We have a little screened in porch off the back of our house. In it are a table and some chairs for those evenings when it’s nice enough to eat outdoors or for coffee on those mornings when the day’s rising humidity doesn’t require a machete to cut through it. The porch door leads to a little deck where we keep the grill, a planter and a combination chair/chaise that we got in one Harris Teeter giveaway or another.
Attached to the side of the porch, just to the left of the door as you exit, is a green hook that you might use to hang a flowering basket or something of that sort. Ours hold a hummingbird feeder. My wife has always been a bird watcher of sorts. Over the years I’ve kind of picked up the habit through osmosis or whatever process it is that leads one spouse to adopt the habits of another. When we lived outside of Atlanta, in Roswell, birds used to, every now and again, fly into the sliding glass door on the back of our house. An unmistakable thump alerted the household as to what happened. My wife would let out an “Oh no!”. I’d don some outdoor gloves, go around the side of the house to the back, pick up the bird, hold it a bit until it regained consciousness, and send it on it’s way. I suspect that’s where the osmosis started.
Anyway, back to the deck and the hummingbird feeder. I went out to put some burgers on the grill the other night and as I looked back towards the porch, a hummingbird had approached the feeder at just short of the speed of sound. It seemed to sense me and moved away just as quickly. Only to return, perch on the side of the feeder, shut down the wings that normally move a million miles an hour, poke it’s beak into one of the yellow plastic flowers, and enjoy a drink of the nectar that is sugar water. The process took only a few seconds and he was off again, on to the next feeder or flower that would sustain, feed and energize him. The bright red throat gave away the “him” part.
As I watched this, a ritual I’ve seen countless times, it occurred to me that those of us who use the web are just like that hummingbird. We fly through the web looking for content that will interest us, sustain us if you will, land on a page or a site that shows promise, and dip into the nectar of that page or site. And if that site’s content lives up to the potential we saw as we landed, we stay for a bit and drink up that content. Recent statistics show that the average person spends only about 50 seconds on any one web page or site and that they visit around 111 sites or domains in a day. Just like the hummingbirds that light on our feeder. A quick drink and on to the next source of goodness.
As internet marketers, web marketers, web media practitioners, we need to constantly be evaluating our page content and that of our clients to make sure that it provides the nectar that will sustain the hummingbirds who visit our site. If we don’t, that sugar water will get stale and the hummers will find others feeders to sustain them.
(Image credit: abirdsfeather.com)
