Using the World‐Wide Web as a marketing tool

he World-Wide Web band wagon is gaining momentum. Web site addresses are being quoted in press and television advertisements, and significant proportions of our market have unlimited free access to the internet via their academic systems. Those of us who are not yet using the Web as a marketing tool are facing increasing pressure to establish a presence there. To publish learned and professional books and journals without having details of them available on a web site, will more and more place us at a competitive disadvantage. As learned societies, a presence on the web can help us gain new members as well as provide valuable services to existing members. As publishers, it can also help us to gain readers, authors, subscribers and book purchasers. A web presence can help us achieve these aims by enabling us to distribute more information than we could do using our standard promotional printed material, and it can ensure that this material is provided faster and that it is more consistently up to date. Thus a presence on the web can give our promotional efforts a previously unheard of flexibility and comprehensiveness. The detailed instructions to authors, for example, which you could not afford to include on your routine journal promotion brochure, can be included in all their detail on your web site, whilst your journal editorial boards can be listed in full and updated within hours of changes being announced. Forthcoming society meetings can be announced, applications for attendance taken, and the meetings themselves can take place – all in less time than it takes to produce the next edition of your society bulletin. Having convinced yourself that you absolutely must, therefore, create your own web site, you will of course need to reasUsing the World-Wide Web as a marketing tool