Puzzled by the way several people were using the word "scam," I looked it up in several dictionaries and presented a logical dissectopm of its meaning. To illustrate a point, I made the kind of argument I used to offer in college classrooms: "If you use the word 'scam' in this sense, then it would allow you to label a scam my course where I teach people how to get published, since in fact very few people do go on to get getting published, percentage-wise, after taking the course. Obviously, I don't believe my course is a scam and no one has ever made any such complaint." What happened next mortified me. Within a matter of hours, the thread evolved into a debate assuming that my course was a scam. Like the hapless Sorcerer's Apprentice who only made a disaster worse, the more I tried to mop up the damage, the more people spun off on their own, disconnected from my original post, discussing me in the same breath as bona fide scammers.

The lesson couldn't have been more dramatic: a discussion group is not a lecture hall. I had no power to set the ground rules or the context, or to control what my audience did with the thoughts I shared. Their agenda could and did differ from mine, and while I could watch my comments being taken out of context and distorted, any protest I made about a misreading had no special claim to attention. As this example shows, the bulletin board medium can trip you up if you don't appreciate its peculiarities. Here are the fruits of my observation and experts' analyses, along with ways to up the chances that you become the beneficiary and not the victim of your efforts to schmooze.

• Participants choose which discussion threads to read by their headings. Unlike newspaper headlines, which appear immediately atop their articles, online headings almost always appear separately first in a list detached from the content of messages. The more your heading points to the specific subject of your post and to your intention, the more likely you are to snag the audience you want. Consider, for example, these vague or lifeless headings and their improvements:
  • MURKY: Research question
  • CLEARER: Do you read fine print?
  • WEAK: Choosing a DTP program
  • STRONGER: Pagemaker vs. Ventura: help!
  • BLAND: Q about 'Who's Who'
  • SNAZZIER: What's what about Who's Who

  What adman David Ogilvy wrote about ads in newspapers and magazines applies even more online, I believe: "On the average, five times as many people read the headlines as read the body copy." A limit of 16 to 24 characters in headings may force you either to use standard space-saving devices, such as "Q" for "question" and "DTP" for "desktop publishing," or to make some up. Whenever you respond publicly to someone else's message, of course, your reply bears their heading -- unless you deliberately create an offshoot with a related heading.

• In an environment of ever-looming information overload, brevity is at a premium. Not only will you provoke irritation when readers wade through screen after screen of something that could have been stated in two sentences, many of those readers will have paid incrementally more to look at or download your bloated timewaster. State your piece simply and clearly and sign off, preferably within 20 lines or less. If you have much more than that to say, either apologize at the beginning of your message or summarize it and invite those interested to ask for more. Avoid the temptation, if your software makes this easy for you, to include the entire message you are replying to before you add your comment. Pare your quote of the previous note to the bone, so that it sets the context, then get to your point.

• Newcomers to the medium and to your discussion can and will look in on an exchange at any moment. This implies two imperatives if you're online to build your business. First, resist the temptation to become too clubby with others who post regularly. Abbreviations and obscure in-group references are fine when you really are hanging out only with each other, or when you only wish to socialize. A public response like "ROTFL -- doesn't it remind you of Saratoga? - H.H." may make its recipient smile, but it sends the message to others that you're online for fun and relaxation, not for business. I'm going to take a strong position on this and recommend that you never use special online slang like "ROTFL" for "rolling on the floor laughing" or "" for "big grin," no matter how prevalently you believe they are understood. Be inclusive rather than exclusionary, and you'll reap the rewards of a welcoming attitude.

  Second, try to restate your business identity or business message in every followup post. You have tossed away a valuable opportunity when people come across a message from you like "Sure, I'll be glad to send you a copy. What's your address?" or "It costs only $20 a month for as much time as you want." Compare the effect of rewording those replies as "Sure, I'll be glad to send you a copy of our free report on keeping your tropical fish healthy. What's your address?" or "The Internet access provided by our company in 75 major metropolitan areas costs only $20 a month for as much time as you want." And unless your online area discourages the practice (see below, Local Differences), sign every post with at least your whole name and your business name, business slogan or a revealing occupational title. For example:

  Norris Kruntz, Financing for "Unfinanceable" Upstart Businesses

  Never assume the entire audience knows what you do just because the regulars do. Take a cue from skilled radio talk show guests who know that listeners are continually leaving and joining them -- they always toss in phrases like, "As I'm always careful to tell my therapy clients," or "As I explain in Chapter 2 of my book, MegaBusiness Secrets..." Sandwiched amidst substantive information, this slides by as a clarification rather than as huckstering. Recognize that even the regulars may have only a shady understanding of your scope of business. Over the space of a month or two, I interacted with a fellow named Dan Veaner, from Lansing, New York. Although I connected him with the product he had created, called "Catalog-on-a-Disk," until we exchanged E-mail messages for some reason, nothing he said led me to understand that this was a program for creating a catalog on disk rather than a singular disk-based catalog for specific products. It's a good idea to develop and test a brief spiel that truly communicates what your company does and then insert it as appropriate. For instance: "As you may know, we have created a program that anyone can use to place their catalog, complete with interactive order form, attractively on an IBM-compatible disk."

• Anyone can comment or criticize. Unlike online conferences (see Chapter 11), which may have a host, a guest and ordinary participants, in a forum or newsgroup all contributions appear, at least initially, equal to each other. That means that until people stop and ponder it, an uninformed or misinformed response carries the same weight as an informed response. Don't depend on any authority you may have outside of the group to add clout to your message. Instead, count on your online readers to be skeptical and irreverent. Only two factors make your contribution believed more than an opponent's: (1) How well your argument is reasoned or documented and (2) Your reputation for reliability within the group. In the latter case, other members of the group may urge others to pay attention to you because you have previously demonstrated your trustworthiness. Still, credibility online is short-lived; you'll never be able to coast for a long while without pedaling in additional displays of knowhow.

  In some ways, cyberspace is a radically egalitarian environment. You have the right to mount a soapbox, but any brainless jerk also has the right to either shout you down or ignore your brilliance. Other media upgrade you at least to a podium and a microphone. For example, if you share your information in a newspaper article, people can disagree in a letter to the editor, but not all of those get printed, and you usually get the privilege of the last word. Implicitly the article carries a greater claim to attention than the reply, unlike the free-for-all melee in a forum or newsgroup. Similarly, most promotions you send out into the world lack any sort of talk-back feature. With online schmoozing you can't stop someone from tagging onto your message, "Hey, aren't you the one I sent $30 to last year and wouldn't refund my money?" All you can do is shout back "No!" According to Bryan Pfaffenberger, author of The Usenet Book, Intel CEO Andy Grove stubbed his toes against the participatory nature of Usenet when he posted a message in newsgroups downplaying the flaw in its Pentium microchips. That message got sent around everywhere with comments attached like, "Can you believe this?" Grove's response might have had a different effect in another medium, Pfaffenberger says.

  E-mail, more than snail-mail, voice-mail or any other kind of communication, seems to place everyone at the same level. That's great when people respond with interest in how you can help them, not so great when people bombard you -- or your suppliers and customers -- with complaints for having somehow offended them. I believe this great leveling effect accounts for humorist Dave Barry's comment that he never receives letters through the mail that start off, "Are you the real Dave Barry?" as many E-mail messages that reach him do. If you prefer the role of distant, lofty authority, disconnect your modem immediately.

• Any message is fragmentable, and any discussion can get away from you. The ability to take your words out of context is almost built into the technology, where someone can select any portion of a previous message to include in theirs. It's usually more difficult and sometimes impossible for a reader to go back and see those words in context. And since many people follow online discussions on an irregular basis, you can't assume that any rejoinder or correction will get seen by everyone who saw the unfair response. "Usenet in particular is like a yard full of snakes -- at any time a snake can come up out of the grass and bite you," says Pfaffenberger.

  John Glenn, publisher of a guide to translation agencies, heard those snakes hissing after he posted a very casual comment in CompuServe's Foreign Language forum, his prime pond for prospects. In a thread titled "pornography," someone asked a question about Japanese pornography that commonly appears in that country on CD-ROM. "I chimed in to say that they had them in the U.S. as well, I'd seen them in a CD store the other day. I didn't add, 'Glenn's Guide to Translation Agencies' after my name as I usually did, but I'd joined the forum as 'John Glenn/Glenn's Guide,' and CompuServe added that automatically in the header of my reply." Of the droves of people reading that thread out of curiosity, one asked, "What is 'Glenn's Guide'?" and suddenly everyone drawn there was learning about his product in the puzzling context of pornography. "I got about 20 inquiries from that thread, but it was uncomfortable for me. Someone even suggested it was a good idea to get attention with the word, 'pornography,' and I had to keep explaining that I hadn't done that."

• Contributions can and do show up 24 hours a day. You're courting disaster if you expect the online world to have any consideration for a 9-to-5, Monday-through-Friday, two-weeks-off-in-summer schedule. One of the most dramatic examples of this I've seen occurred when Sheridan, Indiana-based CBSI agreed to participate in a dialogue on Prodigy about its high-priced business start-up packages. The kick-off announcement went up on a Friday at noon, and it wasn't till almost 48 hours later that the CBSI representative showed up online. In the meantime, some extremely damaging claims about the company and numerous "Where are they?" notices remained visible to every Prodigy member without any company response. Where participation is international, those sorts of allegations could build to crisis proportions even overnight. I'm not saying not to sleep, just to be aware that rumors, inquiries and complaints take no account of your convenience.

  As a corollary to this, if you're soliciting business online, respondents will be getting in touch 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Since telephone calls and faxes will come in day and night, weekday and weekend, be prepared. Turning off your company's fax machine when you go home for the night or the holiday is unacceptable -- people in Europe who don't know that it's Thanksgiving or in Nova Scotia who don't realize you're in Hawaii may simply conclude you've gone out of business. The same goes for companies that allow phones to ring forever outside of office hours. Yet if you're a homebased business and allow your business line to ring in your bedroom, the impression you give could be even worse. Before breakfast one morning I called an 800-number for a sample copy of a newsletter I'd seen discussed on American Online. From the sleepiness of the "hello?" it was obvious I'd woken up the publisher. I wondered about the viability of a publication whose creator had either no money or no business sense.

• A public question requires a public answer. When CBSI finally did show up on Prodigy, the owner of the company, George Douglass, responded again and again to specific, pointed questions with "Call our 800-number and get our tapes." Frustrated participants rejected that answer and repeated their questions, to more frustration. Whatever the rationale, this kind of behavior appears evasive, shady and manipulative to onlookers. Maintain your credibility by providing as much information as you can, along with appropriate qualifiers, such as: "Our literature contains full details, but basically with the XYZZ program a purchaser receives a 486 computer, a modem, five proprietary software programs, a 453-page manual and unlimited telephone support for $10,329." Or: "According to the ground rules of this forum I cannot give you specific legal advice. However, I can say that in several jurisdictions petitiioners have gotten the courts to overturn prohibitions against giving Tarot and astrology readings for pay in one's home."

• Where you can delete messages, be aware that they may never entirely vanish. They may already have found their way into the archives of the system or of individuals, and system administrators may have easy ways of restoring deleted material, as we learned in the case of Lt. Colonel Oliver North in the Iran-Contra affair. Just how hard it can be to recall or correct misinformation online we know from the Federal Communications Commission, still dealing with protests stemming from an unfounded 1986 "modem tax" rumor. "Some days we get dozens of messages about the tax, sometimes just a few," sighs an FCC spokesperson. The best policy here: Think before you post!

Be especially sensitive to expectations about so-called signature files. Sometimes nicknamed ".sigs," on the Internet these function as the electronic equivalent of a business letterhead. Once set up by the user, they get inserted automatically at the foot of all of his or her postings. For example:

*****************************************************************

*     Publicity/Publishing Coach         Marketing Makeovers    *

*     Marcia Yudkin, P.O. Box 1310, Boston, MA 02117, U.S.A.    *

*     Phone:  1-617-266-1613             Fax: 1-617-871-1728    *

*     letscreate@aol.com           75200.1163@compuserve.com    *

*****************************************************************

However, on the commercial online services you'll have to tone down a signature like the above, or leave off everything but your name and a minimal identifier. "We had to make a rule against the Internet kind of signatures, because they were abused," says Janet Attard, a sysop on GEnie and America Online. "People were posting one-line messages and ten-line signatures." I was severely chastised on a Prodigy bulletin board for mentioning one of my book titles along with my name, although on CompuServe this was not usually considered overly promotional. When in Rome, you might say, it's safest to observe what the Romans do and follow their example, being perhaps a teensy weensy bit more daring than the norm, if you like.

Another issue on which expectations differ is the extent to which people will put up with the same old questions. Participants in newsgroups and mailing lists are supposed to familiarize themselves with the FAQs -- Frequently Asked Questions, available in standard places like "news.answers" -- and not to bother the regulars with them. By contrast, on the commercial online services a question that has come up a thousand times before will almost always receive an informative, courteous reply, although possibly a "canned" one. This difference makes sense when you consider that in contrast to the no-one-in-charge, no-one-collecting-fees-for-participation Internet, services like America Online and Delphi make money by catering to newcomers and making sure they feel comfortable spending their time exchanging messages.

Before joining in on discussions, you may want to know how long contributions remain accessible in that online region. Some newsgroups and mailing lists maintain archives of all messages, while others don't. On America Online, GEnie and The Well, your messages stay visible indefinitely, which feels spooky to me for off-the-cuff conversations. I prefer the way postings disappear sooner or later from CompuServe and Prodigy -- but you may have the opposite predilection. You may also wish to investigate the extent to which postings are screened, sifted and possibly rejected or edited. Prodigy maintains its status as a family-oriented service by filtering out messages containing profanity, the sort of thing that I've heard has created problems for some men named "Dick." Some moderated groups simply include or exclude offerings, while others may trim them in ways objectionable to the one whose name is on it.

Marshall McLuhan coined the phrase "the global village" to describe the effect of electronically linking people all over the world. Jay Linden, an Internet provider and consultant in Toronto, calls the Internet "the world's largest, most diverse small town." Perhaps we just need to change that to "villages" and "small towns" to remind us to check out the local customs before we hang out our shingle and walk up and down Main Street shaking hands.

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