HOT NEWS IN THIS REPORT:

1. E-mail marketing: The Internet's "killer application"
2. Napster - The start of an information sharing revolution?
3. Web-based training: Ideal for new employee orientation
4. Cool tool: Mimio
5. Cool tool: FinePrint 2000

Executive Technology Briefing (ETB)
Editor/Publisher: Jordan Ayan
Contributing Editor: Chuck Frey

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--E-MAIL MARKETING: THE INTERNET'S "KILLER APPLICATION"--

During the last few years, e-mail has emerged as an important strategic tool that savvy marketers can use to build and maintain strong relationships with key customers and prospects. Many business people are starting to recognize the value of e-mail marketing, because it can provide a significantly better response rate at a much lower cost than other types of direct marketing. It can also be used to position your company or brand in the minds of customers, as well as build trust with them.

Aggressive consumer dot-com companies have proven that e-mail marketing can have an awesome impact, drawing consumers into a tighter one-on-one relationship based on each customer's individual needs and preferences.

In some respects, e-mail marketing could be an even more powerful tool for business marketers, where selling cycles are longer and the decision-making processes more complex than in consumer markets. In other words, in B2B markets its even more critical to keep your company and its products "top of mind" with key prospects -- so when they're ready to buy, you're the supplier they go to first.

PERMISSION MARKETING
To successfully use e-mail as a marketing tool, you must have your target audience's permission to send them messages. The preferred method of collecting e-mail addresses is to ask your target audiences to "opt-in" - or consciously sign up for - a subscription to your e-mail list. If you send them unsolicited messages, some prospects might accuse your company of "spamming" them, which could seriously tarnish your firm's image and reputation. An excellent guide to this type of e-mail marketing is Seth Godin's" best-selling book, "Permission Marketing." (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0684856360/createitincA)

At the very least, each broadcast e-mail message you send to your target audiences should give them the option of removing themselves from your e-mail distribution list, if they feel your messages aren't of value to them. Most of your customers and prospects won't elect to unsubscribe from your list, but just knowing that they have that option will demonstrate that you care about their needs and preferences.

Here are some creative ways to solicit e-mail addresses from your key customers and prospects: - Ask them to register to obtain access to expanded resources on your Website - Announce a contest - Offer a free newsletter subscription - Provide them with automatic updates when new information is added to your site that meets their stated needs or preferences

E-NEWSLETTER CONTENT
What can you send to your targeted e-mail lists? E-mail newsletters are an excellent form of structured communication, in which you can include helpful tips and "how-to" articles that provide real value to your target. They're also the single best way to drive traffic to your company's Web site.

Like a paper-based newsletter, your electronic communications should be sent on a regular schedule - monthly is a nice frequency, because it isn't intrusive and yet helps to keep your company top of mind with your key audiences. Your goal is to provide your audience with "free" information that helps them with their day-to-day business needs - a great way to build your company's reputation as an industry expert that is focused on solving THEIR problems, not just trying to sell them something.

For best results, the content of your e-mail newsletter should be chatty and helpful, not a hard sell. Ask yourself: What information could I provide to my customers and prospects that would be useful to them, free, and would lead them to purchase our products and services? If you can offer your targeted audience something of value time after time, you and your company will become a trusted resource. As long as you remain focused on providing them value, they will be willing to look at what you have to sell. When you have a special sale or promotion, you can then use your e-newsletter as a powerful vehicle to let your best customers and prospects know about it.

A couple of e-newsletter content pointers:

- Keep each newsletter as brief as possible.

- If you have a lot of information to share with your target audiences, consider providing one-paragraph introductions or "teaser" copy for each topic, along with links to the pages within your Web site where recipients can click through to read the full story, if they're interested. Many busy businesspeople will appreciate your thoughtfulness, because this approach allows THEM to decide if a given article is of interest, and makes it easyfor them to "drill down" to more detail on your Web site.

OUTSOURCING LIST MAINTENANCE
Maintaining an e-mail group list - adding new addresses and deleting obsolete ones - can be a time-consuming task, especially as your list grows in size. That's why many companies opt to have their e-mail lists managed by an outside firm.

Companies like Message Media (http://www.messagemedia.com) and Lyris (http://www.lyris.com) can host your lists for you, automating the process of adding new subscribers to your lists and automatically removing e-mail addresses that no longer work. The ETB list is maintained by one of these services, and it saves us hours of time that would otherwise be spent doing list maintenance. Some list hosting firms also offer advanced services, such as tracking how many people who received your e-newsletter clicked on a particular link to your site - a valuable tool if you need to measure the bottom-line impact of your e-mail newsletter.

HANDLING LIST MAINTENANCE IN-HOUSE
If you want to maintain your own e-mail lists, based on records you have stored in your sales lead management software or other database, then programs like Aureate's GroupMail (http://www.group-mail.com) can help you quickly and efficiently create lists and messages, and broadcast them from your desktop PC. GroupMail allows you to import e-mail lists in several database formats quickly and easily. It also hides your list of e-mail addresses from recipients, protecting the security of your list and helping to ensure that other e-mail servers won't reject your broadcast e-mail messages (many are set to reject any messages with 50 or more recipients in the "To:" field). GroupMail can be downloaded from Aureate's Web site, and costs only $49.95.

Another software program, the JimTool Extractor (http://jimtools.com/extractor), can help you to easily extract e-mail and Web page addresses from any standard text or e-mail file. It can help you to filter and organize your list of e-mail subscribers, and may be especially helpful if you're trying to pull customer e-mail addresses from an archive of past messages. The cost of this useful e-mail utility is $24.95

E-MAIL'S TACTICAL IMPLICATIONS
E-mail marketing should be part of a larger focus on one-to-one marketing, which can employ a combination of e-mails, surveys and database segmentation to better understand and track your customers individual needs and preferences. The more you know about them, the better you'll be able to target e-mail messages to their specific needs.

Also, if you are in the business to business market, where sales cycles tend to be longer, it's critical that you follow up any e-mail promotion with a phone call, letter or another e-mail within one to two weeks.

One other caution: If your company plans to begin broadcast e-mail to market to your customers and prospects, you must be prepared to address every e-mail inquiry and new sales leads as quickly and efficiently as possible. Otherwise, your target audiences will soon become frustrated over your lack of responsiveness, and will probably take their business elsewhere.

If you don't already have an e-mail list, I recommend that you start compiling customer e-mail addresses into a database now. Start building for the future, even if you don't know how you are going to use the names.

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--NAPSTER - THE START OF AN INFORMATION SHARING REVOLUTION?--

http://www.napster.com

You may have heard about the controversy over Napster, a piece of software that allows music lovers to easily share and exchange music files via the Internet. While this Internet service has raised some significant legal issues related to copyright, it also has some important strategic implications for the future. Napster may be the harbinger of a new "peer-to-peer" (P2P) data distribution model that could turn the Internet inside out.

Today, almost all of the content on the World Wide Web is stored on a relatively small number of Web servers. The Internet adopted this server-centric model of distributing information because the average desktop PC of five years ago wasn't powerful enough to act as a file server. Nor did it have full-time, high-speed access to the Internet. But both of those hurdles have recently started to disappear: high-end PCs are now as powerful as yesterday's Web servers, while DSL and other forms of dedicated, high-speed Internet access are becoming widely available. The result is that distributed computing applications like Napster are now becoming practical for the first time ever. In effect, Napster has served as a successful proof of concept for distributed computing.

Napster and the new P2P applications it will inspire transfer control of content to users, who can share files and resources with a huge, decentralized pool of like-minded people. Anyone can be a user as well as a contributor. And, like any network application, its value increases exponentially as more people use it. While Napster makes it easy to share MP3 music files, new software programs will soon become available that will allow you to share ANY type of electronic files, including multimedia files and text-based reports.

This new P2P business model could conceivably become a powerful new engine for new forms of business exchanges and portals, where buyers and sellers can easily list their wares and find products and services of interest.

Napster is a catalyst that for a new renaissance of information and knowledge sharing. To understand the power that comes with this model, you must experience it firsthand. If you haven't used it yet, try Napster. However, we don't recommend installing it on a network, so try it on a stand-alone PC. And keep an eye on the developments in the P2P space looking for elements that you can leverage to your company's advantage.

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--WEB-BASED TRAINING: IDEAL FOR NEW EMPLOYEE ORIENTATION--

One of the first niches where Web-based training (WBT) is gaining a foothold is new employee orientation. Considering the mobility of today's workforce, training new hires on your company's structure, culture and policies is an ongoing need.

Moving from instructor-led training to self-directed, computer-based training sessions could save your company a significant number of man- hours, especially if your organization has multiple offices or facilities. It's also a good place for your human resources and Web development teams to start learning how to create training course using WBT authoring tools like Macromedia's Coursebuilder for Dreamweaver (http://www.macromedia.com/software/coursebuilder) or Allen Communications' Quest (http://www.allencomm.com/software/quest).

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--COOL TOOL: MIMIO--

http://www.mimio.com

Electronic whiteboards are great collaboration tools, because they enable you to capture what's written or drawn on them, transfer it to a PC and share it electronically with others. A new product called Mimio from Digital Ink, Inc. now brings these same benefits to traditional whiteboards.

Mimio consists of a "capture bar," a long, narrow device with suction cups that attaches to the surface of any whiteboard, plus special styluses and an eraser. The capture bar contains sensors that track the location of the marker stylus as you write or draw on the whiteboard, and transfers this data to a PC. The Mimio software then interprets this position data as a live drawing or image. Once transferred to a computer, these digital images can be revised, printed, shared with coworkers, exported to HTML - or dragged and dropped into any Windows software application.

This highly portable system can be quickly attached to different sized whiteboards. Mimio is ideal for team meetings, distance-learning classes, networked brainstorming sessions and other uses, and costs $500. Later this year, the company plans to introduce a new version of Mimio that will attach to flip charts.

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--COOL TOOL: FINEPRINT 2000--

http://www.fineprint.com

If you've ever downloaded electronic books or white papers in the popular Adobe Portable Document format(PDF), you've probably experienced several limitations: First, you can't read a PDF book unless you're in front of your computer. Secondly, printing out a 100-plus page document can cause a lot of wear and tear on your printer; plus you end up with a thick pile of papers that isn't very portable, either.

FinePrint 2000 from Fine Print, LLC is a must-have software utility that solves these problems. It enables you to print 2, 4 or even 8 pages on a single sheet. FinePrint 2000 costs $40, and can be downloaded from the company's Web site. A trial version is also available.

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That's all for now! I welcome your comments and feedback on the Executive Technology Briefing, which will help me to focus it even more closely on your needs.

Jordan Ayan
President
Create-It! Inc.