Since then he has fine-tuned his specialty from marketing technical products to marketing on the Internet and the Web. Indeed, his best known book, World Wide Web Marketing, is now in its second edition.

Instead of just broadcasting and hoping that your words fall upon receptive ears, people are coming to you. So there's already a select group of people, who are interested in what you have to offer. And it's extremely easy for them to tell you what they think and give you their money.

Well, for big companies, they've already done steps one, two, three and four. For a small business, it's "Get educated." Get on the Web, get comfortable with the Web, and get the basic brochure-ware about your company. Step two is: Try to answer all the questions that are usually asked on the phone and in person and get them answered on the website ahead of time. And number three: Be extremely prepared to answer questions. Be organized with your e-mail; be prepared with your e-mail.

Just as you go to a lot of time, trouble and expense to set up a call center, you need to put exactly the same kind of thinking into how to manage your e-mail response methods. You've got to provide training. There's got to be policy, and you've got to be sure you can manage the quantity of the contacts you get. Then, everything you learn in the call center applies to e-mail.

Do you see companies integrating their call centers with the Web?

Some are. The same people who are learning communication techniques at the call center are learning how to manage their e-mail. And everybody who has call center-management software is also now managing e-mail, or wants you to believe that their next release will manage e-mail as well. I can't point to specific tools. There are just too many of them, and they change too rapidly.

Sure. Companies that are doing it right respond immediately. I'm not sure if you remember the Brightware survey that was done a couple of months ago, where they sent the question, "What is your corporate address?" to the Fortune 100 websites. Four companies responded within 15 minutes, and 23 companies never responded at all.

So there's good, bad and ugly. Not responding at all is just flat ugly. It's still astonishingly prevalent, that people haven't given enough thought to how to manage the e-mail that comes in. It deserves as much attention as the telephone. In a lot of companies, the standing policy is: "Our telephones will be answered within three rings." But there's no policy about how long it takes to get an answer to an e-mail.

So customer experience on the Web is really the brand experience.

Customer experience equals brand. When you talk about integrating traditional marketing with Web, it's recognizing that it's all about brand. Every time you touch the customer, every time you communicate with the customer, whether it's direct mail, radio, television, skywriting, the sign on the side of a bus, or what your home page looks like, that's going to establish your brand. And it's going to have a big impact because a website is the delivery side. If you have an ad that says: "We're the best, cleanest, fastest, most wonderful," that's terrific. But if you don't come through on the promise, you have done infinitely more harm than good to your brand.

Exactly. It's like hearing about a great product, seeing great reviews of the product, hearing people talk about how good the product is, and then you call up to ask one more question and you're put on hold for 20 minutes. The person who answers the phone can't answer your question, can't sell you the product and doesn't know anything. All the money they just spent on convincing you that they're a good company is out the window.

I always point to a woman named Kristin Zhivago, who has a newsletter called Marketing Technology. She describes the poor marketing person as stuck between the suits and the ponytails. The suits are the managers, who think sales is a necessary evil and marketing is a hole in the water into which you pour money. They don't understand how marketing works. The ponytails are the guys who dress in black turtlenecks and live on Madison Avenue. They only understand winning awards.

Then there's a third group, that I refer to as the long-haired ponytails. They're the ones who wear T-shirts and sandals and live in Silicon Valley. And just like the black turtleneck guys are interested in design, concept and image, the long-haired ponytails are interested in Java, Flash, MP3 and the latest tools of technology.

So the marketer's standing there in the middle saying, "Wait a minute, guys, we're trying to sell things." If you overwhelm them, they're not going to buy. It's our job to persuade them. My favorite phrase is: "You've got to wear your customer-colored glasses."

I had a good experience on Valentine's Day at 1-800-FLOWERS. I went to their website and was trying to make a decision about which bouquet, because my wife really likes flowers that smell strong. I couldn't tell [because] the description wasn't quite there. You can't smell the flowers on the computer. I thought, "I have a couple of days. I can send them an e-mail. If they're good, they'll respond." And then I saw there was a button where I could talk to a person live. So I clicked that button, and all of a sudden there was a human being on the other end saying: "Hi, how can I help you?" And I said, "Which one of these bouquets smells best?" And they said, "Well, because of these flowers and those flowers, this one is your best bet." And I said: "That's great. That's the one I'm going to buy." And they said: "I'm delighted, and I hope you like it, and have a great day."

Of course, I couldn't leave it at that. I started asking them about what it was like working there. They said that they train people very carefully. They do a lot of role playing and give them typing skills practice. They are chatting with anywhere from two to six people at a time.

First, you go to the search engines and buy the keywords and the specific pages that have to do with your subject matter. That's narrowing the target. The second thing is to go to the small websites that are about your subject. I go to a website that is a very narrow-focus, one-subject website – not a portal. The only people who go there are interested in my subject.

It's exactly like magazines. I'd rather advertise in a trade journal than in Time magazine, because it's a lot less expensive and it's exactly my audience. And then of course we get into the weird technologies, and that gets to be a lot of fun. You know, the technologies that will track people's interests and track their click streams to determine what they're interested in, make profiles and do the collaborative filtering.

Personalization, if we're going to define it narrowly, is about going to a website and having it say: "Hi Fred. Welcome back. It's good to see you again. Here's what you looked at last time, and we've added some new pages that you haven't seen since you were here on Thursday at 3 p.m."

But the banner ads are using cookies. Let's take a specific example. Doubleclick is the ad banner network that supplies ads to some 200 different websites, including AltaVista. So you go to AltaVista, and they serve up a generic ad. Then, they wait to see what you search for, or what you click on, and what website you go to from there. Each time you enter a search term or do a click, it is creating a profile of you. They don't know who you are, but they know what you're interested in. Based on that, they will send you a specific banner ad.

Think about a bookstore. You walk into a bookstore: Do you turn left or do you turn right? You go by the specials bin, and you kind of thumb through the specials. You wander around a little bit, and you have your coffee and croissant, and now it's time to go find the book you came to look for. So you find the right shelf and look at the specific book.

By having an affiliate program, Amazon is giving up the information on what you do when you walk in the front door. Is it going to hurt them some? Certainly. Is it going to hurt them in the long run? No, because having hundreds of thousands of affiliates is worth a lot more money than knowing whether you turn left or right at the front door.

Integration has to do with brand and message. Integration is just making sure that what you say offline is the same thing you say online. But the single best way to get people to your website is direct mail.

Yes. Opt-in e-mail is extremely powerful. On my website, I will do everything I can to get somebody to say: "Yes, I would like you to e-mail me things." I'll also go to third parties who are e-mail address aggregators, not spam addresses, but opt-ins.

So when I go to a website like Web Promote, and I type in my e-mail address, I check off the box that says Automobiles, because I'm interested in buying a new car. So I start getting a bunch of e-mail about special deals and rebates. And I'm really happy, because I want that information. The day I buy a car, I go back to the Web Promote website and uncheck that box, and the e-mail stops. Instantly. It's wildly useful, and the response rates are very high.

They've got their work cut out for them. I don't even care if they have a better website, because Amazon already owns me as a customer. I went to Amazon, and I have been buying things from Amazon since 1996, and they know what my preferences are. I can hit that One-Click Purchase button and wow, I'm a happy camper.

Here's a way I've seen a company do it. At Christmas, I went to a website, www.800.com, that was offering three DVDs for $1, including shipping [and] everything. They needed your name, address and credit card number, so they could charge your credit card. I realized that they were losing $15 on each person who took advantage of their offer, but they got my name, address and credit card number to make it easier for me to buy next time. And they know three movies that I wanted. That gives them a lot of information about how to market to me in the future.