By Chuck Martin
(4/7/98)
(Note: This story was excerpted from The Digital Estate: Strategies for Competing, Surviving, and Thriving In an Internetworked World, by Chuck Martin, copyright 1996 by Charles L. Martin, Jr. Reprinted by permission of the McGraw-Hill Companies Inc. All rights reserved.)
Business Netiquette, as its name implies, is the standard of behavior that governs the commercial development and usage of the Net. The evolving rules of conduct are particularly important in this context because the digital environment of the Net makes it impossible to separate business and consumer "real estate." Virtual town centers, virtual malls, and intranationally aggregated office parks reside in essentially the same space as personal home pages, educational and research networks, and government and nonprofit organizations.
The business community must respect that, for all its vast commercial potential, the Net is also a personal place--home, neighborhood, or city, for millions. "The rules of business Netiquette" is an attempt to provide general guidelines for keeping the relationship between consumers and businesses a healthy, happy one. The potential that makes the Net such an attractive and fertile area for commercial cultivation carries with it a responsibility. Companies would do well to remember that, on the Net, the individual user is always in control and always has choices.
In keeping with the collaborative nature of the Net, these rules represent the input of many people who have developed their own standards of business conduct on the Net.
The rules of business Netiquette
1. Be sensitive to customers with older systems. Offer a text-only option for viewing your site on the splash [home] page.
2. Remember that your customers are paying to be online. Provide fast and easy access to your information and content. Don't abuse their time.
3. Organize material logically from the customer's point of view. Ideally, the splash page will be the main page on a site. Be sure to include clear directions for navigating the site on the main page.
4. Keep in mind that the main page of a site serves a variety of functions. It's a map, a front door, and a marketing message all in one.
5. Use the splash page to set the tone and personality of the site, but do so selectively. The tone of the Web site should correlate with the personality of the company.
6. If appropriate, include a time and date stamp. It helps to keep the site current.
7. When using icons, particularly those embedded in a graphic design, make sure that they are easy to see and that their function is obvious. Test the design on 10 to 20 users to make sure your customers will understand.
8. Include alt text for all icon links.
9. Avoid offending users new to the Net by using heavily laced jargon or by adopting a hipper-than-thou attitude.
10. Do not use bells and whistles just because you can. As bandwidth increases this issue will become less relevant. Until then, heavy use of graphics, video, and audio programs is time-consuming for the user.
Chuck Martin is president of The Digital Estate Group, a U.S.-based consulting firm, and a frequent lecturer around the world. He is chairman of the @d:tech conference and advisory board, and is senior advisor to the New York investment banking firm Desilva & Phillips. Previously, he served as vice president, publishing and advertising of IBM. Before that, he was associate publisher of Information Week and the founding publisher and COO of Interactive Age. He was also editor and publisher of High Technology Business and editor in chief of Personal Computing. He is currently working on another Internet business book scheduled for release later in 1998.
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