Google, one of the world's most prominent evangelists for all things digital, has turned to one of the most traditional of old media routes to try to persuade more British people to go online: it is printing a leaflet.
The Simple Guide to the Internet is part of the search engine group's commitment to Race Online 2012, an initiative started by the UK government's digital inclusion champion, Martha Lane Fox. The co-founder of Lastminute.com and the entrepreneur behind a growing Lucky Voice karaoke bar empire hopes to get 10,000 British businesses and charities signed up to her campaign, which is designed to put everyone in the UK online by the end of 2012.
Google's leaflet, which it intends to start distributing this year through libraries, charities and other public bodies that work with the digitally excluded, will give novices all the information they need to carry out basic online tasks, such as communicating with friends. It will not be used to push Google's own services.
But its appearance is likely to raise a smile among old media executives as it proves that the product of dead trees can still be useful in this digital world.
A Google spokesman admitted: "Well, if you're trying to get people who are not on the internet to be interested in the internet, then realistically you're probably going to have to do something offline."
In fact, it's not the first time that Google has resorted to old media in order to eulogise about new media. A year and a half ago, it announced plans to launch its own internet browser – called Chrome – through the medium of a comic. Unfortunately its faster-than-expected delivery to journalists meant that what was supposed to be a carefully stage-managed announcement became an online festival of speculation.
But it's not just about leaflets. Google will create a complementary website, and hopes that the leaflet and site combined will reach a million people by 2012.
More than 10 million adults in the UK have never used the internet, according to the digital inclusion task force. Roughly 4 million of that group are socially excluded adults, including elderly and unemployed people, whom Race Online is particularly interested in reaching.
"The Race Online 2012 ambition will create profound social and economic change and will mark a step change for the country as a whole," said Lane Fox. "Together we are within reach of our goal to enable the 4 million most socially excluded to benefit from the opportunities and cost efficiencies that the web has to offer".
Alongside Google, the first corporate partners for Race Online include BT, McDonald's, Microsoft, Moneysupermarket.com, BSkyB, the electrical retailer Comet, internet telephony specialist Skype and broadband provider TalkTalk. BT has pledged to get at least 100,000 people online for the first time by encouraging all of its staff, consumers and corporate customers to 'Pass IT on' through a series of partnerships which include UK online centres and Age UK.
In a similar vein retail chain Comet has pledged to 'Pass IT on' to 50,000 digitally disadvantaged people through in-store training for older first time web users while McDonald's will introduce a new IT module to its corporate training scheme.
Sky aims to encourage up to 100,000 customers online for the first time through its own leaflet campaign to customers, TalkTalk hopes to help a similar number through community training at its customer contact centres and offering discounted broadband to those who complete a course at UK online centres.
A recent report by PwC estimated the economic benefit of getting everyone in the UK online is £22bn and government could save at least £900m a year in customer contact costs if all digitally excluded adults got online and made just one electronic contact per month.
