Many organizations are coming to see the Worldwide Web's revolutionary potential for presenting accurate and useful information about themselves -- data, for example, on their missions, businesses, cultures, and competencies -- to key audiences that can directly influence their continued success and prosperity.

Here we consider a few of the possibilities inherent in this trend. A vital element in our discussion is the notion of opinion-leader audiences, the set of key information mediators -- industry analysts, market researchers, and journalists, among others -- that filter and transmit information about firms and organizations to wider audiences. These are important targets of influence for institutions establishing Web servers; and it's easy to lose credibility with these discriminating audiences by mishandling or misrepresenting the content elements you publish on the Web.

Another key point: over time, successful organizations accrue "intellectual capital" -- the collective know-how and experience embodied in their corporate cultures and infrastructures, their achievements, business relationships, human resources, and even publications. For organizations in the services and non-profit sectors, these elements can form the basis for highly advantageous communication with external audiences, particularly with the opinion leaders who depend on reliable business and industry information to do their jobs. As more and more organizations are discovering, a Web server can be an invaluable tool in communicating these intellectual capital messages to such influential audiences.

So it's inevitable that top executives in these enterprises will soon be paying close attention both to how institutional home pages are organized and to the content they make available via the Web. This point leads to what you might call the sociological subtext of our discussion: as the Web matures as a channel to key audiences, many senior decision makers are likely to conclude that Web servers are vital promotional tools -- and much too strategically important to be left under the control of the technologists who have created them.

We have also taken our discussion a few years into the future, to speculate on what may happen when WWW technologies fall into the hands of the dominant public interest organizations in our society --and how they may begin to marshal their intellectual capital elements to build membership as well as image.

You'll find several multimedia content elements in our discussion too, included more to show potential than here-and-now utility. As we note later in this discussion, the audio sidebars -- sampled at very low rates to keep them small -- suffer from some quality distortion. The video clip is an 800 pound gorilla, but a hint of things to come as end-to-end bandwidth and compression technologies improve.

Here Come the Suits
As the corporate types set up beachheads, new practices and standards will emerge.
Addressing Opinion Leaders
Web-surfers end up as second-tier audiences when corporate image and prestige are at issue.
Factual Content IS the Message
Accurate and substantive self-presentation is better than slick advertising hype or parochial cyber-babble
Is That the Thought Police at the Door?
For some internal stakeholders, new rules governing corporate home pages will make Singapore feel like Woodstock. For others, they will be welcome standards ensuring professional polish and control.
Wait 'til Cousteau and Perot Figure it Out
With expanding bandwidth, the non-profit heavyweights will deal themselves into a new variant on the intellectual capital game... with an eye on pumping you up and signing you on.