William Morris, of wallpaper fame, once advised: 'have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful' ... and it strikes me, having set the strategy for several websites, many microsites and countless other bits of digital furniture, that this could be a pretty useful maxim to bear in mind when embarking on any piece of digital marketing.
Increasingly the digital savvy among us are personalising our digital experiences - the very word 'homepage' suggests a place from which you usually start or to which you often return. iGoogle allows us to determine what we place on this page; our toolbars, Digg pages, Evernote accounts, suites of iPhone applications and so on leave it entirely up to us to populate them with what we find useful or amusing.
The sites that I regularly go to are either useful (BBC News, Gmail, eBay, Streetmap, Wikipedia etc.) or enrich my experience in a beauteous or fun way (Flickr, b3ta, Holy Moly).
I would not bother going to - or at least frequenting - a site that didn't do either of these things. Yet my clients frequently give me briefs that, on the face of it, require me to communicate such boringly self-serving factoids, thoughts and opinions - digital junk mail - that the question 'why would anyone care?' invariably pops up.
We can all opt in or opt out of digital environments in split seconds, and unless digital marketing gives us something to put in our homes that is either useful of beautiful, it won't really be asked in.
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