What will be the internet’s next killer application? The question still frustrates many high-tech executives; and investors and analysts are just as keen to learn the secret. Reasonably enough, all are looking for a real hairy-chested application. A true world-beater.
Maybe they’re looking in the wrong place. Perhaps the killer application is right there under their very noses, concealed by its own modesty. E-mail. Common garden variety e-mail.
Underestimate it at your peril. Initially little more than ordinary mail on speed, e-mail software has received a lion’s share of bells and whistles, enabling it to evolve into a potent and integral component of corporate communications, whether ordinary or multimedia.
Now a new growth phase is in the offing. For all companies, the wave will mean new investor relations opportunities. For the unprepared and the unwary, the danger of drowning under an electronic deluge will be very real.
Contrary to the predictions of a couple of years ago, the IR e-mail front for most companies has been – and remains – eerily calm. That goes for high-tech companies just as much as low-tech; for the financial community as much as retail investors.
‘We receive a handful of e-mails per week, mostly from individual investors but occasionally from a portfolio manager,’ says Reuters’ New York-based IR vice president Nancy Bobrowitz. The prospect of even a sharp increase does not faze her, though. ‘E-mail can be easier to deal with than the phone. It’s less labor intensive, and you attend to it at your own convenience. There’s also a paper trail to remedy problems.’
Even Sun Microsystems receives only a hundred e-mails a week from analysts and investors – no great shakes for a high-tech company that developed the versatile Java computer language. Ordinary people exchanging recipes and dirty jokes happily field more.
Other companies, usually those with really active IR web sites, attract larger numbers. ‘I receive up to 120 e-mails per day and many phone calls, and can’t always respond to inquiries as promptly as I’d like,’ says Cisco Systems IR director Mary Thurber. Many originate from Cisco’s web site, which contains a FAQ – a list of frequently asked questions – and, crucially, their answers. Web site viewers can e-mail the IR department directly, using a hypertext link.
Reverse thinking
With the Kingfisher and Severn Trent web sites in the UK, on the other hand, the hypertext link generates traffic in the opposite direction – back to the web site. Kingfisher’s web site invites visitors to ‘Register for e-mail broadcast services,’ which include ‘All press releases or bi-monthly e-mail newsletter.’ Within the newsletter, hyperlinks enable readers who are online to connect, via a simple click, to the IR web site. In fact, these web sites were designed precisely to encourage two-way traffic between ordinary investors and the site.
‘Our objective is to give the private investor the same timescale as the professional,’ says Mark Hill, managing director of the London-based IR Group, which created and maintains both web sites. ‘When the results announcement goes up at the stock exchange, we currently e-mail it to 240 Severn Trent and 230 Kingfisher investors, 80 percent of whom are private investors.’ Every day a dozen or more private investors sign on for e-mail subscriptions with the Severn Trent and Kingfisher web sites. ‘Investors are subscribing so thick and fast, every day, that even I’ve been surprised,’ says Hill.
Incremental e-mail growth is normal and expected. But now a slew of new products and services – from the utterly ingenious to the uncannily simple – have the potential to facilitate exponential growth, especially among ordinary investors. Airport terminals will soon host payphone-like devices providing e-mail and internet access. In homes – the usual base, let us not forget, of the private investor – cyberphones will soon be as commonplace as kitchen appliances.
Telephones are joining the multimedia act as, under brand names like RealCall and NetCall, web surfers can be asked if they want to be contacted by phone. If they say ‘Yes, please,’ and give their phone number, the web site owner can call them literally within seconds. For reasons involving technology, time, and timezones, this is usually automated, but it can be live, in person, in real time.
A new British company, Digital Mail, is providing free e-mail addresses and, more importantly, e-mail capability to the unwashed, unwired masses. Digital Mail sends, receives and forwards e-mails to or by fax machines, digital cellular phones, ordinary post or computers. And possibly within five or so years, talk e-mails will be here. Spoken words will be transmitted as data, predicts Bob Wilt, IBM’s senior financial analyst, stockholder relations.
These and related developments will mean that, for individuals and companies alike, ownership of costly personal computers or modems will no longer be necessary for cybercommunications. The gap between wired and non-wired, between computer haves and have nots, will be bridged. The barriers which have thus far restricted e-mail usage will, in an instant, have vanished.
Cheaper, quicker, easier
Even if you discount the more radical of these developments, it is certain that ordinary investors will have ever easier and cheaper e-mail access. If the Kingfishers and Severn Trents of this world are adding, say, 50 new subscribers a week, tomorrow’s numbers are far more likely to be in the thousands. And that could spiral further upwards as new, as yet unknown, services are launched.
For a harbinger of IR things to come, IBM’s IR director Hervey Parke notes that Big Blue is working on web sites designed for truly and increasingly personalized interaction. Investors visiting the IBM web site will be able to make inquiries into their own accounts and initiate transactions relating, say, to their direct investment programs. Parke joins others in predicting the possibility of individual ‘online proxy voting, perhaps complementing ordinary mail.’
For some companies, the heavier the e-mail downpour, the better. Some high-tech organizations are staffed by individuals who, happily wallowing in all things digital, watch their electronic in-trays fill to bursting and welcome yet another opportunity to order in pizzas and work another four or eight hours.
Nerds are hardly a majority in the workplace, but there is sound commercial logic underpinning the enthusiasm of others. IBM’s Wilt actually hopes for more e-mail. ‘It’s cheaper in terms of postage and general efficiency. Some increase will be offset by the ease of answering e-mails. We can divert staff currently handling telephone and postal communications.’
Barriers raised
Fortunately, flood control is available in – indeed, is a main selling point of – modern e-mail software. With Microsoft’s Outlook, users can preview e-mails on three lines or three panes. Outlook filters, tallies, tracks, defers, redirects, flags, spell-checks, finds, archives, forwards, detects, edits, recalls, synchronizes, groups, goes-to, calendarizes and compresses weekends.
But, e-mail is far from unblemished in the eyes of many in the financial community. Julie-Anne Mizzi, a fund manager with Australia’s AMP, dislikes the over-use of internal e-mail. ‘It uses up disk space, wastes time and creates ridiculous situations where two people a desk apart have forgotten how to talk to one another.’ She also cites the tendency of e-mailers to lean on the carbon-copy button. Not an attitude conducive to an increase in investor relations e-mail.
Bruce Bromley, an analyst at Credit Lyonnais, praises e-mail precisely because it outperforms voicemail: ‘With Lotus Notes, if you are on the receiving end, you see the title and sender, and if you have, say, 30 or 40 e-mails you can pick and choose the ones you read or read first. With a large number of voicemail messages, you can’t identify them, so you might neglect all of them.’ In financial community and IR terms, 40 voicemail messages is a light load. Ignoring or procrastinating over a full complement of, say, one hundred messages is hardly ideal.
IBM’s Wilt notes that ‘e-mail pushes you to improve performance. With its immediacy, if investors don’t hear back from you very quickly, they want to know what has happened. You have to really be on your toes. And if e-mails keep growing so that they cause extra work, we can try to offset it by better communications, by web sites that answer the investors’ questions.’
No-one in the corporate community, least of all IBM, which is as well prepared as any to contend with e-mail flooding, counsels complacency. Large-scale contingency preparations are vital. Even high-tech companies ‘can only handle a deluge up to a point,’ says Wilt. ‘It can get overwhelming, especially if you are not efficient, and especially if you don’t have a plan. Every company has a breaking point.’
