Make your website ultra sticky with interactive photo tags

The evolution of photo sharing

The recent release of the Timeline feature on Facebook, sites becoming more picture friendly (jux), and business cards becoming stylishly virtual (flavors, aboutme), there is no doubt that photos are big on marketers’ and consumers’ minds. Other social media sites surrounding photo sharing have recently hopped on the bandwagon such as houzz and Pinterest.com that have grown exponentially.

They have taken the lead for fast-growing niche photo sharing sites and more specifically photos of interiors, homes and lifestyle which are on people’s minds. Now, bring in tagging people, places and things, and photos are beginning to provide a lot more information than simply a two dimensional visual. Photos are quick (for our ever-shrinking attention spans), scanable with the eye, and immediately tell us what it is that we want to know. It sounds so simple.

Now, if a photo could actually possess a thousand words, enter San Francisco based startup, Stipple which enjoys backing from big name investors like Justin Timberlake and AngelList Co-Founder Naval Ravikant.

Their main target market appears to be vendors and e-commerce sites along with photographers to be able to profit off of each time a consumer purchases a product from their stipple tag. If this tag is then clicked on, that vendor receives a percentage of the purchase as demonstrated in the video below, but as you watch the video, imagine how it could be used on your own site, even for highlighting data that is not retail related:

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Creative applications for Stipple

What else can you see this being useful for? How can interactive photos make your business better?

Looking past their initial offerings of tagging, the technology and ease of use is pretty straight forward for anyone with a bit of knowledge of WordPress or the tiniest bit of HTML. A few lines of code and you’re in (and did I mention its free!?). Next, add as much information as your audience would enjoy.

Stipple may not be fit for every blogger, but I see this as being incredibly useful in my own business as a real estate broker to make a local real estate website interactive. Think about it – throw in some neighborhood info, third party crime, education and lifestyle stats and boom, you have a fully interactive neighborhood summary in one photo and the consumer never has to leave that page. Take it a step further, add the average house values, integrate with picketreport.com, and even a call to action, and you’re one step closer to amazing site interaction.

The image below took about an extra 30 seconds to tag and these will be displayed directly on the blog. All information can be stored within each photo and is presented as users hover over each information-containing dot (click to see it in action).

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And what would a cool product be without the integration of some analytics? Stipple even offers basic data on how many times each dot is hovered over, or how often a photo is hovered over.

Reinforcing brand recognition and interaction is the name of the game here. Instead of consumers having to go back and forth between sites and pages, and then linked elsewhere, everything is right here which is a win for any site owner and is convenient for consumers.