ReachCustomersOnline.com

Small Business, No Website

Posted by TimSlavin at April 9, 2004

I'm back from working in California. There was no email newsletter last weekend because, as I expected, my mom's house in San Francisco is still a no-internet zone. There are a few of those areas left in this world.

On my plane flight out, I did come across a very interesting article, Dictatorship.com: The Web Won't Topple Tyranny (PDF) (article on page 20) from The New Republic, a US magazine. The article describes how repressive governments use the internet to consolidate their political power when conventional wisdom says internet adoption should lead to fewer dictatorships.

And today, in a phone call doing research for clients, I came across a website that supports my belief that small businesses (think florists, dry cleaners) will have less need for a website and more need for email contact to reach the customers who walk into their shops. The site is Localtel.com and it is a more commercial version of Craig's List, one of the first online communities to harness the economic power of people.

Both sites seem ripe to be copied and applied all over the world. Localtel.com in particular shows how the lucrative Yellow Pages business model can be expanded to include community information; the hard part is to advertise enough to train customers of local businesses to go to their site when they want to find their local businesses. Craig's List does this through word of mouth within a very active community in the San Francisco Bay Area. LocalTel.com does this through feet on the street (sales people) the way print Yellow Page phone directories do.

I'll be back weekly next week. Have a great holiday weekend!

Tim

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