Wait 'til Cousteau and Perot Figure it Out

The crusaders grapple for a share of your mind, your time, and your bucks.
With expanding bandwidth, the non-profit heavyweights will deal themselves into a new variant on the intellectual capital game... with an eye on pumping you up and signing you on.

In the near term the Worldwide Web will become a critical tool for corporate communication. And while it won't become a popular channel to mass-market audiences all that soon, we will comment on one likely future dimension of Web practrice with regard to mass audiences.

If we look forward to the day when end-to-end bandwidth improves sufficiently to bring consumer households into the WWW channel, it's not a stretch to envisage public interest organizations leaping into the intellectual-capital game. All the possibilities that we have described for corporate and institutional information bases apply with equal validity here -- but amplified big-time by the stylistic tools and techniques of direct mail promotion and media relations (like, for instance, video news releases).

Imagine home pages, and the hypermedia content they could introduce, for powerful interest groups like the American Association of Retired Persons, or the National Rifle Association, or Greenpeace, or indeed any comparable membership organization, whatever its ideology or agenda. The same intellectual capital elements -- certainly cast in more overtly persuasive trappings -- figure here too, but projected on a far broader screen to be sure.

Here's another thought experiment. Pick one of the scores of large public interest groups operating today; or better yet, pick two -- one that you admire, another that you may dislike. Imagine how each might organize its home page structure, the elements it might include, and the persuasive resources it might marshal to prosecute its goals in, say, membership building, fund raising, legislative relations, and media relations. That path will lead you far beyond the considerations we have introduced here. At the same time, it may help you come to terms quite quickly -- if you haven't done so already -- with both the rich potential and the somewhat chilling down-side of Web-based invitational publishing.