- 1997: Volume 6, No. 4 Are You a Spider or a Fly?

Personal observations (sometimes but not always with tongue in cheek) from the editorial director of INO Global Markets, an Internet site specializing in futures and options information.

It's A Jungle Out There

After four years of crawling around the World Wide Web, I'm absolutely convinced that cyberspace is techno-doublespeak for "jungle." Where else can you get so exasperatingly lost? Take Waldemar's List, that wonderful directory of futures industry sites, which occasionally gets up and moves to another location on the Internet. When this happens, all of a sudden your treasured bookmark to the List is useless, and you end up flailing around in circles frightened to death you'll never be able to find Waldemar again. And he's vital, no doubt about it-he's your lifeline to all that historical data, all those candlesticks, the huge amount of contract information that only the Web can harness and deliver at reasonable cost.

Stay Calm And You Won't Get Lost

Of course, if you stay calm the directions to Waldemar's new location on the Web will be as clear as a shaft of piercing morning light (click here). For myself, though, I tend to panic rather easily in front of a computer screen, and I know I'm not the only one with this kind of reaction, given that the Web only got going in 1989 and there are still many of us left who were brought up on typewriters and carbon paper. But getting lost is only the half of it. Strange things lurk in this electronic jungle, and many of them are invisible to the naked eye, not unlike viruses.

Beware Of Catching A Virus

Take bookmarks again, indispensable as they are. It wasn't until I had carefully built a dossier of about 300 of them that, suddenly one day, they disappeared! Not all of them as a matter of fact-a few mysteriously survived somehow. Whatever virulent jungle organism it was that stole out in the middle of the night to obliterate my bookmarks was "kind" enough to leave behind all those beginning with the letter "A"-34 of them. The ultimate insult if you ask me. The rest, B to Z, were all gone. Ouch!

Praise For The Human Touch

Losing my bookmarks forced me to reacquaint myself with the big search engines. My favorite by far is Yahoo! and I think this is because it relies more than the others on human intervention to organize its vast database. For example, when you submit a URL to Yahoo! there is nothing automatic about the content of its e-mail response. What you get is a real live person insisting, for instance, that you've recommended the wrong category for your Web site and "it's going to go here, not there." I like that.

Some Links Are Helpful

Alta Vista is excellent too, in a different way. Its chief claim to fame is that it can put its spidery hands on just about anything. Trouble is, what you want might be item number 4,632. I have a special reason for liking Alta Vista though. It was the first search engine where you could insert an address in the URL line and find the identities of every single Web site that was linked to yours. Here's the code if you want to try it out, using the domain name for INO Global Markets (www.ino.com) as an example:

+link:http://www.ino.com/ -url:http://www.ino.com/

This is pretty useful. With a single click, you can find out how many sites have you in their sights. With a few more clicks, you can check on your competitors and do a complete market research job. It's also a great way to build a list of Web sites which have their own site directories, because more often than not the hyperlink to your site that Alta Vista is detecting resides in an index or directory.

Other Links Are Laughable

Aside from the marketing value of knowing who is pointing at you, here at INO we have found some intriguing competitive situations. Some Web sites, exhibiting cuckoo-like behavior, live off other people's sites exclusively-homing in on key pages of information with precision-made hyperlinks. In our own case, the favorite target of these parasites (the perfect word!) is the INO QuoteWatch service of prices and charts, a very popular section of the site which we offer free of charge to all visitors. While we've found no time yet to study the legal aspects of this Internet piracy, it's been hilarious watching the frantic reaction of our neighborly cybercuckoo cousins to sudden, unannounced changes in QuoteWatch URLs or, even better, to a complete breakdown of our quote system. To say that mild panic sets in would be an understatement.

Imagine the embarrassment of 30 or 40 of your hyperlinks generating the message FATAL ERROR! instead of the World Sugar or Natural Gas settlement tables. Not that we are very happy when QuoteWatch goes down, either, but at least we have a good standby. We offer free temporary access to fee-paying services such as our GLOBALcharts. When the comedy is over and our tears have dried, once again we are reminded of the truth of that powerful adage: Content is King.

We Are Creatures Of Habit

Amid all the Internet hoopla, we human beings surprisingly remain creatures of habit even when you think people would perhaps go a little wild, what with one million Web sites from which to choose. Fact is, according to Wired magazine, the average Internet user regularly visits just half a dozen sites. But this actually makes a lot of sense if you think about it. Why surf around insanely after you've found out where to go and what you want? Yahoo! has figured this out. It's not just one of the best search engines for other people's sites, it has become a very respectable news and information Web site in its own right. The Excite and Infoseek search engines are following this pattern, and it's just a matter of time before the others do, too.

Why Web Traffic Is Elusive

Here in the futures and options industry, the webmasters of brokers, advisors and others have been trying to capture their own strong and loyal

followings. To achieve this means creating a Web site that's worth coming back to, but to tell you the truth there aren't all that many of them yet. Their handicap is they don't generate much in the way of unique or distinctive material. If they do, they reserve this information for their existing clients.

Following all the excitement involved in setting up a Web page, there's been a big letdown. Many firms are resigning themselves to the fact that Web traffic is not going to come to them, at least not in the numbers they expected; instead, they are going to have to go look for it.

Web Traffic Is Just Like Market Liquidity

The legendary Leo Melamed, founder of financial futures, never gets tired of explaining how liquidity begets liquidity; how one futures contract will outlast its competitors because it becomes recognized as the most active market, and traders will always head for where liquidity is best. Witness the scrap going on between DTB in Germany, MATIF in France and LIFFE in the UK to nab the Euro, assuming Europe's single currency is introduced as planned in 1999. And look at the battle being joined by old rivals CBOT and CME to try to make a winner out of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, on the one hand, and the retail version of the Standard & Poor's 500 Stock Index, on the other. You just know that, in the end, only one exchange will emerge victorious in each of these situations.

It's a funny thing, but Web traffic appears to be just like market liquidity. That is, traffic begets traffic. Whether it's motivated by the herd instinct or an efficiency equation I don't know, but if I had to guess I would think the human factor plays a strong part. Our own experience with INO indicates that people become, and stay, immensely loyal. We had the good fortune to get off to a relatively early start on the Web, in March 1995, and we have seen our traffic "liquidity" expand with each succeeding month. The amazing thing is that INO's traffic continued to grow even when parts of the site were down for repairs and upgrades. That's the human factor at work. People are not only loyal, they are very resilient. They'll stick with you through thick and thin-as long as you're a favorite bookmark.

Are We Coming Full Circle?

Are my instincts right, then, in thinking that cyberspace should not be treated much different from terra firma in developing effective marketing and promotional programs. Your home page is like your headquarters or branch office; not many non-clients are going to pay you an unsolicited visit. Instead, you will need to reach out and promote your firm along traditional lines of advertising and direct mail. For advertising you will look for high traffic Web sites in your special zone of business, the equivalent of using a high-circulation magazine, newspaper, radio or television program. For direct mail, you will rent the best-qualified Web lists available and start a regular e-mail program.

Certainly there are differences, but most of them are positive. With the Web your potential market becomes global. Responses to your advertising and direct mail are quicker. Your promotional messages can respond to market conditions and be changed at a moment's notice. While traditional promotional concepts will still prevail, the trick is to be organized to deal competently with the faster pace and the technology of Web marketing. This is where the value of that underutilized Web site comes into play. Developing the site gave you the expertise to become a spider. Now all you have to do is catch those flies.

Alex McCallum is a co-founder of INO Global Markets with Adam Hewison, INO's president and chief executive officer. Both Hewison (adam@ino.com) and McCallum (alex@ino.com) hail from northern England but actually met in 1979 at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange where Hewison was an IMM floor trader and McCallum head of PR. They started INO on March 14, 1995 with "a mission to improve the flow of market information to the worldwide community of futures and options traders." INO is based in Shady Side, Maryland.