How to Make New Media Work for Your Business
The Los Angeles New Media Roundtable, or Lawnmower, sponsors bimonthly round-table discussions and conferences on issues that these emerging and high-growth companies face. Up to 1,000 people attend the events, held in Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York. Past topics include digitization and utilization of “media assets,” such as video and film, and broadband’s effect on content creation. Lawnmower Managing Director Jim Dolbear recently answered questions that businesses ask the Culver City-based group most often.
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Q How can I bring my content or product to the audience or customer?
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A The general rule of thumb is that you need help to distribute your service or product. You can’t do it yourself. That’s been the problem with the Internet. People think if they put their stuff up online and have it available, it’ll be enough. But it’s not enough.
Unless you’re linked into a lot of eyeballs and get a lot of traffic on your site, you’ve got problems. So you need to try to partner with front-end people who already have that traffic. For instance, if you have something that’s targeted at women, rather than hiring a brand marketing person and advertising agency to try and figure out how to reach women in America, you should just go talk to IVillage or Women.com.
The good news about the Internet these days is that there is likely to be a partner available that you don’t know about. Once you’ve figured out who you are as a company and who your target market is, you’ve got to ask yourself where your market is aggregating online already.
If you have a product that’s targeted at women and you know there are women on Women.com., you can save yourself a lot of bother if you can do a deal with Women.com, where you can either drive traffic from them or somehow get yourself presented on the Women.com site. If you have something of value, you can find a partner. The Internet is just mature enough that there’s a high probability someone’s already got your audience all in one place.
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Q How can I make sure my product or service is compatible with today’s Internet technology?
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A It’s an issue of knowing all the Internet browsers and Internet service providers and knowing what their specifications are. In some sense they are the voice of the platform.
It sounds simple, but you could spend all this money on your product and the whole thing could tank because people couldn’t see it or it didn’t work or it didn’t download right. If what you’re doing is written for the top two browsers, Netscape [Communicator] and [Microsoft] Internet Explorer, and it’s written for service providers like America Online and EarthLink, you should be OK.
You can call them for their specifications, but depending on how technically proficient you are, what they say could go right over your head. You might have to work with a Web developer, but the information is available.
You also have to make sure that you write for the 28.8-Kbps modem speed, which is the dial-up bandwidth in most of America. People used to make this mistake all the time where they would try to do really sexy stuff and write for a faster modem speed, and then everyone in America would experience it as a disaster because it would take five minutes to download. Engineers and creative people do this all the time. A business obviously can’t do that. It doesn’t matter how cool it is if it doesn’t work.
It’s strange, but there’s been kind of a regression in Web sites these days. Web sites, two or three years ago, used to be heavier. The colors were heavier; there were more elaborate graphics. Now they look much cleaner, and a lot of that has to do with people figuring out that the heavy stuff takes too long to download given the current state of technology in most of America. The colors are lighter now, and the graphics are more simple.
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Q What is the outlook for the new-media industry in the coming year?
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A It’s going to keep going full speed ahead. The only bad news is that it’s going to be a little stressful for people because things are going to be happening very quickly, and some things are going to seem bigger than they really are. So there are going to be people who fail. But the underlying fundamentals of this thing are completely real. It’s going to go on for a while; I mean decades.
I really do think that the Internet is for real in terms of its impact on the sheer availability of information. All of the things that people do in business are information-driven. On the Internet, information is so available that you just get smarter quicker. That’s a huge thing because that’s what makes this acceleration real.
The second thing is that more businesses are going to have a digital platform, and that’s very significant, because if you define the specifications for bolting someone else’s solution onto yours, it’s an immediate partnership. You basically drop a hot link on their site, and they drop a hot link on your site and it’s done. That’s it. You’re in business together.
Lawnmower can be reached at (310) 899-3800. The organization’s Web site is at https://www
.lawnmoweronline.com.
If you have a question about how to start or operate a small business, mail it to Karen E. Klein, Los Angeles Times, 1333 S. Mayflower Ave., Suite 100, Monrovia, CA 91016 or e-mail it to kklein6349@aol.com. Include your name, address and telephone number. This column is designed to answer questions of general interest. It should not be construed as legal advice.
