Addressing Opinion Leaders

Through its Web server an organization can publish detailed media-rich information about itself: its mission or business, its organizational structure and leadership, its core competencies, markets, constituencies, activities, services, products, and so on. This information can be organized for maximal appeal and content value for key targets of influence.

Who are these key audiences? They are opinion leaders who can influence an organization's reputation and perceived value in its markets, and transmit the impression of organizational value into the world at large. Media decision-makers and journalists, of course, are important targets of influence in their own right, but in today's information-intensive society they're arguably no more critical than parallel communities of information mediators like market researchers, securities analysts, fund managers, institutional investors, and academics.
[188k] The professional media: no more monopoly on information.

Potential industry partners and business allies should also be ranked among these top-tier targets of influence. We are also dealing here with business prospects and customers, of course, but not necessarily as primary targets. Strong selling messages are antithetical to the objectives of this "high road" approach, which hinges on factual (and interesting) self-presentation.

But are these influential, top-tier audiences currently accessible through the Worldwide Web? A number of Net-specialist market researchers are working to identify many of these segments as we prepare this discussion, and right now the market segmentation of the WWW's audience is not entirely clear. But it's a safe bet to predict that, even if they're not doing so already, the leading media, securities, and market analysis organizations will soon be working the Web extensively for information gathering and background research, particularly as more enterprises establish inviting home pages that marshal useful and substantive information about their operations.
[168k] Informational and promotional?

In many respects, the Worldwide Web is the optimal forum for media-rich enterprise communications aimed at opinion leaders. Bear in mind, however, that these professional audiences are not easy marks: their work centers on reading, viewing, and evaluating materials that organizations produce to advance their own interests. Naive and impressionable they are not: so slick mass-market ad copy and execspeak PR spins simply won't play in this quarter. These are discriminating audiences, and they're always on the lookout for reliable and useful information that helps them in their own work.