Net Attitude: What It Is, How to Get It, and Why Your Company Can't Survive Without It
Authors: John R. Patrick
Venue:  (2001)

From the Book:Tude. Attitude. Attitude is everything! At some level, I believe, attitude is everything anywhere in life. But, for sure, attitude is everything when it comes to the Internet. And that's what this book is about. Internet attitude. I've known John Patrick for a long time, since before the Internet came along, back when he was just an IBM executive. I remember that even then he was good at "business development." That meant he got out of the office and talked to other people including both customers and people who worked for other computer companies. Perhaps because he was a good schmooze artist and a smart guy, he saw the possibilities of the Internet early on. (If he hasn't told you somewhere else in the book, go visit his website at IBM: http://www.ibm.com/patrick, where you can find out a lot more.) Anyway, legend has it that he got involved in the Internet so early that he ended up having the IBM Web server under his desk. He was among the prime movers inside IBM who recognized that the company should be visibly involved with the Internet and evangelized the use of the Internet to the rest of the company. IBM, of course, had been involved in the development of the Internet itself, mostly in its research labs. But its research labs were often isolated from the mainstream of the company's real business: serving customers. Patrick was the guy who got the Internet to become part of the company's business. (He ended up as vice president of Internet technology for the whole corporation.) All of that was attitude. Patrick has a lot of it himself. Odd, since IBM wasn't always known as a place where people with a lot of attitude survive and prosper. But good for the company, because attitude is every thing on the Internet. And totally appropriate to have a guy with a lot of attitude write a book about Internet attitude. Here's the attitude. The Internet changes everything. It changes the way business gets done with customers and between business partners and suppliers. It changes the way we live and enjoy our personal lives. It changes the way we get educated, manage our governments and public policies, entertain ourselves, produce creative stuff, everything. It changes everything. My Personal Experience. I grew up in the magazine business, mostly as an editor. I love magazines. Magazines are toast in the Internet era, mainly because of attitude problems. People who publish and edit magazines think of magazine readers in terms of very large groups-demographic groups or psychographic groups or special interest groups. That magazines are toast is ironic because they were the first medium that could be targeted. Before cable television, before radio networks, before any other medium, magazines figured out how to create a targeted environment that was designed for just sailors, for instance, instead of everyone who had a boat, regardless of whether it was a sailboat or a powerboat. Now magazines are toast because there's a better way to target even more specific groups of people. There's even a way to target individuals as a group. In fact, it really isn't appropriate to think of "targeting" because the very notion is founded inside the context of large mass markets, one where marketers need to hone in to targets. But magazine people think targeting, and they can't conceive of a different way of doing it. They just can't get their minds around the idea that you could write for one person at a time, or that computers could handle managing the interaction with an individual one at a time. They don't have the attitude. To have the attitude, you have to embrace the Internet and all of the new abilities it gives you, even if they challenge the most fundamental principles you learned at home, in school, at work, or even on the street. Here are the few basic, immutable principles that I've been able to discern that are relevant to the Internet: Personalization. The idea that you can target media to an individual is now embodied in the phrase "one to one marketing", popularized by consultants Don Peppers and Martha Rogers in a book by that name several years ago. Before that it was known as narrowcasting, as opposed to broadcasting. But it's not just media or marketing. On the Internet, the fundamental promise is that you can be the single most important entity whenever you are interacting with it. Computers can remember information about anyone. Computers can use that information to present only the most relevant data to any individual automatically. The networks that connect computers into the Internet can deliver that information to you wherever you happen to be. This is personalization: It is a still a very difficult thing to accomplish. The technology is still primitive. We haven't done very much personalization yet so we still don't really know how to do it. True personalization requires integration, which is the hardest thing of all to do with computers-to get various computer systems to cooperate even if they weren't designed to do so. You'll get example after example from Patrick as you read Net Attitude about how personalization could work if we had the technology and knew how to apply it. It's just a matter of time-and attitude. Interaction. Before computers came along and got hooked up to the Internet, media were static or passive. In other words, media people-writers, producers, editors, musicians, actors, and so on-made something that you consumed. A movie might involve several senses, but you got to consume it without talking back. The Internet is interactive. That means consumers can talk back. This is a very, very difficult part of the Internet attitude for almost everyone to adopt. Whether you are a businessperson or a creative person or both, you've been trained to control your environment. Having everybody talk back to you all the time seems both overwhelming and chaotic and precisely the opposite of what you were trained to do. For instance, one of the most central effects that the Internet has had in business is to give individuals the ability to look inside companies in a way they were never able to previously. So, when a company put up a site on the World Wide Web for the first time, the senior management had to decide who controlled the information about the company: was it the marketing department? Or customer service? Or sales? Or information technology, which traditionally controlled everything about computers? This led to internecine warfare inside a lot of companies because each department viewed it as crucial to their particular mission and didn't want to give up control to another department. Each had a legitimate need. Many companies still haven't resolved this conflict, haven't even under stood that it gets resolved by understanding that the issue is interaction and that the customer has the right to interact. Have you tried looking up the e-mail address for any real human being on any corporate Web site? In my experience, 90 percent of companies still won't tell you how to send an e-mail to one of their executives. Companies act like they are scared of their customers. That's not Internet attitude. Real Timeliness. The Internet happens in real time. This was a big challenge for my colleagues in the publishing business, where life is defined by how long it takes to produce and distribute your publication: daily newspapers, weekly or monthly magazines, or even books, which take at least a year. Unlike older media, there is no logistical reason-other than the time spent thinking about or creating the communication-for Internet communications to take time to produce and distribute. Real timeliness takes the concept of interactivity and cranks it up a notch. Not only does Internet attitude call for letting customers look inside your company, but it sets an expectation that you will actually respond to customer communication right away, in real time. I bought a pair of shoes from Rockport.com and they didn't fit. I sent an e-mail to the address shown on the Rockport.com Web site for authorizing returns. I never got a response. My wife took the shoes to the shipping store, so I got a credit on my credit card. But I'll never buy from Rockport.com again, since they don't apparently read or respond to e-mail to an address they publish on their Web site. They should not have created a Web site unless they were prepared to respond to customers in real time. They don't have Internet attitude. The technology of the Internet-computers and communications integrated and broadly available-can lead to threats as well as opportunity: invasion of privacy, widespread spamming, computer viruses. Part of Internet attitude is to recognize that we are in a major transition as a society and to embrace the threats as equally as the opportunities, to understand that we will ultimately figure out how to handle the impact that the Internet will have on our society and not to run away from it or try to stop or slow down the change because of the threats. Enough already Patrick knows Internet attitude. He's written a book about it. Read the book and get the attitude. Stewart Alsop