Key Business Benefits Of The Internet
The Internet offers businesses an impressive number of competitive advantages, including these six key benefits: electronic mail, access to research, tracking competitors, inexpensive remote collaboration, enhanced customer service, and low-cost marketing and advertising.
Let’s look at them one by one.
Electronic Mail
Much of the traffic on the Internet today is electronic mail. Indeed, it’s been estimated that well over 4,000 messages are sent each second of the day on the Internet.
Being able to send messages in seconds to a user anywhere in the world is probably the single most important reason so many companies find the Internet so appealing.
The Internet is also cheaper and more cost-efficient than comparable commercial online networks such as CompuServe, GEnie, or MCI Mail. Once you’re connected to the information highway, there are no additional per-minute or per-message charges. In the world of commercial online services, by contrast, flat-fee plans by which users send unlimited messages are quickly giving way to pay-as-you-go schemes as the services learn to compete in this new market.
There’s another important aspect to this, too: In addition to enabling your employees to communicate in an effective and inexpensive manner, the Internet links your company with the Internet’s more than 20,000,000 users.
To be fair, we’re not talking 20,000,000 potential customers, but even if only 1 percent are vaguely interested.. .well, you get the picture.
Research
Imagine that every site in your local library were actually a gateway to another library and that each of those libraries had another two to fifty times as many volumes as the first one. That’s what makes the Internet such a treasure trove of information for your business. For starters, the Internet provides
■ Access to the Library of Congress and just about every major university library in the United States
■ Business-oriented databases such as Commerce Business Daily, the Federal Register, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Economic Bulletin Board
■ U.S. and Canadian Census data
■ Supreme Court decisions
■ World health statistics
■ Security and Exchange Commission corporate financial reports
■ International weather forecasts (including up-to-the-hour satellite pictures)
■ United Nations information
■ And even transcripts of daily White House press briefings
The Internet has more than statistical data, however. The network’s lifeblood is its widely varying and often freewheeling discussion forums, split between public bulletin boards (called Usenet) and private electronic mailing lists. Both offer forums packed with experts discussing new developments in their fields. There are Internet discussion groups about almost anything you can think of - chemical engineering, entrepreneurship, computer programming, franchise opportunities, Eastern European trade and politics, semiconductor manufacturing, continuing employee education, and over 10,000 other forums.