Part II:

Transcript

Brett Tabke: This is Brett Tabke, we are back here again with Bryan Eisenberg, co-founder of FutureNow Inc. Online marketing, conversion. What is your thirty second elevator pitch on your company?

Bryan Eisenberg: Basically we have been focused on improving conversion rates and the experience that your customers have on websites since 1998. Basically the premise was people, uh, everybody has different reasons why they buy. Um, and every company wants more revenue and you get more revenue by giving people what they want and we happen to basically become the advocate for customers and help you design, market and all of that so that when they actually come to your website they do what you want them to do. That is how you get more money.

Brett Tabke: Uh huh. Ok, excellent, uh. What did you do before you got into the web stuff?

Bryan Eisendberg: I was actually a social worker and a teacher. So, um, both my brother and I. My brother Jeffrey is my partner and everything like that, and he was an investment banker. um, we have always had a passion for trying to understand why people do the things they do. Again, you know working as a social worker I work with paranoid scyzophrenics who you know are also sometimes drug abusers and um, my philosopgy was if you can persuade someone who is in a totally different perceptional world to take their medicine and to shower, you can persuade anybody to do anything you want them to do. I was slightly wrong, because now I have kids, but close enough. But you know anybody with more or less the right skills and communciation abilities, you can do that with.

Brett Tabke: Uh huh, interesting. So, what did you teach. Can I ask?

Bryan Eisenberg: Oh I've taught everything from. My first thing I was teaching was computers. I've been online since bulletin board systems, I had my first one back in 1982. So I started to teach computers and a little bit of programming too, you know everything from 4th-9th graders basically was my range. Um, I taught English as a second language. I taught a lot of science. So you know, a lot of fun stuff.

Brett Tabke: Excellent. And now you are...

Bryan Eisenberg: Photography at one point.

Brett Tabke: Photograpy. No video though.

Bryan Eisenberg: No, just photography.

Brett Tabke: Good. Last thing I need is another competitor. So you have done three books now on marketing. "Teaching Your Cat to Bark" was probably

Bryan Eisenberg: Waiting for Your Cat to Bark, ya.

Brett Tabke: probably the most branded in the space that people know, and your latest, "Call to Action" and I just found out you have another book?

Bryan Eisenberg: Yeah, we started back in about 2001 we released persuasive online copywriting. Uh, boring title when you look at the other books they are a little more creative. It's funny, we gave it a boring title because at that time we knew we were only going to sell through Amazon and the way Amazon actually worked was it was a pure search engine. So anyone who typed in online copywriting, the only book that came up was ours and so we sold a lot of books. We actually went through three printings and it finally went out of print. You could find copies on Amazon from anywhere from like 70 to 1000 bucks we've seen 'em on there. It is unreal. I mean it shocks us everyday. Then we did a hardcover of "Call to Action" which we self-published with the help of a lot of the people in this industry it became NY Times, Wall Street Journal, and USA Today best sellers. And then last year we did, "Waiting for Your Cat to Bark." You know again, nice creative title, we've had a lot of people talking about it, and it bacame #1 Wall Street Journal best seller, um, it has been a lot of fun. It is a lot of hard work, but it is definitely a lot of fun.

Brett Tabke: Now Online Copywriting is a favorite topic of mine because it's so...

Bryan Eisenberg: It's the key. It's the key to this whole web thing.

Brett Tabke: uh huh, uh huh, and titles specifically is mine because you know running a forum I deal with titles. Hundreds of thousands of titles a year, um. What is your best advice for Webmasters titling their pages?

Bryan Eisenberg: Well I think there are two aspects. There are two critical pieces to every single page I think most people neglect okay, which is one, the title of their page, right. The title of the page, the job of it, is not only to rank well, but also when it shows up in the listing of ranking, you want people to click on it. So what it says makes a big impact. Then from there is the headline, right. The one thing you are guaranteed that just about everybody will read when they land on your page is the headline and you better invest everything you can to come up with a good one. The thing that I think most webmasters settle for is they write it once and they think they are done, and uh this is not a static medium. Go ahead, put in something in Google Website Optimizer and write up 20 different headlines and figure out which is the best one. Keep tweaking it until you find you know what fits right for your audience.

Brett Tabke: What uh, what would you say are the biggest trends you have seen in marketing over the last year? two years?

Bryan Eisenberg: Well obviously we are seeing a huge trend towards more social and user generated-content and stuff like that and it is natural. My good buddy Roy Williams out of Austin Texas as well runs the Wizard Academy and he actually does this presentation where he shows us how marketing society goes in forty year pengulums. We go from a very idealistic society to a more civic society. In other words we are more I and more about me focused if you think about Madonna, and Michael Jackson at their peak in the 80's. All the way to you think back to the 60's where there is civic-minded and unions and the peace corpe and all of that, and what's happened is if you think about that gap of twenty years, here we were at most civic back in about 63 and about 2003 we came back right. Here was 83 where we were all about I and it was all about plastic and phoniness and you can see all the lousy commercials from the time and stuff like that, so fake. You come back to 2003 and now 2003 looks just like 1963, but just in the reverse part of the pendulum, ans what we are seeing is it is slowly evolving, everybody is moving back into this more social thing because we became so isolated, um that we are looking for more connections to people, and having that connection means so much to people that if companies can foster those conversations and get people to join their conversation, something that is really meaningful, not just for the sake of humor or anything like that, they are going to see some great results over the year. Because of this connection to people what happens is word of mouth spreads faster, and if word of mouth spreads faster there is one other issue that is critical for your marketing department today, which is you need to become more transparent, because you can fool somebody once and back in the 80's not everyone had a cell phone, not everyone had a Blackberry, not everyone had IM or text messages, you can get away with it for quite a while until something came out. Today you have a bad experience. You know my mom had a bad experience with Best Buy, I put in on the blog, two days later, Best Buy called me, had tons of people commenting about it. It's a different world and so you know you are eith going to have great service, great products, and be transparent about it, about what you can and cannot do, or you are going to pay the price. We are even seeing it in the movie industry. You think about, there is a classic Hollywood fomula: take the leading man at the time, the leading woman at the time, you put them together make a summer romance movie together and you are going to have a big hit. Always worked. Worked for 50-60 years. You remember the movie Gigli? Right. Horrible, horrible, horrible movie. No one admits to ever seeing it, okay? But the movie came out on like a Tuesday. By Wednesday ticket sales were down by 18 percent. By Saturday it was yanked out of the theatre. Now you remember the pink diamond that he bought and it was a whole big tabloid thing. For all intended purposes it should have worked, big difference, text messaging and IM and the word got out to quickly and so I look at this and so now the third dimension. So now you have this conversation, you have this transparency, and the third dimension is speed. People are not taking advantage, they are sitting around acting like they did for the last 20, 30, 40 years and the world is moving much faster than they are and unless they can find ways to execute at Internet type speeds, they are going to be left behind in a hard way.

Brett Tabke: It's a hard business world. We just keep getting faster and faster and faster.

Bryan Eisenberg: Well what happens is there is an evolution of sales and marketing. We were talking about Waiting for Your Cat to Bark, where if you think about the initial first sale. I don't care what your religious background is. It could have involved an apple or some form of barter or one way or the another. Every evolution from retailing to big stores to catalog to the Internet. What it does is it actually makes it much easier on the consumer, and it reduces their friction, their hard work, right. It gives them more options. But while at the same time reducing friction right, it's just general law of physics. When you reduce something one place, what has to happen. It has to go up somewhere else, and that hard work has to come to a person that wants to make money. And so yeah it is a lot of work today that is the scary part, it is not going to come easy. It's not going to come as easy as it did ten years ago.

Brett Tabke: And it's getting harder all the time. It's an uphill battle.

Bryan Eisenberg: And there is more and more options. And more and more media choices. You know Facebook, MySpace, video content, YouTube. It is just overwhelming. Twitter. It's just another channel, another media source, and how do you keep up with it? How do you decide where to invest? You know one of my suggestions is to take a percentage of your budget and have people go just experiment in different things until you find, and don't count on wins, count on this is an experiment. Let's see what to do, and learn about it, and see how it evolves. I have a good friend who works at Proctor & Gamble and his title is Chief Investigator of Alternative Media. Right. Who do you have in your company who is doing that? Isn't that a cool title?

Brett Tabke: That's a great title. I fell over backwards when we actually appointed somebody Chief Evangelist. A small company, a dozen people, and we have an evangelist?

Bryan Eisenberg: By the way I think that is another one of the big roles you are going to see in a lot of companies. I did a blog post at an art club out in <> where I interviewed Betsy Weber from TechSmith about it and what it takes and how you look at it, and how you measure it, and the ROI of it, yeah and I mean you need someone who is responsible to have the conversation. You know it is great if it can be the CEO, but often times the CEO has a lot of responsibility and he should be part of the conversation, but he can't manage it day to day. You need someone who is there, who is passionate about it, who wants to be part of it, and hopefully you can get that from someone who is in your community really and making that evangelist and help them increase that communication anyway you can.

Brett Tabke; Yeah, exactly so, you got the blog, you have written books, you are speaking at conferences left and right all the time, you are involved in trainings with Roy at Web Wizards down there. What other outlets have you got?

Bryan Eisenberg: Well the blog is a big one. Our big thing is we have been trying to educate the market on the importance of conversion for so many years I think the market is finally starting to wake up and say, "oh yeah, I got visitor's now, what do I do with them?" And yo know we have been doing this stuff since 98 and we have been publishing all kinds of stuff, so <> becomes a big challenge for us, we just started doing screencast. We figured okay we have got about 2 million words out there. People can't get it in words, we will do it in video. So what we do is a 3-5 minute clip and we look at websites and we look at product detail pages of like Fingerhut, and Best Buy, and TigerDirect and we say oh why this one does well, works well, but this one doesn't. We will look at how people do landing pages from pay per click campaigns. We did that with Petco recently and we are doing a lot of these Screencasts, and so that has become a big avenue. We also do a lot of trainings and I think that is one of the key things. One of the biggest challenges, you know I'm also the chairman of the Web Analytics Association, um former chairman, but still quite involved and with the founder of it, um is that this whole industry suffers from a lack of talent in many ways, but also knowledge. It's very complex. It's not an easy, oh you know I produce print ads. It is a lot more challenging than that, and our big focus has been doing a lot of training courses so we do classes called Call to Action which is all about how to design for conversion, and thinking about it from our process called persuasion architecture. We do classes on persuasive online copywriting, really thinking in terms of blogging today and the content you develop. Not just for commerce, I mean copywriting is the key, and even playing in video content is all around copywriting. It's understanding what you are trying to do and what you are trying to get out of it. You know we do a little bit of consulting and yeah we also have a radio show that we do on WebmasterRadio called Blog Buzz, where in about 3-5 minutes we give you a summary of all of the top stories that are happening in the interactive marketing space. If you don't have time to follow the roughly 7,000 blogs we are doing right now, we have a motivated system, that a friend of ours actually developed, um and we are saying these are pretty much the top stories that pretty much everybody is discussing. Here is a quick summary and a little bit of our take on it, and you are done you don't have to read it all.

Brett Tabke: Excellent, excellent. Well, we are about out of time here. I appreciate you taking the time to be with us.

Bryan Eisenberg: Oh yeah, absolutely.

Brett Tabke: Thank you.

[edited by: Vanessa_Zamora at 8:10 pm (utc) on Jan. 14, 2009]