PR Squared: It's a Tab, Tab, Tab World

Now that the two most popular web browsers feature "tabbable browsing," most of the world will soon adopt this mode of surfing. Will that make marketers less anxious about allowing visitors to click away from their site?

For as long as I've been doing this PR thing, I've heard marketers gasp in horror whenever an idea was presented that might (MIGHT!) motivate a website visitor to click away from their website. Ever notice that the vast majority of links found on a website tend to link to inbound pages within that same site? "Once the beast is ensnared, do nothing to let it out!!"

Of course, none of us could ever do anything truly special (or devious) to keep an unmotivated visitor at the website. Great content = longer visits, longer engagements. Period. I'd often suggest to clients that if the content was good enough, the marketer should be confident that the visitor would return for more. (That whole, "If you love someone, set them free" mentality.) More often than not, that kind of hippy-dippy thinking got me an eye-roll for my troubles.

In Ye Olden Dayes when a click could, indeed, lead to a lost customer, I had some sympathy for the marketer. But, I wonder if tabbed browsing will alleviate some of those primal fears?

When the superior user interface of the "Open in New Tab" function becomes commonplace, can we presume that the visitor who clicks away may merely be doing some related research; perhaps to augment their knowledge about the brand found in "Tab #1?"

If this becomes an accepted point of view, might marketers take-on the additional responsibility of ensuring that the links on their sites lead to the very-best external content? Might their website (or del.icio.us account) become a content aggregation portal, instead of just a nest of self-referential links?