The World Wide Web affects every single aspect of just about every business in America today. Your business included. Unless you are hooked up and surfing the Web on a daily basis, you likely are not even aware of the impending threats to the viability of your company.

Just consider what happened to the mighty Encyclopedia Britannica, when it thought it could ignore the digital world. After losing 50% of their sales in less than 18 months, they eventually reacted, yet they still may not recover.

The entire travel agent industry lost almost 80% of its members in a breathtaking period of less than 24 months, as the airlines went directly to customers with ticket sales on the Web.

Even a very Web-savvy company like gigantic Hewlett-Packard is totally overhauling itself every few months, tightening its focus on electronic commerce. They recently announced they will consolidate several thousand employees into a single "eBusiness" entity.

Reader's Digest announced that they plan to immediately invest $100 million in the Internet as part of a "growth program." Actually, it is more like a survival strategy for the mammoth publisher, who has seen revenues slide dangerously in the past year.

So, do you really need to be on the Web?

Yeah. Like right now.

Are you ready for IMC to take you on the web?