Walking down cyber streets in the Pacific

[B][B]By DANIELLE NOTO [/B] [I]Special to the Saipan Tribune[/I]

WASHINGTON, D.C.[/B]—“Location, location, location” used to be the old adage that dictated storefront or business success. However, more and more, it is click traffic, rather than foot traffic that is driving success. Businesses must now appear on online networking sites where their suppliers, distributors and customers are “taking a walk.” In the virtual world, a business that is not listed on a networking site becomes the equivalent of a restaurant on a dead-end street. Business as usual in the Pacific Islands is naturally evolving to utilize the benefits of online networking. A new business networking site, Island Business Link (www.islandbusinesslink.com), launched this summer and is leveraging this growth for entrepreneurs and business owners in the Pacific.

Facebook.com, a U.S.-based website online since 2004, has seen its overall percentage of world usage increase 27 percent in the past three months. Currently, www.facebook.com has over 90 million individual visits every 30 days. Actually, if you were to go down the list of most popular sites for each country on the planet you would find a social networking site is now in the Top 10 of the large majority of them.

According to www.internetworldstats.com, Internet penetration into the Pacific Islands and Oceania is growing in lockstep with social networking sites. According to internetworldstats.com from 2000 to 2008 the Marshall Islands’ Internet use increased 340 percent, Micronesia’s Internet use increased 700 percent, and Guam’s Internet use increased 1,200 percent. In fact, the 34 million people living in the Pacific Islands and Oceania, which includes major trading partners Australia and New Zealand, now have a higher internet penetration than the total world average. According to www.comsScore.com, social networking usage in the Asia Pacific Region is up 23 percent for the year ending June 2008.

Official business to business sites are also growing. For example, www.LinkedIn.com covers businesses by industry and has over 150 different industries and 25 million different members listed. In fact, LinkedIn has actually outpaced Facebook in growth for 2008. In addition, as of April 2008, an online B2B site, www.Alibaba.com, is now the fifth most popular website in the Asia Pacific Region (defined as China, Japan, India, Korea, Taiwan, Australia, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Singapore, and New Zealand), after four search engines.

Business owners and investors have been asking for a more focused online network for the Pacific region. Last year at the U.S. Secretary of the Interior’s 4th Annual Business Opportunities in the Islands Conference, 72 percent of the attendees who completed an online evaluation said an internet based business tool would help stimulate private sector growth. The Department of the Interior, which maintains relationships with U.S. Freely Associated States and Territories in the Pacific and Caribbean Regions, responded. That site, www.IslandBusinessLink.com, has been a roaring success. After only two months of being online and almost zero marketing, there are nearly one thousand business owners networking and developing opportunities thanks to the website. Large contractors, consultants, and procurement coordinators, as well as local artisans, restaurant owners and dive operators are working together toward their shared goal of a robust regional economy. Main industries in the Pacific Islands include tourism, fisheries, and development-especially in Guam where there is already $10 billion committed to the movement of U.S. troops from Japan. The Island Business Link, a regionally focused business networking site, is one of the first targeted networking sites, and it will not be the last.

The new horizon in online business networking is not bigger reach, but better reach. Better reach includes focused networking sites based on business regions and their unique economies. Facebook propelled their growth this year by accommodating different regions and producing their sites in languages other than English. It is easier to socialize online with people who speak your language, and it is easier to do business online with people whose focus is the same region as yours. While Pacific Islanders are able to use the larger networking and business sites focused on China or the U.S. to enhance their businesses, it can be rather daunting for an island business owner to find better suppliers for small businesses with them. For example, www.Zoominfo.com boasts nearly 43 million members and four million companies spread all over the world—a farming supplier for island agriculture is like a needle in a haystack. A better reach is essential and narrowing the network by region means a concentrated list of opportunities from places that are speaking the same “business language”—investments in and around the area of the Pacific Ocean.

Finally, in the Pacific Region there is a premium on the value of focused online business networking. The Pacific Ocean covers an area of 60 million square miles and has 25,000 islands. Its ability to do business has been impacted more than other business regions due to changes in oil prices. Especially now that worldwide shipping costs have increased and there is more and more focus on decreasing consumption of fossil fuels due to global warming. The fiber optic infrastructure in the region is racing to catch up with demand. American Samoa is on the verge of connecting to a line from Hawaii and there are projects in the works for other islands. This will exponentially increase the use of the Internet by Pacific Islanders.

With all of this in mind; growth in online social and business networks, the trend toward more specialized networking sites, and changes in shipping and global trade due to energy prices and efforts to protect the environment, businesses in the Pacific Region will be moving online. The Island Business Link, seeded by the list of attendees from the annual conference and various missions to the islands, fits into the intersection of all of these trends, while its organic growth highlights how the internet is changing the way business is done in the region. While it is unlikely that anything will ever replace face to face networking, there is substantial evidence that online business networking, barrier free and available twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, is where the majority of the ‘foot traffic’ for the Pacific Region will be in coming years.

[I]Editor’s Note: Information complied for this article, if other than directly attributed to a source, was located on a variety of websites including the networking websites themselves, Alexa.com, internetworldstats.com, siteanalytics.compete.com and comScore.com.

The author was a 2008 Summer Island Fellow for the U.S. Department of the Interior. The next business opportunities conference will be held in Honolulu from April 6 to 8, 2009. More information can be found at www.islandbusinessopportunities.com.

Danielle Noto was a 2008 Summer Island Fellow for the U.S. Department of the Interior.[/I]