We Have Met the Future and It Is the Internet!

You may recall a famous scene from the movie, The Graduate, when a friend of the family pulls Dustin Hoffman's character aside at his graduation party and whispers, "Benjamin. Do you know what the key to the future is? Just one word. Plastics." Fast forward 30 years, replace the word "plastics" with "Internet," and you'll have the 1990s version of that same scene.

The lnternet. It's ubiquitous. It's the media darling of the world. It's launching empires, and making drastic changes in corporate fortunes both up and down. And, it will undoubtedly revolutionize how most of us communicate, get our news, do our research, find our next job, shop for clothes, and even how we interrelate.

For all organizations, particularly those involved in marketing, public affairs, advertising and sales, the Internet is a marketer's dream. As community affairs and sales departments continue to converge to handle corporate sponsorships and total station projects, the Internet will become increasingly useful.

It can cut marketing costs. It can also reduce the amount of time currently necessary to get materials into the hands of a target audience. While the Internet will not likely replace printed material in the immediate future, it can certainly be used to provide price lists, fact sheets, program listings, advertising rate schedules, staff contacts and a host of other traditionally print material. Not only is there no cost for reproducing this material, it is instantly available at all hours and time zones to anyone who wishes to access it.

Also, if you are on the road, you are never disconnected from the important information that can he available on your station's web site. You can either download whatever you need on site, or you can use the Internet to take prospects, clients or community partners through your station's web site to explain a program or station asset.

Used as a competitive tool, you can do timely research on any station in your market or in any other market. interestingly enough, there are few stations we could find in our WWW research. Several were found by going to Media Central, a website maintained by Cowles New Media (http://www.mediacentral.com/). In our opinion, one of the best of these is the graphics-rich home page of KQED, San Francisco, with hypertext links to its TV and radio stations and its publishing ventures.

For an unbelievably beautiful home page and a peek at the future of television, visit NBC Network's home page at http://www.nbc.com. Most TV station home pages focus almost entirely on news, weather and sports subjects, with little to offer on the station's community affairs activities. An exception is WJLA in Washington, DC, which has a hypertext link called "special programs."

When you click on it, the browser gets information on "Children First," a campaign to heighten awareness about Washington, DC, area schools and "Working Woman," with career strategies, health, fitness, investments and other subjects of interest to this audience.

As a professional development tool, the Internet is invaluable. You can keep current via home pages offered by Advertising Age, Inside Media, the NAB, NCTA and Nielsen Media Research.

Perhaps one of the most useful sites for community affairs directors is the FCC home page. Here, you'll find information about FCC filings, rulings, current press releases, a description of laws and rules governing TV access and programming, and new software designed to help the public retrieve documents from the FCC.

To give you an idea of the quantity of material available, when I entered the term "broadcasting," the Web Crawler search engine found 908 citations and Yahoo found 302. Many of these probably are not of interest to the community affairs professional, but surfing the net from the comfort of your home or office beats spending hours in the library pouring over reference books and periodicals.

Finally, and most importantly for people who deal with nonprofits in their community, the Internet is a tremendous resource. You can find virtually any nonprofit in the country - or the world for that matter - via the Internet. You can search by organization title, by subject area, or by state to find a particular organization you want to reach. If you want to find an organization with current campaign material for your station to use, the Net provides the mechanism.