Last week, as I paid for my lunch, the cashier asked me, “Didn’t you co-author a book on the Internet?”

Celebrity is where you find it. My cashier friend is in rarified company, since the marketing for Selling on the ‘Net (NTC, 1996) has been, shall we say, spotty.

Nonetheless, since I wrote a book I must be an expert, which means I’ve had occasion to talk to business and IT leaders about the Web. Although almost everyone has a Web presence by now, many tell me they “… need to develop an Internet strategy.”

Strategy is good. Substitute any other tool for “Internet,” though, and you’ll immediately spot the problem (“We need a circular saw strategy”). “We need a strategy” is a defensive statement. The last two words of this sentence – “I guess” – remain unvoiced, but they come through loud and clear.

Even though the World Wide Web has been visible to business for about five years — and has been the focus of an extraordinary outpouring of creative energy, not to mention some cash — business leaders still don’t understand how to think about it. And while few dispute the future success of Internet commerce, we have to survive until the future gets here.

Businesses succeed on the Internet the same way they succeed in any other area: By deciding to succeed and understanding what success means. It’s a matter of clear, realistic thinking and deliberate planning. And as with most aspects of business planning there’s no tensor calculus involved.

Creating a Web site has more in common with publishing than with any other mundane endeavor. Like any publication, successful Web sites start with a clear focus and purpose, because if you confuse visitors to your site they’ll leave. Creating clarity takes hard work.

You’ll be in the middle of this discussion, so be prepared to lead it if the conversation gets squishy. Here’s an approach you can use if you decide to take charge:

Step 1 – Establish your business model: A business model states a cause-and-effect relationship in specific terms. Right now, the most successful model is enhancing customer relationships by improving service. Another good model: Suggesting new uses for your products to increase consumption by current customers.

Step 2 – Profile your target audience: An audience profile describes who you want to attract and what they want when they visit. Reading Web demographics and figuring out how to attract “that kind of person” is a trap. You want prospects and customers, not visitors. If you sell office furniture, you may want to attract architects and facilities planners who want advice on office design – teenage surfers are a distraction. If you sell acne medicine, architects and facilities planners are the distraction, unless they have pimples.

Step 3 – Define measures of success: Good measures come from your business model. Although not every cause-and-effect relationship lends itself to direct measurement, avoid simply falling back on measuring what is convenient, such as hits. Measure what’s important, not what’s easy to measure. Anything that doesn’t test your business model is pointless.

Step 4 – Perform a reality check: Is your target audience really going to exhibit the behavior you need? This may come down to arguing or it may involve market research. Just watch out for the we’ve-reached-consensus-so-we-must-be-right fallacy. Automobile makers did this successfully, rejecting online purchasing and instead helping buyers research car purchases.

Now comes all the real work – these four steps are just the start, and don’t ensure success.

In a competitive marketplace, nothing can.

From the IS Survival Mailbag …

My recent column on the Year 2000 raised both the ire and scholarship of the IS Survivalist community.

Quite a few readers took me to task for proposing that both the “decadist” camp (the millennium ends on the decade boundary … December 31, 1999) and the “centurist” camp (December 31, 2000) have legitimate claims.

A few disagreed with my fundamental premise, insisting 1990 was the last year of the 1980s. To them I respond, “thlppp!” Never let it be said I stray from the high road.

Others explained that decades don’t matter — since there was no Year 0, 2,000 years won’t have passed until midnight, December 31, 2000. Jim Carls wrote to explain why they’re wrong:

“If you look it up in your history book, do the math and assume that historical accuracy is of some importance in defining the start of the Third Millennium Anno Domini, the latest point at which the millennium could start was in 1997 (Herod the Great died in 4 BC). And, according to Stephen Jay Gould (interviewed last week on PBS), the latest possible date was October 23rd. Let’s all bring that up in the next planning meeting!”

I say we start celebrating December 31, 1999 and don’t stop until January 1, 2001. Which means the real Year 2000 crisis will be a severe grape shortage. Vineyards … start planting!

Another group of correspondents took issue with the idea that the two-digit year was a feature, rather than a bug, and that it made good business sense at the time. Quite a few e-mails pointed out that a four-byte integer field could have stored 179 years worth of dates avoiding the problem for some time to come. Others questioned how much money programmers saved by not using a four-position year.

The first group would be right if storage were the only issue. Backtrack 25 years, though, and figure out how many iterations of Moore’s Law we have to undo. Computers had, I’d guess, about 1% of today’s processing power. The computation time needed to convert dates to and from integer format would have greatly extended batch processing times, which would have been very expensive. Tim Oxler invites everyone to visit a Web page he put up to discuss this in more detail: http://www.i1.net/~troxler/html/space.html.

The second group raises an interesting question. Leon Kappelman & Phil Scott answer it at http://comlinks.com/mag/accr.htm. Short version: The savings have been huge, far in excess of even the largest Year 2000 cost estimates.

And then there’s the other point — my contention that the world will muddle through as usual, neither blowing up nor sailing through unscathed. Robert Nee wrote to formulate this more precisely. He points out that the basic laws of supply and demand in a market-based economy predict that for every company that goes bankrupt due to Year 2000 problems there will be others that pick up the slack, both in terms of supplying goods and services, and in terms of employment.

This is a wonderful insight. Yes, lots of companies will fail. Yes, lawyers will file trillions of dollars worth of lawsuits, bayoneting the wounded to make sure as few companies recover as possible. (To the gathering flock of vultures now soliciting Year 2000 whistleblowers I’d like to make a simple comment. I’d like to, but I’m not sure libel laws permit it.)

In the end, though, demand will drive supply and so long as whole industries don’t fail, suppliers that are Year 2000 compliant will buy the bloody remains of those that aren’t, providing enough supply to satisfy demand and enough employment to keep everyone working as they do so.

Which, in turn, hearkens back to another point made frequently here: Many of the best investments in IT are those focused on your company’s survival, whether they’ll deliver measurable returns or not.