Systems vital for online opportunities

As the use of the web changes, society is getting more comfortable with it and engaging in deeper usage.

Social networking, for instance, has thrown up numerous examples of new interaction between people that translates across to consumers and suppliers.

This generates new opportunities for existing online businesses and traditional firms that have largely steered clear of anything more than a website.

And anyway, an increasing number of businesses are finding their traditional, and profitable, strategy being undermined by alternative offerings with an online component. Some of that is obvious, like selling goods, while others are less so, such as offering for free the specialist knowledge that was previously difficult and expensive to obtain.

Of course, traditional businesses have advantages, such as brand awareness, which can help them adjust to this new environment.

"If you are making money it is, arguably, a lucrative business, then someone will want to get into that," business adviser Jackie Shervington said.

One response to such a threat is to be proactive, especially for small businesses, which may rely heavily on traditional advertising means to generate sales leads.

"The internet offers opportunities to review pricing," she said.

"If you can get volume at lower costs you might be able to broaden your market."

But panellists on the WA Business News forum warned that corporate forays into the online world could often be asymmetric, with a big failure being inadequate systems being put in place to truly take advantage of what they are doing.

"We have clients that are waking up to the power of the internet," said Buzka's Raphe Patmore, who also has an online marketing consultancy called Modus Operandi.

"The biggest issue is they are getting 200 responses to ads in email and are cutting and pasting those emails into excel spreadsheets."

This, he said, was not a cost-effective way of handling the back office side of online marketing.

"You don't have a scalable business," Mr Patmore said.

Vibe Capital's Matthew Macfarlane agrees.

"Of course, what do I do if I get 5,000 inquiries a day?" Mr Macfarlane asks rhetorically.

"There are very good remote systems that will deal with that at a very low price."