Everyone knows that the Internet is a popular way to find information, whether it is through a search engine or a specific company's web site. That's why the Chamber's new Referrals Online Program targets consumers online.

Thanks to our new program, the Chamber's web site can help drive traffic to your business, bringing you potential customers. Here's how it works: Chamber web site visitors search lists of Chamber members by entering a keyword. As a member you have your company name, contact name, address, phone, fax and hyperlink to your web site listed. You have the option of enhancing your listing by adding features like a map to your location, a hyperlink to your e-mail, a picture of your facility, special offers and coupons or a complete description of all of your company's services.

The last feature may be the most valuable addition for your business. By providing a complete description of all of your products and services, the computer's search engine will pick up any keyword that has a coinciding category listing. For example, if your main product is new cars but you also offer used cars, rental cars, auto detailing and paint and body work, your company can be listed under all of those categories by providing the information in the description. The computer automatically recognizes the keywords! This is your opportunity to be listed in as many categories as you want and further expand your advertising capabilities.

These valuable services are available to you for an annual subscription of $50 per option or the low price of $150 for the complete package (a saving of $100). To view a completed site and see your opportunities, please go to http://rol.irm-sytems.com/cgi-shl/foxweb.exe/rol/rol?ac=so&id=galawcoc

Through this growing online program, visitors find what they need - information about businesses - and you get what you need - a referral from the Chamber that can drive your business.

Activity on the Chamber's web site has spiked to over 13,000 hits per month, so make sure you're taking advantage of all that activity and all those potential customers by keeping your company's information current.

The Chamber has always served its members by providing referrals to anyone who calls our office looking for a general list of available services, said Amy Bryan, Vice President of Small Business Services. 3With the help of the web site, we think the prospects of increasing your business are even better. Not only will you be advertising to the local community but all across the world as well.

Call the Small Business Services Department today to enhance your company's web advertising!

THE BUSINESS CORNER
A Brief History of Money
By Dr. J. Brauer, Professor of Economics at Augusta State University

Take out a dollar bill and hold it up. Examine it carefully, Surely, it is money. But oddly, in economics textbooks, money is not defined as dollar bills. Instead money is defined by the functions it fulfills. First, money is that which serves as a means to trade work for work, such as economics lectures for groceries. Using money as a "medium of exchange" avoids the expense and trouble of bartering. Second, money also must serve as a standard of comparison between the value of one thing and the value of another thing. Using money as a "unit of account" allows us to quickly compare the value of an hour's worth of lecturing with that of an hour's worth of producing lettuce. And third, money must be a "store of value" as well, so that I can save my money to make a purchase many days or even years later. A fourth item, not always mentioned in the textbooks, is that money is something with which to settle debts, not incur debts. Thus, even though many of us use credit cards, they are not money because they do not settle debts.

Throughout history, many items have served these three or four functions with varying success. These items have included salt, cattle, furs, tobacco, shells, arrowheads, stones, and precious metals such as gold and silver. Because in these examples money is always a physical thing, it is called "commodity" money. There are additional requirements for money: (a) whatever is used as money must be widely accepted as money by all people in society; (b) it must be standardized so that one unit is the same as another unit; and (c) it should be divisible into small portions.

To use cattle as money, therefore, poses a problem, because a cow is not easily divisible, and when it is divided, it begins to rot and stink to high heaven pretty fast. Shells and arrowheads are not sufficiently standardized, and salt will take on water and spoil, too, if you are not careful. The problem with gold and silver is that it is easy to shave off tiny flakes from bars of these metals and then pass the rest on at full value. Moreover, gold and silver are heavy and cumbersome to lug around. Imagine paying for your shiny new $30,000 car with bars of gold!

As civilization advanced, therefore, money had to evolve. An important moment came with the invention of paper money. At first, you would deposit some "money," such as gold, with a trusted friend who if trusted by enough people eventually became the "banker." He would keep everyone's gold and in exchange give each depositor a piece of paper, a certificate, verifying that he had the gold the paper represented and whoever possessed the certificate could claim the gold. Later, you would get several papers (small denominations) which allowed you to claim a fraction of the value of the deposited gold. These paper certificates eventually became accepted as money, fulfilling all the functions and requirements listed above. Eventually, there were so many bankers, each with his own certificates, that it became difficult to trade across the entire Unites States, let alone the world. It seemed simpler for a central government to step in and to decree that, henceforth, only certain government-approved pieces of paper would be money or "legal tender" as that dollar bill in your hand says. This is "flat" money...money by government decree.

The dollar bill fulfills all the functions and requirements I listed. It serves as a unit of account and as a store of value. It certainly is a medium of exchange and can be used to settle debt.

The biggest problem with paper money is that inflation erodes its use as a store of value, causing people to stop believing in their money's usefulness. That is why countries suffering from hyperinflation are forced to periodically change their currency or to adopt another country's currency as their own, such as Ecuador and Bolivia did when they officially declared the US dollars as their currency as well.

Dr. J. Brauer is Professor of Economics at Augusta State University's College of Business Administration. He can best be reached via his web site http://www.aug.edu/~sbajmb.