What is interactive media?

Consumers, more and more, want to interact with the companies they do business with. You can improve your interaction with customers and potential customers, and build an online community, by engaging in two-way communication with visitors to your website.

Interactive media on a website generally refers to features that respond to a user’s actions. It can also refer to actions that a user can take in order to further engage with a brand. The point of interactive media is to encourage the visitor to invest more time and effort into your brand. When visitors are invested in your brand, and in the interactions with your brand, they are more likely to become a fan – and a loyal customer.

Interactive media can be as simple as having a Twitter button that visitors can use to follow you on Twitter, to encouraging them to “Like” your brand page on Facebook, to providing feedback forms on your site, or encouraging community by stimulating comments on your blog posts.

What is rich media?

One of the best ways to encourage visitor interaction with your brand is to incorporate rich media into your website. Rich media is generally considered something that offers an interactive experience, combining images, videos, sounds, and other features. Rich media catches the attention of the visitor and encourages some kind of involvement, whether it’s watching a how-to video or playing a simple game related in some way to your content.

Pros and Cons of Rich Media

One of the biggest advantages of rich media is that it can attract visitors – and keep them on your site – all the while delivering your message and creating a sense of belonging to your brand’s online community. The more time your visitors spend on your site, interacting, the more likely they are to make a purchase, and perhaps even share your site with their network.

Rich media offers you the chance to create something that visitors to your website will want to share. It’s fun for users to share games and videos with their networks. Rich media provides you with infinite variety and flexibility to create unique, engaging content.

There is a price to pay, however. There are production issues, including cost, as well as interactions with developers, and others, to ensure that the features work properly. You will need greater bandwidth in order to support the rich media features of your website. On top of that, your audience might need plug-ins or other advanced browser technology in order to participate, depending on what type of rich media you employ.

When it comes to measuring the success and conversion of rich media, it can be difficult to determine ROI in hard dollar terms.  In some cases, you might not have performance metrics in place to handle rich media and effectively interpret data about how features are used on your site.

In the end, you need to figure out whether rich media will enhance your site – or cause too many additional problems. In many cases, it is possible to have an interactive website without incorporating a great deal of rich media. It’s still possible for visitors to enjoy videos (you can even provide a user area where visitors can upload their own videos and images of them using your products), leave comments, and engage in social media on your site without bogging it down with too many rich media features.

The important thing is to use your site to build a sense of community, and encourage interactivity that will keep visitors coming back.