This installment of the Champion series features Jim Sterne, head of Target Marketing , and a leading Internet marketing expert and author. Sterne has spent more than 20 years selling and marketing technical products, and since 1994, he has devoted all of his attention to the Internet as a marketing medium. Not only was he a founding partner of a regional Internet access provider and a consultant to some of the world's largest companies, including AT&T, IBM and Sears, Roebuck, he is a dynamic speaker who has presented his unique perspective on Internet marketing at conferences around the world. His latest book, Web Metrics, Proven Methods for Measuring Web Site Success, was released in 2002.

Publish recently caught up with Sterne to get his views on the changing landscape of Web publishing and Internet marketing.

Publish: What got you started in Internet marketing?

Jim Sterne: I was doing standard marketing consulting for technology companies in 1993 and 1994. One of my clients distributed software updates via FTP and asked for help improving its FTP site from a marketing perspective. After about 5 minutes of explanation and demonstration, I started changing file names and adding a readme.txt file -- things you'd think of as standard. Later, one of the technicians called everybody into the basement to see something called the World Wide Web. One look at Dave Taylor's Internet Mall and the Sun Microsystems homepage and I was hooked. The benefits were obvious.

Publish: It’s pretty safe to say that Web publishing has changed the way that most companies communicate with the outside world. Do you think this is a communications revolution on the scale of Guttenberg, or just the most recent evolution?

JS: It’s just the most recent thing. I believe that the Internet has given us an ‘additional’ way to communicate, but it has not terminated all the other ways. Now, it's a question of which medium is best suited to communicate a specific message for a specific purpose.

Publish: What is your background in Web publishing?

JS: I've been in sales and marketing for 20 years. As such, I've been in the business of communicating with prospective and current customers all along. I've been doing it online since 1994, putting up my own site and learning about the vagaries of managing a small site.

In addition, I've been studying the Web sites and the Web management techniques of large corporations. My consulting clients want to know how to best present themselves online and how to manage the process of keeping a site up and running. As a result, I stay tuned to the latest Web capabilities, but only in terms of how they affect the site visitor's experience.

Publish: What is your next Internet marketing project?

JS: Right now, I'm focused on proving the value of Internet marketing and e-business. I hosted the second Emetrics Summit in June to further explore the world of Web analytics. I want to understand the depths of our ability to learn more about our customers and their desires by watching what they do on a Web site. By measuring site performance, search engine ranking, promotion effectiveness, navigation efficiency, product popularity and so on, I can fine-tune my site and my offerings to better fill the needs of my customers. It’s fascinating stuff.

Publish: What technology, innovation or development could take Web publishing to the next level?

JS: I don't see anything on the horizon that can make as big an impact on Web publishing as having enough time to hook together all the pieces we currently have on hand. If we can successfully wire together workflow, cascading style sheets, templates, filters, file converters, XML -- you name it, we can reach a point where those responsible for the success of their products, departments or business units can be true content managers, instead of being technology wranglers or depending on technology wranglers. We can all write our own letters and place our own telephone calls these days. The big change will come when we can easily host our own content, make it look decent and have it be navigable -- when the publishing technology will help, rather than flummox.

Yes, I know I'm apt to hear from dozens of content management firms who will all cry foul and declaim the superiority of their solutions. As soon one of those systems can work across multiple platforms, supporting multiple departments with a wide variety of goals and resources, and keep up with the constant changes in the technologies we want to use, the content tagging we'll need and the political nightmare all of this is creating, it will become the de facto standard of Web publishing, much like Microsoft Office is the standard for word processing, spreadsheets and presentation software.

Publish: What is your biggest pet peeve about Web publishing?

JS: From a publisher's perspective, my biggest gripe is that content owners have no idea how difficult all this really is. I used to write out a draft letter by hand, proof and correct it, write it out again and then give it to a secretary to type. (Yes, my grey hair is showing.) I didn't want to give my first draft to my secretary because any changes would require her (yes, her) to retype the whole thing.

Then, along came word processors. I could see a printout of my first draft and mark it up for changes. The result was a great deal more work for my secretary, who had to make constant revisions until I was satisfied.

This is a lot like Web publishing today. Content owners want to change this a little, move that a little and link to this other item for the first two days only. It’s very annoying.

Publish: In what way has Web publishing made the most positive impact on business?

JS: By providing instant information anywhere, anytime at an enormously lower cost, resulting in shorter sales cycles, happier customers and smoother operations.

Publish: Look into your crystal ball. What do you see for the future of Web publishing?

JS: XML and wireless are the big blips on the radar scope at the moment. Text will increasingly have meaning though XML tags, so that content posted on one site can instantly be integrated into the content and applications of others, moving toward Tim Berners-Lee's Semantic Web. With wireless, people can access all the information that they can eat from anywhere with any device. Put the two together, and I think the winners will be those who can gather information, filter it and put it to use faster than the next guy. It should be interesting.