Web Communication: "Sign - Sign - Everywhere A Sign"

Your business success depends on your ability to communicate effectively to an interested audience. Appropriate traffic to your website is important, but the tactics that generate visitors are not the same tactics that get visitors to stay on your site.

Web sites that are running constantly and do not meet business expectations generally suffer because they are designed to keep the viewers attention long enough to communicate a clear message marketing concise.

Web-communication is a series of elaborate multi-sensory language of signs: signs of being the words, images, audio and video that make up the range of the presentation, which, like all forms of communication have their own grammar, context , and relevance of personal experience as interpreted by each member of your customer-audience.

When words lose their meaning

Marketing is one of those words that has lost its currency because it has been tossed about with little regard for its meaning. For many, it's just another word for advertising, which obviously is not. For the more sophisticated it takes in all the disciplines of branding, positioning, identity, advertising and more. Especially implies a strategic marketing approach for the implementation of such tactics.

For companies interested in using the Web to promote their business objectives, Web-marketing is the execution of a communication strategy through the implementation of creative multi-sensory signature presentations.

Semiotics: the study of signs

"Sign, Sign, everywhere a sign,

By blocking the scenery breaking my mind,

Do this, do not, can not read the sign. "

- Five Man Electrical Band

As the lyrics of the songs, the 'signs' of the Five Man Electrical Band' suggests, we are surrounded by the signs, the interpretation of which creates our reality. The study of signs and significance as it follows is called 'semiotic'.

We are bombarded with signs, not just images, but the words, voices, gestures, posture, clothing and movements of the messengers, as well as music and sound effects that accompany the presentation, not to mention the media chosen the same.

Each of these elements is a language all its own. And like all forms of language, if you do not learn the rules, the grammar and syntax, you can not communicate coherently.

Fear of Meaning

The majority of corporate communication is wrapped in a protective veil of ambiguity caused by the fear of making a decisive statement of who you are, and what it represents. This type of defensive thinking can protect your business from some critics, but also the distance from your audience real people and businesses that may be sensitive to what you have to offer.

Advertising, video, images and copy designed not to offend, will fail to communicate meaning, and if what you are saying is not significant, how can you expect your audience to respond? Bland royalty-free images, video clips, stock market, and talking-head presentation of statistics and specifications will ensure that all the money you spent on the generation of traffic will go to hell, as the visitors leave faster than they arrive.

Instead of just looking at how many hits your site is getting each week, take a look at how long it stays on your site. If people are leaving in a few seconds to arrive, then they have determined you have nothing to offer them, which may or may not be true. You need your visitors to stay long enough to capture the essence of the marketing message and if not, then perhaps it's time to rethink the message and how they are delivered.

A Little Yiddish can help

Yiddish is a language of language, the conversational metaphor, a set of expressions that a narrow interpretation of the words mean little, but through common experience and the relevance of the listener means more than words can imply.

In Yiddish there are many ways to tell someone to 'kick the bucket,' is not a very nice thing to say to someone, but a sentiment that is often expressed in each case.

So then how do you tell someone how you feel without resorting to crude direct approach? In Yiddish it is necessary to use one of the many available expressions, for example, "there zolst vaksn a tzibele mitn dr'erd in kop!" which literally means "May you grow like an onion with his head in the ground," a much more colorful, poetic turn of phrase, with hints of humor that softens the intensity of meaning raw.

Our everyday language is full of language and metaphor and for the most part not even notice. If we beat our competition, we instruct our staff to "take no prisoners" and if we can we 'swept them away,' business often using metaphors of war to emphasize the enormity of the stakes involved in business initiatives, or should I say 'campaigns'.

It is not only written and verbal communication that is always enclosed in a cocoon of evocative metaphor. The visual communication, including images and video, has its own idiomatic language metaphorical sign that helps communicate a meaningful message in short-handed. The 30-second television commercials producers are experts in this type of communication, how else can a story to tell, complete marketing in 30 seconds?

Importance of character and situation

When we create Web-video commercials we need to tell a story that the audience can identify. This story should be a metaphor that draws on their experiences of the public, and if done correctly you should enable the viewer to lower the natural defense mechanism of sale and to let the humanity of the characters and situation penetrate a significant human level. This style of presentation makes the point and delivers the message in a much more effective than a hit-you-over-the-head, hard to sell the commercial style, or a sense of exhortation of business platitudes.

Dr. Satoshi Kanazawa, a professor of sociology at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, in 'Psychology Today', 'friends in the brain "by Kaja Perina says:" The human brain is wired to respond to stimuli as it did in its ancestral environment, where television and movies did not exist. Kanazawa says that we evolved to believe that 'all realistic images of people you meet are often friends and family.'

Environment of evolutionary adaptation there was no way to know, like today with celebrities. "

The implication of the research Kanazawa for the Web-marketing is significant. If, as marketers can create websites and presentations Webmedia populated by people going to where your Web-audience can relate, then you have solved the biggest obstacle in the process of Web-sales: a lack of confidence.

People buy things from people they trust, people who know and love, and people who can relate to. You can establish this relationship with a campaign of continuous audio and video presentations delivered by characters who represent the personality of your company, offering a message that enhances the lives of your audience or commercial interests.

The familiarity of Genres Presentation

An effective Web-shopping should touch the audience in some way. One method we use to make this connection is through the exploitation of genres.

Genres are storytelling formats with built-in conventions, rules and guidelines. These agreements provide a communication-shorthand allowing Web-storytellers to provide rich content to an economical use of time and space.

Since the public already understands what are the conventions of the genre are identified, resources should not be wasted establishing a framework that is embedded in the same genre.

This is where the Web-commercial producer must expand the concept of genres beyond what is generally understood. Everyone understands the Western style detective, romance, and sitcom genres of narrative, but there are genres beyond the boundaries of literature, films and television series. Genres are also truncated in the world of narrative television commercial. Take for example the current series of television commercials ubiquitous Macintosh that have been copied many times by many people on the web and on television itself.

The use of gender as a method of presenting Web-spot offers a set of expectations for the viewer or what has been termed as 'cultural capital'. While recognition of the family provides a connection, its fun and creative manipulation provides particularly AIDS and improves memory recall. You can see an example of this manipulation usually the link at the end of this article.

The Bottom Line

If real estate is about, 'location location, location,' then websites are about, 'communication, communication, communication.' The clever web-marketing will understand this and use their web site the way it was always supposed to be used as a means of communication but that communication must be delivered in the form of simple text, but can now be delivered with all multi-sensory media tools available. The caveat, of course, is knowing how to use these tools properly ......