And turn them up he did. Using a few keywords, Martin quickly found a newsgroup for people with handicaps and posted a message asking users for feedback on the idea. Within a few weeks, Martin had heard back from enough users to be able to pass along encouraging news to his client: most of the respondents had three wheelchairs in different locations and found the prospect of having one lightweight portable chair very appealing. Today, Balentine has added intelligence gathering on the Net to its basic menu of customer services.
Market Research
The prospect of pinning down accurate international data is what spurred Eric Anderson, CEO of Art Anderson Associates, to take the Internet seriously. A significant portion of his $4-million engineering and architecture business involves designing ferry vessels and port facilities for overseas locations, and it's vital for the firm to obtain reliable geographic surveys. "Lots of coastlines are inaccessible," Anderson points out. "To make them func-tional, there has to be a ferry service. The Net helps us find information about those sites."
Anderson began investigating the Internet in earnest after attending a seminar led by a consultant who specialized in gathering competitive intelligence. Intrigued, but unwilling to pony up the high fee the researcher was charging for his services, Anderson decided to give it a whirl himself. He signed up with a local access provider, installed Internet In A Box -- software by Spry, CompuServe's Internet division -- on his PC, and began tapping away.
Anderson is now counting on the Web and newsgroups run by overseas tourism boards to help his own company "leapfrog into new markets." To get the latest news on development and tourism in Singapore, say, he pulls up the Singapore Web page and checks out which industries are "hot" and who the major players are. "If I see that there's an intensive push to develop industry or tourism in a certain area," he says, "I try to find out who's leading that push." And then he contacts them about building a ferry.
Anderson says that using the Internet is doubly appealing because it cuts his expense budgets. "It allows us to do more preliminary research without the travel expenses we had before." That cost-saving feature is one of the Internet's big attractions. Most companies can justify a $99 software package for getting around on the Net (starter kits usually contain E-mail programming, a browser, and a few other on-line networking tools) and about $20 a month for an Internet dial-up account for one computer. Compared to what a market research analyst charges for a single report, the Internet looks downright cheap, provided you have the time to hunt down what you're looking for.
Competitive Intelligence
Craig Stouffer, CEO of Mobius Computer Corp. (an Inc. 500 company in 1995), used to work the phones feverishly when it came to scouting potential business. The $7.5-million manufacturer of computer systems sells to Fortune 1,000 corporations. Keeping close tabs on those companies' 10K reports, now available on-line, helps him get an early line on which of them might be in the market for new or upgraded systems.
Stouffer also gathers product information and lists of references from competitors and potential customers by working the Internet. "You can post a question on the newsgroups about products or systems, and 4,500 people respond with their experiences." A slight exaggeration, yes, but there's no question that the number of people you can reach on the Internet is mind-boggling. When Stouffer first logged on, about a year and a half ago, there were some 8,500 newsgroups. Now there are nearly twice that many. Painstakingly reading through all the subject descriptions, he whittled down that list to just over 200 newsgroups on topics pertinent to his business. These days he only has time to read the postings in five or six groups each day, but having gone through the huge list once, he can now cut to the chase with the utmost efficiency.
Many of the resources that businesspeople like Stouffer are mining on-line -- for instance, the inside scoop on competitors from real customers -- weren't accessible to them previously in any form. "There's information available now on the Internet that's never been available anywhere," says director of operations Trey Seitz at Competitive Intelligence International in Chicago, a consulting firm that specializes in digging up industry dirt. "The newsgroups are a good place to get information anonymously from experts, and on mailing lists you can find competitors and their customers." Seitz says that exploring the Internet should be a first step for any start-up. "You can pretty much find out what any company in any field is doing. It's a great first step for an entrepreneur -- you can evaluate market needs just by posting a message."
Admittedly, getting the goods on the Internet is not always that simple. But investing a few hours each week in finding useful information is the only way to test the possibilities. The CEOs who have come to rely on the Internet for diverse business information agree on one thing: at some point they had to stop talking about it and just jump in.
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Phaedra Hise (phaedra_hise@incmag.com) is the technology editor for Inc. magazine.
RESEARCH TOOL PRIMER
There's no research librarian to hold your hand on the Internet, so learning a few key terms and tools is the first step to productive exploration.
