Find a wife and calibration gas–online

Back in the day, when we were still Scott Specialty Gases, I answered to a VP who called a marketing meeting to discuss the growing power and economic possibilities of the still infant World Wide Web. When he’d finished putting his spin on how the Internet was already changing how consumers and businesses spend their money, he asked for our reactions. I couldn’t resist voicing my opinion.

“Actually, I think you’ve under rated the Internet’s economic power,” I commented. Then I went on to explain, “A couple of years ago I met a woman online. As a result, I’ve been driving two hundred and 40 miles round trip, two and three times a week. I’m pumping gallons more gasoline, paying interstate highway tolls to the states of Delaware and Maryland, drinking at least six extra cups of coffee each week, and generally reallocating to Maryland establishments, income dollars that would have been spent in my Pennsylvania stomping grounds.”

I’ve long since married that lady I met on America Online and have relocated to her home town of Baltimore. This means that PA businesses have literally lost out on collecting tens of thousands of my income dollars over the last 14 years. All due to the Internet. Every member of our Marketing Team had a good chuckle at my story during that meeting years ago, and while all heads were nodding in agreement at the burgeoning power of connectivity, I dare say that no one in the room could have envisioned what was to come.

I’d already been working with our IT people (we called them MIS in those days) to develop a website we called scottgas.com. Actually, I was fighting a string of tactical skirmishes with them: they saw the website as an MIS/IT function, while I saw it as a marketing function. Had we been developing a site for, say, a library, I might have agreed with their point of view. Clearly however, since our website represented a B-to-B enterprises whose charter was to make and sell high quality calibration gases and other cylinder gases, Marketing Communications trumped IT/MIS.

One of the banners from scottgas.com

That was also back in the day when businesses were expecting to sell tons of product online because it was a more efficient and economical way to do business–for both buyer and seller. For many, that became reality. For others, such as sellers of specialty gases, not so much. Many specialty gases are too complex to purchase easily online. They can also be pretty doggone expensive. As the only specialty gas supplier offering full-blown Internet-based ecommerce, we gave our customers every opportunity to buy their gases and equipment online.

In the end however, the majority of customers opted to order products the old fashioned way, through our 800-number and local sales representatives. That’s not surprising when you consider that one of market differentiators has always been our outstanding technical assistance and customer service. Who needs point and click when you have a friendly specialty gas expert as near as your telephone? That’s not to say our website isn’t useful. As a showcase for our products and services, and by accurately portraying us as a leader in the specialty gas industry, our outpost on the web is clearly one of the most important marketing tools we have.

Scottgas.com is still out there on the Internet. If you Google the key words, specialty gases, you’ll find Scott comes up number one or two in the search results. However, since becoming part of Air Liquide, it’s giving way to our new website, ALspecialtygases.com. Unfortunately, Google doesn’t know this quite yet. Air Liquide America Specialty Gases comes up below the top search positions… too far below to suite us.

And so now that our new website is largely complete, we’ll undertake the business of search engine optimization. I suspect that just about the time we accomplish SEO to our satisfaction, some new manner of web crawler will be launched. I’m getting the feeling that web maintenance will be never ending.