How Grand Central Station's Black Spot Improves Your Content
You make your content sticky when you use the power of curiosity. It is a subject we discuss here often. And on my recent trip to NYC, it was yet again underscored while standing in the center of Grand Central Station.
Here's the story...
My youngest son lives in Norwalk about an hour north of the city. He, my oldest son and I rode the train in on Saturday morning to celebrate a birthday weekend. After getting off the train, I remember walking up into the "palace" and felt my jaw drop at all the splendor greeting my very wide opened eyes. The three of us just stood there not saying a word and letting it all...soak...in.
After a minute, Ross pointed out a very small black brick in a corner on an otherwise perfectly pristine and breathtaking ceiling. I looked at him and felt an immediate need to know why and now not later. Curious, indeed. He said that during the station's mass restoration in 1988, the team transforming this historical American icon decided to leave a nod to what the ceiling once looked like.
Initially, I thought it was the result of decades of soot from the trains chugging in and out of tunnels below. Wrong. Research proved it was mostly nicotine and tar and the result of the cigarette smoke swirling inside the terminal in earlier times.
So what does this all have to do with sticky content you're asking?
Well, research has proven time and again that when curiosity gets used in a well-crafted title, a post always gets more eyeballs and engaged minds. We've said it before and we will say it again. Curiosity is an itch that must be scratched. It's what well-known content marketing company Upworthy calls the curiosity gap. It basically piques human interest so much that we want to close the gap between what is known and what is not known.
Needless to say, they use the strategy day-in and day-out as the foundation for the volume of engaging content they craft and produce. In terms of how they approach that content, these brilliant marketers sum it up in one sentence:
Simply write a headline that is tantalizing enough to get read to click through but does not give away the whole story.
Centuries ago, English philosopher Thomas Hobbes said, "Curiosity is the lust of the mind." No argument here as I lusted to know why that "black spot" was on the beautiful ceiling of Grand Central Station.
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