation, and can help build relationships and loyalty.
Photos of individuals, which in a direct marketing/business sense are relatively useless (what information do they convey to the reader?), can be very important to the self-esteem of the person shown -- regardless of how many people may choose to look at them. Consider the Special Olympics site which under "Yale Special Olympics Contacts" provides pictures and profiles of a variety of volunteers, including the janitor who serves as "chair of Yale's Sanitation and Recycling Committee for the 1995 Special Olympics World Summer Games". Those pictures are buried deep in the hierarchy of directories. They are not intended to attract readers to the site, but rather to publicly express appreciation.
You can use text, photos, audio and even video on the Web to recognize and motivate individuals. And you can also set up a systematic program that uses this kind of recognition to help build a sense of community, and to recognize and reward sub-communities -- like teams and extra-curricular groups. These forms of on-line recognition become particularly important as Web sites vie with tens of thousands of others for the attention and loyalty of users.
Consider the possibility of a school using Web space to recognize:
When everybody does it, does it have less value? Like the photos of teams and plaques of achievers hanging in the corridors of schools, even if only the students and a handful of visitors will see them, still they are a source of pride and motivation, and the number of other schools with similar photos in no way diminishes their value. And the community of people who feel they belong to that Web site will look and return and show what they find to others, regardless of how many other new communities are created.
Also, remember that these "recognition" pages can also have tangible benefits. Faculty and students are the greatest assets that a school has, and pages that provide photos and bios of them and pointers to their articles, etc. can serve as marketing tools for the school. This approach becomes particularly important as colleges use the Internet to compete for the attention of the best applicants, and as high schools use the Internet to enhance their image and improve the chances of their students being accepted at the best colleges. It becomes even more important as these schools realize that there are educational benefits as well as profits that could come from Internet-based distance learning. As they extend the reach of their school beyond the traditional campus -- offering courses on-line over the Internet, or programs in which some or even most of the interaction with teachers and other students happens on-line, they will have to pay ever more attention to their on-line image and marketing.
And, of course, the faculty members and students can use their Web space to market themselves as individuals, as they seek jobs or grants or acceptance at their next school.
Many colleges, like Yale already have lots of Web space devoted to faculty personal pages. And graduate schools like Harvard Business School are just beginning to allow and encourage doctoral students to post their biographies/resumes on the Web. Today that seems like a novelty and a competitive advantage for the privileged. But soon personal Web pages for all faculty and all students are likely to be common practice -- not just in colleges, but also in many K-12 schools.
It's easy to imagine a time when standard application forms (for high school, college, and employment) ask for your email address and the address of your personal home page.
So when a school uses Web pages for recognition and motivation, it is also preparing its students and faculty to compete in this new arena which is likely to be very important for their careers.
Today, on-line employment agencies like Monster Board and Career Mosaic make resumes as well as job openings available to wide audiences. And at the same time, many people with personal Web pages are posting their resumes for public viewing -- regardless of whether they are currently looking for a new position.
Often your personal home page consists of some basic identifying information, pointers to the places you most frequently visit on the Web, and a pointer to a "hyperbio." The hyperbio tends to be informal and fun, as well as informative. It reflects your personality, while highlighting your interests and accomplishments -- with links to articles you have written, and fun stuff about your family and friends, sometimes lots of pictures, and sometimes links to companies and schools you are associated with. And many people include links to their complete formal resume from their home page and/or from their hyperbio.
This is a relatively new phenomenon, which runs counter to ordinary social behavior. At least in the U.S., unless you are a politician, it would be considered bad taste for you to stand up at a party and tell everyone how great you are and hand out copies of your resume. But the Internet is a "pull" rather than a "push" environment. You freely post whatever you wish in your Web space and people can choose to come and take a look if they want and whenever they want. But no one ever feels that you have foisted information on them by posting it in your own space.
The hyperbio and on-line resume and the general concept of marketing yourself on the Internet come naturally to students who use the Web constantly as part of their school work. They see their professors and contemporaries doing this. And they also see that companies they might want to work for have Web pages of their own. It's a lot easier to point a potential employer to your on-line resume than to mail one. And it's even better if the employer finds your resume first and seeks you out.
Internet pioneers -- now turned entrepreneurs -- are using this technique quite effectively. People like John December, John Quarterman, Daniel Dern, Michael Strangelove, Dave Taylor,John Sumser, Kevin Savetz, Scott Yanoff, Larry Chase, Mary Cronin, Russ Jones, and Chris Locke have established audiences and credibility through a variety of free information services that they have provided about the Internet over the Internet. Now they use Web pages to advertise their credentials and promote new business for themselves as Internet consultants, authors, and speakers. And computer industry greats like Gordon Bell and Mitch Kapor do likewise. In this case, you yourself are the product you are selling. Your name becomes a brand. Your face becomes an icon.
This approach fits very well with the trend toward "virtual companies." More and more people are working as independent contractors for a variety of employers. And more and more small companies are teaming together and working like a single company for the duration of a project. The Web makes it easier for the independents to advertise their skills and for companies to quickly identify the individuals and other companies they need to team with to win and deliver business. This trend also opens opportunities for new kinds of agencies that use the Web to help speed the searching and matching, who help certify the qualifications of remote workers, and who provide a variety of support services to help virtual companies operate smoothly and at low cost.
At the same time, speaking agencies, like Expertspace, are taking to the Web. The Internet is one of the hottest topics on the lecture circuit today and agencies are using the Internet to identify speaking opportunities, locate appropriate speakers and make the matches. In fact, ironically, in this high tech environment, direct personal contact is highly valued -- like in the pre-mass media times of William Jennings Bryan and Ralph Waldo Emerson. People are willing to pay $1300 each for two-day introductory Internet seminars. And individual Internet speakers can receive $4000 and more for a one-hour presentation. In this environment, Internet entrepreneurs can do well providing free information and services on-line to build audience and reputation and then make their money in the lecture and seminar market.
In fact, one could make the case that active participants in cyberspace have a heightened need for direct personal contact with other cybernauts. Face-to-face trade shows and seminars devoted to the Internet are growing at an unprecedented pace, despite the fact that print publications and Web sites that mimic trade shows can provide much of the same factual information. At first, heightened demand for the direct see-and-feel environments of demos and trade shows seemed due to the technology itself, which is highly graphic. It's hard to explain the Web to someone who has never experienced it. But today at trade shows like Internet World the vast majority of the attendees are very familiar with the Web and could easily understand new product offerings from traditional advertising and product literature and on-line demos; and still they come in ever increasing swarms. This phenomenon seems to result from two related factors. First, the Internet business environment today mostly consists of large numbers of small companies and independent consultants -- the same sort of people and companies that use the Web to find one another and partner as "virtual companies." Lots of human networking takes place at these events that later leads to fruition using on-line networking tools. Second, the basic human need for community has a personal as well as an electronic side. While on-line communities can bring together people of common interests from all over the world, still there remains the need for direct personal contact; and the on-line experience seems all the richer when at one time or another you have met some of the participants face-to-face.
Recognizing this need, some entrepreneurs are creating communities that have both on-line and face-to-face components, such as afterwork gatherings of "Browsers" in the Wall St. area of New York. And at the same time, on-line communities like TheWell in San Francisco are providing Web space for their users to create personal Web pages, as a way of introducing themselves to one another for possible on-line and/or face-to-face contact.
So at one end of the spectrum, self-marketing with personal Web pages is an important element of recruiting and partnering in cyber-business. And at the other end, it's a social statement, far more personal and creative than "personal" ads (which also thrive on the Web), and tending toward the formation of larger communities or circles of friends than one-to-one match making.
The rest of the Way of the Web
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