Pretentious title, huh?
I’m still in post-holiday mode at the moment, so you get to enjoy the ramblings of a deranged mind that was deprived of internet usage for a whole 2 weeks! It’s also an excuse for me to play a bit with WordPress 3.0 and Flickr and to dump my holiday images on you like one of those sad family slideshows from yesteryear.
Of course there’s a serious side to this all. As I was wandering around Seville in Spain taking these picture, I was struck (as is almost always the case) that the world at street level is a fairly grubby place. Apart from the stunning Spanish women, there is often a real lack of things to photograph when you look straight ahead and even when something amazing is down at eye level, it’s invariably blocked by cars or signs or workmen.
So, as you can see from the album, I started to look up and take pictures of the skyline of Seville. I’m pretty happy with how it turned out and I learned a lot about the city that I think can be applied to our IM efforts as well. The builders of Seville had to put up a load of buildings for various functions. Much of what they did was pretty utilitarian and much of what they built at street level has changed or been torn up in some way over they years.
However, as soon as you get above head height they built ornamentation and colour and twiddly bits all over the city….and the majority of this is still there and is as engaging now as it was when it first went up.
So how does all this relate to internet marketing? I think it’s in the way that we perceive things as humans. It’s in the detailing that catches the eye on a building and it’s in the detailing that holds the attention of your customers as they look at your own work. I’m as guilty as the next person of building sites that contain reviews that are “workmanlike”. They answer the basic questions but sometimes miss the very thing that would have my customers actually buy the product.
You can see this in the classic longtail traffic that your site log will tell you about. I have a website talking about TV’s and it does a good job (I think) of taking the reviews up a level….but when I go to my log file, I find folk arriving on my site because they want to connect their PC to the HDMI input and because they are unsure what a screen size really means. This is the stuff that will grow my traffic and I had no idea it was even necessary!!
So from now on, my sites will have reviews that try to go just a bit further into the worlds of my customers….not away from the subject completely but just extras that will help more of them straight away. Maybe in years to come, folk will be taking pictures of my buildings in the same way that I did in Seville.
Oh, and as an extra bonus, when I went to see “Knight and Day” last night, there was a long section set in the places I walked round in SevilleĀ just last week. Fantastic!