The super highway facing the digitized world full speed ahead.

• Author: Little, Candace M.
• Position: Media

When the Internet emerged in the early 1990s, many could not grasp the vastness of the breakthrough. But Jim Clark, founder of several Silicon Valley technology companies, including Silicon Graphics, Inc., Netscape Communications Corporation, myCFO and Healtheon, saw its potential. In a 1995 interview with John McLaughlin, Santa Clara Valley Historical Association president, Clark said, "The Internet is the de facto standard communications network. We think of it today as a data communications network, but voice is data, video is data, images are data, text are data--all of these things are just data--and so the Internet is going to be the super highway that we all have been looking for."

Clark was right--we did find this super highway of digital information--and it has led us from pencils and paper and vinyl records, to ordering meals from iPads at restaurants and listening to The Beatles' Help! album on our phones. This ever-increasing digital saturation can be overwhelming at times, particularly when it comes to how it affects your business. The trick is using this super highway for the benefit of your company by connecting potential customers to your business and finding a lasting way to store and protect your company's digital property.

Potential Customers This Way

Have you ever felt that using the Internet is sometimes like making your way through a cafeteria food fight with digitized information being flung at you like pizza crust and half empty milk cartons? The last thing business owners want to do is have their product or service presented to potential clients in a pizza-crust-about-to-hit-your-face kind of a way.

The key to attracting customers online is all in the delivery--it's no longer enough to just slap a banner ad on the screen, said digital marketing professionals at the Women Tech Council (WTC) Social Media Summit on May 11, 2010. Mitch Joel, president of Twist Image, an award-winning digital marketing and communications agency, and author of Six Pixels of Separation, a book on how to connect your business to everyone, said business owners need to take a whole new approach to marketing. He described explorers of the new world and said business owners need to be like Cortez, who after landing in Mexico (a new world at the time), burnt all of his ships. That, Joel said, is what businesses need to do in order to connect with their customers--don't look back, only forward to the new way of online communication. Leaving many of your old points of view behind can be scary, but Joel said it's necessary to succeed.

This new form of communication is all based around community; specifically, the...