Kevin Heisler: Tell us about your new book, Always Be Testing.

Bryan Eisenberg: A little over a year ago Google offered everyone a free A/B and multivariate testing tool called Google Website Optimizer. Adoption has been great, but people are still experiencing challenges understanding what to test and how to get an ROI out of testing. Always Be Testing is the answer to that issue. To quote one of the early reviewers, John Jantsch, “I’m a big fan of GO, but this is the first thing I’ve read that really makes it seem practical and simple.” The book is expected to launch at Search Engine Strategies San Jose.

KH: That’s a brilliant title. It’s got that whole “David Mamet-Glengarry Glen Ross-A/B split” thing going for it. Can you do a good Alec Baldwin imitation?

BE: A is for always. B is for be. T is for testing! Who gets the steak knives? Who wants third prize?

KH: So in conversion marketing, who gets the good leads?

BE: The person who best understands the personas of their prospective customers and will spend the time to continuously improve their marketing by refining the alignment between those personas, their campaigns, and their messaging.

KH: Who comes up with your book titles? Waiting For Your Cat to Bark? — that’s genius.

BE: It’s always a team effort. I’m lucky to work with some very creative people.

KH: How many books do you think you sold because people thought they were getting the new Cesar Milan Dog Whisperer book?

BE: I hope not too many. But maybe a handful of people out there who ignore marketing might also ignore book covers.

KH: Did you ever consider any other animals for the title, or was it always a cat?

BE: Both Jeffrey and I are dog owners, but it was Lisa Davis’ cat-like ways that won out.

KH: When’s the sequel, Waiting For Your Dog to Meow, coming out?

BE: Please, one book at a time. This is hard! We’re hoping that this book answers a critical question that people are facing today: how do we get a better return of our search marketing efforts?

KH: Why doesn’t anyone have the nickname “The Word-of-Mouth Marketing Whisperer”? Seems like a natural to me.

BE: I would nominate my friend Andy Sernovitz, but I doubt anyone would feel comfortable calling him a whisperer.

KH: Another one of your bestsellers is Call to Action: Secret Formulas to Improve Online Results. Hundreds of thousands of people have read that book or attended one of your Call to Action seminars. So is it time to change the title? Like, maybe, Call to Action: Famous Formulas to Improve Online Results That Everyone Knows But You?

BE: Thank you for the compliment. Certainly a lot of people have read the books and used it to improve their web marketing. I wish it were more people. I still think that we have a long way to go until these concepts are universally applied.

I think Always Be Testing is going to be helpful in reinforcing those concepts presented in Call to Action and making them even more actionable.

KH: On a serious note, how would you define advanced search marketing? What makes any search engine optimization (SEO) or search engine marketing (SEM) tactic advanced?

BE: I think it is really a question of scale. Good SEO and SEM are about creating ways to grab your potential visitors’ attention, creating content that is relevant to them, and providing a great experience for every keyword campaign and for every step, from the first click to conversion. Truly advanced SEM would have a better balance between driving traffic and converting that traffic.

KH: Your FutureNow blog, GrokDotCom, lists the top 10 retail sites for conversion rates each month. Those numbers aren’t real, are they? Office Depot, for example — 20.9 percent. How’s that possible?

BE: The numbers are measuring real people visiting these sites and completing purchases. They aren’t indicative of the website’s overall conversion rate — just conversions of those on the Nielsen Online panel.

KH: How do you win the paid search game? Is it a zero-sum game?

BE: Just like for every pot there is a lid, for every search term you need an incredibly persuasive and relevant landing page. You can’t afford to be generic. Too many marketers focus on the ad’s click-through rate (CTR). That’s important. However, the marketers focused on conversion rate can always outbid the marketers with lower conversion rates. It’s simple math: the more you convert, the lower your cost.

KH: You also spoke at the Bazaarvoice Social Commerce Summit. How would you define socialommerce?

BE: According to my good friend, Sam Decker, CMO of Bazaarvoice, “Social commerce is a term for the strategy of connecting customers to customers online and leveraging those connections for commercial purpose.” In simplest terms, it’s people sharing with people their commercial experiences without marketers polluting the stream.

KH: What’s the future of search? A point-and-click barcode reader GPS iPhone linked to inventory management systems?

BE: I tend to think the future of search is related to the mobile device, not computers. I can see it working in several ways based on the pieces I see Google working on. First, I can imagine a widget that sits on your mobile phone; when you click, it calls 800-411-Goog. You tell it what you’re looking for, and it provides results (and probably some audio ads). Voice is a much easier interface than typing. You’ll also be able to take a picture of a product barcode or UPC symbol, and it will bring you back results of where you can purchase the item locally or online.

Whatever the future is, it will bring more complexity for the search engines and for the people who want to be found, and it will be seamless and friction free for the end customer.

KH: What’s the future of SEO as a profession?

BE: The search engines are definitely getting better and indexing all kinds of content and technologies. Every day they continue to refine their algorithms so they are less influenced by artificial methods and influenced more by the massive amounts of data they’re collecting.

I’m hoping marketers will get past the old world view that marketing is about driving traffic and begin to understand that today’s marketing is about providing customers, from initial awareness to purchase and hopefully to becoming evangelists. This requires careful planning of the customer journey and experience at a click-by-click level. I don’t see it going there yet, but I’m hopeful more people will read Waiting For Your Cat to Bark?

KH: You guys are kind of like the Weinstein Brothers (Miramax guys) of Internet marketing. So which one are you, Bob or Harvey?

BE: That’s the first time I’ve heard that comparison. Usually it’s the “Car Talk” guys that people compare Jeffrey and me with.

KH: Tell us about your sibling rivalry. Growing up, was it kind of like Cain and Abel?

BE: Growing up and being four and a half years apart meant Jeffrey and I didn’t really have much of a relationship. It was a little over 13 years ago that Jeffrey and I started working together, and we have been business partners and the best of friends since.

KH: What did you want to be when you grew up?

BE: Both Jeffrey and I share one passion: understanding why people do the things they do. It manifested in me becoming a social worker and counselor for years and Jeffrey becoming an investment banker. He figured out how to take that passion and his business skills and turn them into the business known as FutureNow.

KH: You spoke at webcom Montreal 2008 in May in a session entitled, “The Golden Rule of Interactive Marketing.” What would that be? Market unto others as you would have them market unto you?

BE: That’s the way most people would think about it, but that’s the old model of marketing. We explain this concept in detail in Waiting for Your Cat to Bark? The golden rule is a two-parter: He who has the gold rules. And, do unto others as they would have done unto themselves.

KH: The Brits and Europeans were wowed by your panels at SES London. What can Canadians [at SES Toronto] expect to learn from a guy from Brooklyn?

BE: Unfortunately, Brooklyn pizza doesn’t travel well, or I’d share some of that. We did manage to take a few Canadians, including SES Toronto chair Andrew Goodman, on a pizza tour of Brooklyn during SES New York. I promise to share something else that also has a good scent!

For a recap of Bryan’s SES Toronto keynote, follow the scent trail to Bryan’s post on “The Interactive Marketer 2.0“
. .

Editor’s Note: We can’t make the book come out any sooner, but we would like to invite you to join Bryan on Wednesday, July 9th for a free landing page optimization webinar; the first in our “Always Be Testing” webinar series, brought to you by FutureNow and the Google Website Optimizer team. Space is limited, so sign up today!

Ever wonder how often other people return an item you want to buy online?

Honestly, it never occurred to me before, but now that I’ve seen Shoeline.com’s Return-O-Meter™, I wish other online retailers would borrow the idea (especially since I’ve learned it’s actually lowered returns and raised Shoeline’s conversion rate).

If you own or are in charge of a marketing budget for an e-commerce shop, you should take a close look at the latest webinar from the good people at Elastic Path Software.

In “9 Ecommerce Innovations: What’s Now & What’s Next,” Elastic Path co-founder Jason Billingsley showcases the latest e-tail trends in these hot categories:

• Video
• Customer Service
• Real World Guided Selling
• Multi-store Retail
• Navigation
• Merchandising
• Social Shopping
• Loyalty

(If you need to bookmark the webinar for now, check out Linda’s recap at Get Elastic.)

OK. Now that you’re about to have a bunch of new ideas for cool features to add to your site, let’s not get carried away just yet. What works for Amazon, NetShops, Shoeline, Zappos, Martin + Osa, Borders.com, Endless.com, American Eagle, Shopatron.com, Backcountry.com, Knicker Picker, Vitamin Global, WineLibrary.com, and Shoeline . . . [deep breath] . . . may not work for you — which is exactly why strategy must come before tactics. Always.

How will you know if these innovations will add value to your visitors’ online shopping experience? Well, if the change you want isn’t too expensive to implement — and if it’s not overly disruptive to your current business model — try it out by running a split test.*

. .

*Split testing is the only way to know whether your site’s new features are A) worth keeping, or B) setting off the Return-O-Meter™. Don’t know where to begin? Join us on Wednesday, July 9th for the first installment of “Always Be Testing,” our free monthly webinar series, co produced by FutureNow and the Google Website Optimizer team.

Granted, a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, but online, your customers don’t quite have the luxury of taste, touch, or smell. So one thing we can learn from ProFlowers.com’s impressive conversion rate last month is that images matter. A lot.

But what works for one website may not work for yours. Oftentimes, the product (or service) itself dictates which strategy is most effective. For instance, if you’re selling jackets, you may want to give visitors multiple views and zoom features.

It all depends on what you’re selling and how much the customer needs to see in order to feel confident to buy.

At last month’s eMetrics Summit in San Francisco, Bryan had a chance to sit down with WilsonWeb.com’s Ralph Wilson to discuss the importance of product images and how they affect conversion. Here’s the video…

That’s why A/B split-testing is essential; it’s how you know the images are making a difference.

For more ideas on how you can test your way to a better conversion rate, we cordially invite you to join us on Wednesday, July 9th for our free “Always Be Testing” webinar, co-hosted by FutureNow and Google Website Optimizer.

. .

Editor’s Note: Don’t keep this all to yourself. Help spread the word on Facebook…

What: A new monthly webinar series brought to you by FutureNow and Google.

FutureNow friends and fans,

We are so excited about our new free webinar series we have just kicked off called “Always Be Testing”. It’s a monthly webinar that covers specific testing ideas, how to structure tests, and how to use Google Website Optimizer. The best part is that Google has decided to participate in it first-hand, offering the lastest tips and insights straight from Tom Leung, Google’s Business Product Manager.

Our first webinar will be on July 9th, at 12:00pm EST and last 30 minutes. The subject we will be covering will be confidence and trust-building elements on landing pages.

For more details and to sign-up to attend, visit futurenowinc.com/abtwebinar.htm

We hope you’ll attend and share this with anyone you know who is looking to begin to test their marketing or to increase their testing effectiveness.

Best Regards,
-Brian Bond
VP Marketing, FutureNow, Inc.

When: Wednesday, July 9, 2008 | 12pm EST

Where: Your computer

Why: Whether your business has just started testing, is planning to test, or has been testing for years identifying the areas and elements that have impact is often challenging. Each month, Bryan Eisenberg starts off by taking attendees on a dive deep on a specific subject area to test in your marketing and give you ideas on variation you could test. Along with these ideas each month Tom Leung will bring you useful insider tips and tricks about using Google Website Optimizer to easily test your marketing campaigns and website. Lastly, the two will team up to answer a popular question spotted on the Google Website Optimizer forums or sent in by our readers and listeners.

How much: It’s free, but space is limited so sign-up today!

If you’re hoping to download Firefox 3, it looks like it’s now safe to do so. But for nearly two hours yesterday, when the latest version of the popular Web browser first launched, so many people rushed the Firefox landing page that Mozilla’s servers crashed from the volume.

A round of applause for the marketing team at Mozilla. The pent up demand for their product combined with a brilliant “Firefox 3 Download Day” campaign to produce a perfect storm of online marketing genius. As of 7am PDT today, over seven million people have downloaded Firefox 3. They even made it into the Guinness Book of World Records for the most software downloads in a day. As CNet reports, “The download rate, which peaked at 14,000 per minute Tuesday, was about 6,600 per minute Wednesday morning.”

Mozilla’s secret: An effective landing page and a commitment to website optimization testing.

Follow the Call to Action

In February of last year, we explained how Call to Action buttons make a difference on each of the landing pages for the major web browsers (including Firefox 2). Back then, FutureNow Conversion Analyst Joshua Hay noticed that…

“The non-standard shape stands out from the background of the page and has been given a persuasive color that draws the eyes to it [and] reinforces their brand. Within the Call to Action, Firefox lists the benefit and tells the visitor exactly what he is getting. Directly below the Call to Action, Firefox provides links that answer visitors’ questions if they aren’t quite ready to take action…”

Clearly, the download button for Firefox 2 was effective. It had been downloaded hundreds of millions of times; an impressive feat for software that, as Seth points out, “…wasn’t the default when you first turned on your computer.”

But Mozilla didn’t stop there. With version 3, they kept the same basic design, but they changed a few subtleties with the design, to bring us this:

Now is when I imagine some of you rolling your eyes, thinking, “How can something so make a difference? They barely changed it!” Believe me, I understand your doubt, but making small improvements is why Amazon has one of the best conversion rates online.

Do you see everything Mozilla changed? I count five “small” tweaks that helped them convert seven million and counting. (I’ll explain why it worked to the first person who can correctly list all three five changes in the comments.)

Maybe your landing pages aren’t giving away free software. Maybe you don’t need to break world records to meet your goals. Maybe you don’t expect to go from zero to 5% market share in 24 hours. But don’t think it’s impossible to, say, double your landing page conversion rate.

It’s possible.

. .

Want to test your way to a better conversion rate? Do it strategically. FutureNow can help.

FutureNow is pleased to announce that our co-founder and Chief Persuasion Officer, Bryan Eisenberg, will deliver a keynote address at the Search Engine Strategies conference in Toronto at precisely 0-900 hours (that’s 9am) on Wednesday, June 18, 2008. That much is certain.

What we can’t share at this time — because, frankly, he won’t tell us — is what it is Bryan will discuss. It’s “something big,” he insists. It’s “something the online marketing industry needs to wake up to.”

Me - “Something from [your forthcoming book] Always Be Testing?”

Bryan – “Nope. It’s top secret. Sorry, Robert.”

After two and a half years of working with him, I’ve seen Bryan pull this “top secret” routine a couple of times, and it’s always because something big’s brewing underneath that spiky hair and knowing smirk of his. Unfortunately, I won’t be making it to Toronto for Search Engine Strategies, but I think I speak for all of us when I say that we expect a full report from Bryan and anyone else who plans on attending.

. .

For all declassified info on this event, please visit the SES Toronto website for details.

What: From the SES Boston website:

Landing page optimization and conversion rate improvements are no longer simply buzzwords. The rising cost of driving online traffic means marketers are paying more for less return on their ad dollars.

To keep up, online marketers must roll up their sleeves and dive into conversion optimization. Optimizing your landing pages and your website is a proven means of increasing your conversion rates and realizing improved ROI.

The Call to Action Workshop includes the information you need to know to achieve dramatic results from your online efforts. Are you planning for top performance? Are you accurately evaluating that performance? Are you setting the best benchmarks for measuring success? How well are you communicating your value proposition? Are you structured for change? Can you achieve the momentum you need to get the results you want? If you have the desire and commitment to create phenomenal online results, then this training will be your own Call to Action. This workshop will demonstrate how these skills are essential for building a user-friendly, search-friendly, and persuasive site that converts visitors into buyers.

When: Tuesday, June 24, 2008 | 8am – 5pm

Where: Seaport Hotel | Boston, MA

Why: People say a lot of crazy things. “Our conversion rate will never be higher than 3%” they say. “There’s no reason to optimize our current site when we plan on a redesign next year,” they insist. “The Red Sox will NEVER win another World Series,” they proclaim. If your website seems to be going through its Curse-of-the-Bambino era, maybe it’s time you spent a day with a conversion expert (and bona fide Sox fan!) who’s seen clients move virtual mountains online.

How much: Tickets for are $1,345 for this full-day event, but we’re biased and think it’s a bargain at any price, so you should click here for registration info.

What: From the SES Toronto website:

“If you have never attended a Search Engine Strategies event before, plan on being at SES Toronto 2008. Even SES Toronto alumni need to attend because this industry has reinvented itself and SES Toronto 2008 will be fine-tuned to the latest developments. Don’t be left behind as your fellow marketers and SES Alumni gather to learn how to maximize search engine marketing and optimization opportunities, stay informed.”

• Organized by two of the world’s leading search authorities, SES Toronto Conference Chairman, Andrew Goodman and SES Global Content Director, Kevin Ryan.
• Delivers real-time actionable information you need to grow your business through search engine marketing;
• Teaches the ins-and-outs of search engine marketing from top search experts and the search engines themselves;
• Provides a unique setting to network with fellow marketers and search engine industry professionals and discuss the trends in search engine marketing;
• Grants access to the world’s most comprehensive gathering of search engine marketing & optimization-related solutions providers and potential partners & affiliates

When: June 17-18, 2008

Where: Metro Toronto Convention Centre | Toronto, Ontario

Why: Because SES is always worth the trip, but especially this one since Bryan’s keynote address is rumored to be so powerful, so top secret, that he won’t even discuss it with his humble co-workers! He must have something serious up his sleeve to share with the online marketing community.

How much: Tickets for are $695 CDN for a single day or $1,295 CDN for both days, but you should still click here for registration info.

Seriously, the oceans are in horrible shape, and it’s your fault. You did it, Supply, Demand, Pollution and Overfishing. And if we don’t take ownership now, our brands, our children, and our collective appetite for seafood may never forgive us.

I’m not trying to bum you out, but the next time you feel the need to impress clients or co-workers with your sushi-ordering skills, you should at least know whether you’re eating sustainable fish. (Either way, you’ll have to kiss your Chilean Sea Bass goodbye.)

Perhaps you’re wondering, “What’s all this hippy, save-the-Earth stuff got to do with online and multi-channel marketing optimization?” Great question, and I’m glad you asked.

By now, you’re familiar with the environmental catch-all term “green marketing,” but what you may not realize is that “blue marketing” is a relatively untapped way to differentiate your brand while raising awareness for an urgent problem that affects everyone. Besides, it’s not easy being green, because, when everyone’s doing something “green,” it loses meaning fast. (Seth Godin has a great post on the coming backlash over green marketing.)

A quick anecdote to make my point: The other week, I saw two containers of soy milk — original flavor, same brand, same size — sitting next to each other in the fridge at my corner store. One of the containers had a green cap, the other didn’t. I picked up the container with the “green caps for green energy” promotion, turned it around, and saw that they were promising to donate 30 kilowatts of “green power” (solar power?) if I entered the number from under the cap into the database on their website. Pretty smart, right? Well, yeah, but when the first words I read are, “Can one little green cap change the world? Just maybe.” I have my doubts. Even if their campaign is a great idea, it’s lost amid the over-branding of “green.”

It’s sad, but as much as we care about the planet, Broca is tuning out.

Making Waves

World Ocean Day happened on June 8 and, if you’re like me, you didn’t think to commemorate it. Still, I have been paying attention. Did you know that if we don’t curb overfishing, pollution and global warming trends, there will be no more (edible) fish in the sea by 2048?

It’s true. Here’s how I found out:

The URL at the end caught my attention, so I went to Oceana.org/matingseason.

Oceana is the world’s leading ocean conservation group, and their website is full of blue ideas. You can become a WaveMaker, tell your grocer to buy sustainable fish, find out why you should say no to shark fin soup, and you can even download a pocket seafood guide so you always know if you’re ordering something sustainable and low-mercury.

Not concerned with saving the fish? How about saving the humans? As the climate of the ocean changes, so goes the rest of the world. Anyone who’s lived through the East Coast heat wave these past several days will find it easy to believe that 11 of the warmest years on record have happened in the past 13 years and ocean temperatures are rising.

How to Avoid Drift Net Marketing Tactics

Whether your eco-friendly marketing initiatives are focused on land or sea, here are a few ways to build trust, encourage word of mouth, and keep it financially sustainable (read: the other “green”):

1.) Be specific — What’s the exact dollar amount you’re trying to raise? What’s the exact percentage you’re donating, and to whom? Why are you donating to that cause and that specific non-profit?

2.) Campaigns are best — It’s so much easier to track and manage special promotions at the campaign level than it is to track it across the entire organization. By focusing on campaigns, you can see very closely how and why your customers and clients are responding to your environmental marketing efforts at each touch point across channels.

3.) Don’t guilt trip — Nothing is a bigger turn-off. People donate because they want to, not because you’ve nagged them to. Be careful not to come off as holier-than-thou about whatever cause you’re promoting. (I was at an event to raise money for drinking water in sub-Saharan Africa the other night, and the CEO of the company that was hosting the event was yelling into the microphone, acting as though attendees — who’d already donated $100 just to be there — were being cheap if they didn’t raise their hands to sponsor a $5,000 well, and literally shushing the crowd like they were in a grade school library. Whatever the online equivalent of that is, don’t do it.)

If Sharks Were Marketers…

Ideally, giving to a great cause should be the icing on the cake that encourages fence-sitters to convert to happy customers. Whatever you do, don’t go the drift net route and merely advertise your brand’s inner green- or blue-ness as though it’s self-evident. Each year, tens of millions of sharks are killed by drift nets while marketers like us roam free.

Hmm… If sharks had better marketing support, maybe we wouldn’t have an irrational fear of them.

What: Shop.org’s 2008 Online Merchandising Workshop promises to…

“…pick up where our Marketing Workshop left off and deliver practical and tactical steps to create and execute a customer-centric merchandising strategy. We will bring together seasoned and successful eCommerce and multi-channel veterans and research analysts to examine in depth such topics as best practices in multivariate testing, innovations in product presentation, listening to your customers to determine the right product offering , industry trends in online merchandising, and the partnership that must be formed between merchandising and marketing teams for a retailer to be truly customer focused.”

When: July 14 – 16, 2008

Where: Hyatt Regency Huntington Beach Resort & Spa | Huntington Beach, CA

Why: Because the fabulous roster of speakers are sure to enlighten you with profitable insights on ecommerce website optimization, web design, tracking, and anything else that will help you get the best possible return on your e-tail investment. Besides, you’ll be at a stunning beach resort in sunny California and you are NOT going to miss out on that, are you?

How much: Tickets for this three-day event range between $625 – $1,125, depending on your level of involvement and how early you register.

We all take the Google homepage for granted.

It’s so remarkably simple that (unless you’re, say, a blogger for a website optimization firm) it’s unremarkable; just a text box, two call to action buttons, and a few links that most humans don’t even look at, let alone use. That’s all.

But why? Why is it that the Google homepage has barely changed in the past decade? Are they obsessed with minimalism, or is there more to the story?

From its humble origins as a research project by a couple of Stanford graduate students, Sergei Brin and Larry Page always knew that testing matters. They realized that it’s not just important to build a good online experience, but that they would need to know why it worked in order to make it better.

Take a look at Google’s 1998 homepage and see if you can guess its most innovative feature:

Got your answer? Feeling lucky (hint: that’s not it)? Great. Now hold that thought.

Speaking at the Google I/O conference last week, Marissa Mayer, vice president of search products and user experience at Google, explained how the company developed a culture of testing, insisting that, “On the Web in general, [creating sites] is much more a design than an art. You can find small differences and mathematically learn which is right.”

The CNet article (also linked to above) details some of Google’s many innovations from their years of A/B split testing. Their results illustrate one of our mantras here at FutureNow: “Believe what they do, not what they say they will do.” For instance, users claimed they wanted to see more search results per page, but testing proved otherwise. You can read the article for details on that one, but I digress. The homepage example remains the most telling. Here’s how Mayer tells it:

[Our beta testers] would sit in front of the Google screen for 15 seconds, 30 seconds, 45 seconds, a minute…Google was perplexed.

So Mayer would eventually intervene and ask what was holding up the searchers. “I’m waiting for the rest of it,” they’d say. Clearly they expected more of the flashy ads and busy text of other search pages of the 1990s.

“The very first home page was that misunderstood. People didn’t resonate with it,” Mayer said. One woman even thought the Web site was a fake construction that was part of a psychology experiment. As a result, the company put a copyright notice at the bottom of the page. “It’s not there for legal reasons,” Mayer said. “It’s there as punctuation. That’s it. (It tells the searcher) ‘Nothing else is coming; please start searching now.’”

So here it is, the big innovation they came up with back in 1998:

Amazing. Just showing a copyright assurance is what gives us the confidence to proceed.

Mayer said a lot of insightful things in her presentation, but this quote struck me:

“The urgent can drown out the important.”

So true. With website optimization, what seems to be of urgent and of vital importance from your company’s perspective may not at all be what’s urgent and vital to your visitors. In fact, your visitors may not even know what they’d fix about your website if they could.

Who among us would have told Google back in 1998 that they should try putting a copyright symbol on the homepage? [*Hears crickets chirping in background.*] Exactly. And that’s why developing hypotheses and testing from the visitor’s perspective is a must.

. .

Editor’s Note: FutureNow is an “authorized consultant” for Google Website Optimizer. (We’re writing the book on it.) To learn about which of our optimization services will best help you boost conversion rates and other key performance metrics, please contact us for a free consultation.

As a former music journalist and current karaoke champion [in my own mind], I know a bad remix when I hear one. That’s why I’m particularly impressed with this outlandishly cheesy/brilliant rework of Extreme’s soft “rock” hair ballad chart-topper from 1991, “More Than Words” — one of the most yack-inducing songs known to man — used by our pals at Bazaarvoice to kick off last week’s Social Media Summit in Austin, TX. Watch this video and see how a few men in wigs can pick an even worse song and still do a better job of inspiring brand affinity and laughter than Mr. Softy himself:

Lyrics:

Sayin’ you should buy this, are not the words they will believe from you
It’s just they have YouTube, and every search brings up blog entries too
How easy it could be to find out how they feel

More than words is all you had to use to make it real
Then you wouldn’t have to cry over costs per click
‘Cause you’re Google’s top guy

What you do with Ratings and Reviews?
More than words to keep it real
Let them say just how they feel
What would you say
If they took those words away
Then they wouldn’t buy things new
Without reading a review…

Now your market wants to
Talk for you and help others understand
All that you have to do is open up and just reach out your brand
Then you’ll see word of mouth for you and me to read
More than words is all you ever needed to make more sales
Then you could easily say “Mr. Bossman, it’s time I get a raise”

How sweet it’d be
A freed marketing annuity
More than words to show they feel
That they like a brand that’s real
Why would you pay
For research to guess and play
More than words to show what’s true
Then hear your market say “I love you”

. .

Hat tip to Linda for transcribing these righteously dorky lyrics.

You were on a roll. Just two years ago, You were Time magazine’s person of the year. When Web 2.0 changed everything, You were there. You did it. You turned the Web into the “interactive” medium we always knew it could be.

You changed the rules. You took control.

So what happened? Lately, it seems that marketing and advertising executives are either blind optimists or furrow-browed skeptics about social media marketing. Are we — the marketers, the bloggers, the people who read and post comments on blogs and message boards, the 2.0 digerati — overestimating our audience’s desire to interact?

In a Copyblogger guest post, Hoffman/Lewis advertising CEO Bob Hoffman insists we’re marketing to ourselves. (Et tu, Bob?)

Marketing to “Me”

Bob’s article is a must-read, especially for marketers who are self-proclaimed “Facebook addicts”, “Twitterholics”, or the like, because in it he claims that You, the aforementioned social web-savvy, are the only ones who actually know how — or care — to interact with content online. (He defines interactivity as “the ability to interact with the content of the medium, not just the medium.”) According to Bob, for most people, the internet is a passively interactive experience, like TV but with a mouse for a remote. The net effect is that marketers are living in their own web-savvy bubble and are now guiltier than ever of marketing to themselves.

While I agree with most of Bob’s piece, I wholeheartedly disagree with his conclusion:

Don’t kid yourself. As an online marketer, you are facing the same challenge that every marketer since the beginning of commerce has faced: How do you attract the attention of people who are actively trying to avoid you? The methods currently in our arsenal just aren’t good enough.

It would be lovely if the “social network/conversationalist” crowd were right and interactivity between marketer and marketee would evolve as a caring, loving relationship.

I’m officially skeptical.

Fair enough, but who ever said that social media marketing has to be a forced interaction? The problem isn’t that the methods in our arsenal aren’t good enough, the problem is that “social media marketing” is a misnomer.

Social media marketing should be a largely introverted activity, one where the marketer spend more time listening, researching, and refining their message than they do actually pushing one. It should be about creating environments, and playing in existing ones, where you learn juicy details about what’s actually important to your customer segments. Yet for most, it seems “social media marketing” has come to mean the tactics by which one goes about hunting down customers and annoying them under the guise of “friend”-ship.

Of course push marketing tactics don’t work well on the social web. They never did so well in Web 1.0, either. The problem isn’t social media. The problem is marketers putting tactics before strategy and expecting different results just because the technology and format are new. That’s what’s laughable.

In a recent interview with Josh Bernoff, co-author of the new book Groundswell: Winning In a World Transformed by Social Technologies, we discussed the need to put people before objectives, strategy and technology (just remember the acronym P.O.S.T and you’ve got it). Keep that in mind when considering these other stats about the online population* from the book:

• 25% read blogs, visit social networking sites, and/or read customer reviews
• 20% regularly update/maintain a profile on a social networking site
• 18% contribute to online forums or discussion groups
• 14% comment on someone else’s blog
• 11% post ratings/reviews of products or service, publish, maintain or update a blog, and/or listen to podcasts
• 8% use RSS
• 5% use Twitter

*Figures represent percentage of online U.S. adults participating at least monthly.

Bob is right to a degree. Most people online aren’t involved in social media. But, as Seth Godin points out, the “who” matters more than the “how many,” and if someone is willing to give you free insights about your products, services, or brand, shouldn’t you listen?

A Sea of Irrelevance

Neil Postman, a notoriously cranky (and brilliant) theorist of the mass media era, came to mind after Bob outed himself as being “cranky” and “skeptical” about social media marketing. In Amusing Ourselves to Death, Postman defers to two other media skeptics, both famously crankier than even Bob Hoffman or Neil himself:

What [George] Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What [Aldous] Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy.

Orgy Porgy, Centrifugal Bumblepuppy, Stumbling your Friend Feed, Twittering your Facebook in public. Anyone care to explain the difference? Point is, Orwell’s vision came true in 1933 (16 years before 1984 was published) and Huxley’s vision came true somewhere between 2005 and last Tuesday.

We are living in a sea of irrelevance, but don’t let it bother (former person-of-the-year) You! The constant hissing of digital white noise only makes relevance that much more valuable a commodity. After a day of swimming through mental 2.0 excrement, even a fleeting sip of relevance tastes like champagne.

And that’s our job as marketers; to keep the campaign champagne coming.

Ah, but if only it were that easy. How do you know when to recommend a Sicilian Syrah blend, an earthy Chilean Cabernet, a crisp-and-buttery New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc, or maybe a reserve bottle of South African Pinotage? What if an ice-cold Budweiser will do? You’d look pretty stupid offering some fancy-pants varietal to someone who just wants a Bud.

And that’s exactly how social media helps us. It gives us new data to plug into existing methods. But as Postman warns, “there is a limit to the promise of new technology . . . it cannot be a substitute for human values.” Very true, especially considering that I lifted that quote from Wikipedia.

So I wonder, if Neil Postman were an “interactive” marketer, and still alive today, how would he ensure his message was getting to people distracted by the technology that’s come to define them, when it should be the other way around? My guess is that he’d use personas.

But don’t take my word for it. I’m in the Persuasion Architecture business and my target customers are marketers and business owners who read blogs and occasionally comment. Your social media strategy might look very different from mine.

UPDATE: Brian Clark, the editor and founder of Copyblogger, has made a brilliant contribution to this discussion: “The Five Essential Elements of Effective Social Media Marketing“ 

. .

About the Author: Robert Gorell is the Editor of GrokDotCom. If you enjoyed this post, he invites you to subscribe or, like, totally join FutureNow on Facebook.

With those words echoing in our heads, Bryan and I were chatting about this brilliant tutorial post by Garr Reynolds on his Presentation Zen blog, where he shares a presentation for Dr. John Medina’s new book, Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home and School.

You can see the presentation here or view it full screen at SlideShare:

| View | Upload your own

I can’t wait to read Dr. Medina’s book, but flipping through Garr’s presentation again got me thinking about Seth’s post, where he insists that conference organizers owe their audiences “surprise, juxtaposition, drama, engagement, souvenirs and just possibly, excitement.” We couldn’t agree more.

But wait… what about our upcoming NYC seminars, just two weeks from now? Are we really promising “surprise, juxtaposition, drama, engagement, souvenirs and just possibly, excitement”? Well, yeah, I guess we are. That’s something to take seriously.

While I can’t promise you that Bryan’s slides are all as pretty to look at as Garr’s, I can promise that our event attendees won’t be keel over from “death by PowerPoint”. That’s the good thing about seminars like these; they’re face-to-face and interactive, and everyone gets to walk away having learned something instantly relevant to their own online strategy. And they get to ask questions. Lots of questions. Besides, how could you be bored in New York when you get to make fun of both of our losing baseball teams choose from 6 gazillion menu items at our 14,000+ restaurants?

News.GrokDotCom.com shows your favorite marketing blogs in one spot. And as an added bonus, you can vote on posts that “add value” — or “skip it” if you’re not impressed — so we know which ones to feature as Best of the Day, Best of the Week, and Best of the Month.

At News.GrokDotCom, you can…

• vote for the most valuable posts of the day, week, and month.
• see related posts for all topic (or “meme”).
• comment on any post or topic.

For those who may be wondering if we’re trying to out-digg Digg, out-sphinn Sphinn, or out-meme Techmeme, the answer is no, absolutely not. We follow each of those portals well enough to know they don’t need any competition. We hope to provide something else.

Together with OneSpot, FutureNow has developed News.GrokDotCom to monitor thousands of blogs, bringing you the most linked-to and commented-on marketing posts of the day. It’s part algorithm, part RSS feed discovery engine, and part human intervention.

Here’s how it works: We put your favorite marketing blogs (and ours) into a trusted set of feeds. The trusted set then starts attracting posts from blogs that the OneSpot algorithm identifies as “related” in some way. The result is pretty amazing; a consistently high quality stream of insights on online and multi-channel marketing news, social media trends, search engine marketing hoopla, merger gossip, venture postulating, tech posturing, web analytics geekery, and pretty much anything else that might help you make more money and define — if not dominate — your niche.

Over the past several weeks of testing, we’ve noticed posts on the Around the Net feed go popular before they hit big on other social blog portals. What’s more impressive is that the Around the Net portal shows stories from small blogs as well. Blogs we’ve never even heard of seem to magically show up once they publish a story our readers might find valuable.

If a story’s a dud, or if it seems to be over-hyped elsewhere, we delete it. The rest is up to you.

So vote on a few stories, play around with it, and let us know what you think. News.GrokDotCom is still in beta, so we’re eager to hear your reactions and any comments you may have on how we might make it better.

- Editor, GrokDotCom

P.S. You might want to subscribe to Around the Net vis RSS.

Were they doing this purely by word-of-mouth, as a “thank you” to loyal customers who would then tell their friends about it?

I decided to go to DunkinDonuts.com to see if they were at least promoting it on the homepage.

Yes! I knew I could count on them to follow through on the homepage. This may seem obvious to many of you, but not following through on the homepage is the curse of many cross-channel campaigns (GoDaddy is a good example).

Alright, so they’ve got the homepage covered. Now let’s see how they’re doing on search.

What? No iced coffee!? “Stay tuned for our new Free Iced Coffee date”? Ouch. Let this be a reminder to us all that, the next time someone tells you to “Google yourself,” it might not be a bad idea. They could have easily updated this page with new details.

Oh, well… This campaign is still a winner.

Ten years ago, if you ordered an iced coffee at a Denny’s restaurant in suburban Detroit or a Waffle House in Nashville — and I have — the waitress would look at you like you were crazy. “Um, we’ve got iced tea,” they would insist, forcing me to explain the complex artistry that goes into creating creating iced coffee (i.e., take coffee, pour into glass filled with ice).

Sure, iced coffee has been a staple of the New York City diet for as long as anyone living can remember. And, yes, Starbucks did get even the most unlikely customers hooked on “grande” iced lattes. But Dunkins never tried to convert working class folks into latte-sippers. Coffee and donuts, that’s their game; so iced coffee was never much of a stretch.

What else might they have done to sweeten up the campaign? If the Dunkin Donuts free iced coffee promo is it a hit in your area, leave a comment to let us know if you plan on stopping by to get a cup.

. .

Time to make the donuts? FutureNow can help you caffeinate your campaign by planning it from the customer’s perspective.

Social technologies have changed how we gather and share information. They’ve changed who we meet, where we meet, and, sometimes, how we meet. They’ve changed how we buy, what we buy, and where we buy. They’ve changed what, how, and how much we know about the people around us. And while social technologies may not have changed what it essentially means to be human, they’ve certainly amplified, at once, our voices, our influence, and our need to be heard.

Right now, a brand — possibly yours — is experiencing a public relations mini-disaster thanks to a comment left on a message board; a university student is recommending a movie to 372 people at once via Facebook; Barack Obama’s social media-driven campaign is beating the odds (and the Clintons).

Welcome to the groundswell.

Josh Bernoff, Vice President & Principal Analyst at Forrester Research joined us recently to discuss the soon-to-be-bestseller he’s co-authored with Forrester’s Charlene Li, Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies. The book is a brief history of social media — fully seasoned with research and anecdotes from the most notable triumphs and failures of the so-called “Web 2.0″ era — that explains how to thrive now that customers and clients own your brand.

Click here for the Groundswell podcast

Of course you’ll buy the book, but here’s a 15-minute interview you can download (by right-clicking) while you wait for your copy to be delivered.

POST (not haste)

As Josh explains the paradigm of Groundswell thinking, don’t forget POST:

• People – What are your customers ready for? What do they want? What’s motivating them?

• Objectives – What are your goals?

• Strategy – How do you want relationships with your customers to change?

• Technology – Swap “tactics” for “technology” and the same is true. The people, objectives, and strategy must come before your choice of technology/tactics.

Want to find your customers’ social technographics profile?

. .

Read more about the phenomenology of social tech at the Groundswell blog, or any of these other great blogs.

Your questions were fantastic and have given us — and the conference presenters — a lot of great ideas for discussion topics. You also made it very difficult to choose a winner!

So, without further ado, our free ticket winners are…

Chana Hercenberg:
As a consultant, someone who has spent time researching the industry [...], I would say one of the most important issues to address for a business going mobile is how do you best design a robust and engaging money making mobile page in a small amount of space? What are the best technologies available, and what are the best tips for optimizing the space?

Sudhir Bhojwani:
Are we going to see more of companies such as Blyk ad model MVNO? How big is this market really? I feel it only affects young subscribers.

Tim Peter:
Simple question: Why do we think anyone will *ever* transact using a handset when they’re holding a phone in their hands? Wouldn’t it just be easier to call? Shouldn’t the emphasis be on tracking the outcome of the call itself and using *that* as the call-to-action?

Don’t forget: We’re assembling a crew of mobile marketing experts to answer not just these, but ALL of your other questions in following posts. Stay tuned!

. .

P.S. IMC is still offering a 20% discount for GrokDotCom readers.

Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t.

Here’s the promise Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder and CEO, made to media buyers last November:

With Facebook you will be able to select exactly the audience you want to reach, and we will only show your ads to them. We know exactly what gender someone is, what activities they are interested in, their location, country, city or town, interests, gender [etcetera, etcetera] . . .

Several months later, this is the result:

Apparently, David at Broccoli & Cheese wasn’t a good target for this ad:

As you read this, thousands of 18-34 year old men are watching Tampax commercials. Not because they want to, but because television is an imprecise medium that makes it hard to get the right ads to the right people. As a result, we’ve been conditioned over decades to expect irrelevance at the commercial break.

But wasn’t the Internet, and in particular, social media, supposed to turn that tide? Take Facebook—they know more about my day-to-day life than my parents do, and surely enough to serve me ads that I’d find remotely useful. But they’re dropping the ball. Big time.

[...] Will someone out there besides Google please get their [expletive] together?

If MarineCFO’s Chief Financial Officer is reading this, chance are s/he’s not thrilled with Facebook.

To be clear, I don’t think MarineCFO was silly to place this ad. It’s just that, like me and perhaps even you, we’re easily seduced by the promise of demographics. We like to think it’s sufficient.

Demographics are like catnip for marketers.

They make being wrong feel so right. They always seem to have the right answer. They help us justify lazy decisions. They give us such wonderful opportunities to prejudge our audience — specifically, how they define themselves and what they want to hear, see or read — based on a few scant details. Yet by themselves, demographics can never be accountable for anything because they’re based on correlation, not causality.

Marketers, and the advertising platforms that prey on them, need to look beyond the logistics of ad placement and stop thinking of “targeting” as a one-way, two-dimensional process. Demographics are important, but without the context of psychographics [define], they’re quite often useless. To paraphrase Mark Twain, to a media buyer armed with vague demographic data, everyone looks like a target.

I wonder where and how these ads would have been placed had they planned the campaign with personas.

As first reported by Direct Magazine, the survey found that…

• 19% dislike learning an item was back-ordered or out of stock after said item was placed in a shopping cart
• 14% are frustrated by Web sites that malfunction as payment is being processed
• 8% are confounded by unclear return policies
• 6% don’t like unclear shipping information
• 6% dislike not getting an acknowledgment after an order has been placed

Adding another dimension to these numbers, Jack Loechner at MediaPost explains that:

. . . iCongo, Inc., released the results of a consumer survey conducted by Harris Interactive that reveals [that] 33 percent of online U.S. adults indicated they are more likely to shop online rather than in-person at a store due to the high price of gasoline.

If there were ever a time to optimize your e-commerce website, it’s now.

What else causes friction? Read FutureNow’s 2007 Retail Customer Experience Survey for answers.

. .

Join FutureNow’s Bryan Eisenberg on June 3rd in New York City for the Call to Action seminar. Based on his bestselling book of the same title, Bryan will show you how to improve conversion and brand affinity by reducing friction for the customer.

Who would throw away a perfectly good UFO house?

That’s exactly what happened in Taiwan more than 20 years ago, as you can see from these Flickr photos.

Wow. An entire resort filled with UFO-style houses.

Abandoned.

Seeing this made me think of the websites that are abandoned each day, each quarter, by businesses that decide they need to redesign instead of enduring the less glamorous process of website optimization.

According to one blog, there are a several rumors as to why the “UFO house” resort in Sanjhih was abandoned. One story suggests that someone was killed there and the resort is haunted. Another is that the Taiwanese government outlawed bathing beaches in the area. But the most believable explanation is that the design was impractical; the resort is in a remote, windy area near the sea, and if the houses are indeed made of fiberglass as it appears, it would get incredibly hot in the summertime.

Form without function is art, not business.

In August of last year, Internet Retailer’s Form and Function survey of “243 chain retailers, catalog companies, virtual merchants and consumer brand manufacturers,” and found that…

60.3% . . . have redesigned their e-commerce sites in the past year, including 20.1% in the past three months and 14.3% within six months. Of the retailers planning to overhaul the look of their web sites, 74.7% expect to do so within 12 months and 28.6% within 90 days.

[...] “The pace of web site design is brisk because more retailers know that having an attractive site that makes it easy to find merchandise and make a purchase is a competitive advantage,” says Joey Lechtner, director of e-marketing services for Fry Inc., an Ann Arbor, Mich., web site design and e-commerce development company. “Retailers ‘keep up with the Jones’ [sic] and if their competitor redesigns a site, they notice and take action.”

A costly redesign? Just to keep up with the neighbors? What if these earthlings — these so-called “Joneses” — take their design cues from outer space? Sure, there are times when a website redesign makes sense, but if you plan it with human visitors in mind in the first place, redesigning each year would seem crazy.

And let’s face it. Maybe you don’t need a redesign. Maybe you just need to recognize that you’ve built a cool-looking-yet-impractical UFO house that would be fine if you just painted it white and installed solar panels, reflective glass and an air conditioner.

That’s my website optimization metaphor and I’m sticking to it. For now.

The IMC Mobile Marketing conference, in addition to offering a 20% discount to all GrokDotCom readers (click here for details), is letting us give away three free tickets to their event.

How To Enter

All you need to do is leave a question — not a comment — below that addresses a common or interesting concern about mobile marketing.

Be specific. The more detail you give, the better our chances of giving you a clear answer.

The three most interesting questions (according to Bryan and me) win. It’s that simple!

Who Should Enter

Anyone reading this who wants to learn more about mobile marketing; especially those who read GrokDotCom often but don’t comment. We’re setting one of the free tickets aside for a first-time commenter, so don’t be shy!

Why You Should Bother

Because EVERYONE’S questions will be answered. That’s right. Even if you don’t win, we will have mobile marketing experts (from the conference and others) answer your questions. Besides, your odds of winning free tickets are pretty darn good.

How You’ll Know if You’ve Won

We will email you. We’ll also announce the winners next Monday in a new post.

Good luck, and may the best questions win!

UPDATE: Thanks for the great questions, everyone! The winners have been announced. So, if you have already left a question below, we will get your question answered in upcoming posts as soon as possible.

. .

Editor’s Note: Happening in the same hotel, the two days prior, June 2nd and 3rd respectively, FutureNow’s Persuasive Online Copywriting and Call to Action seminars give you even more profitable excuses to visit New York.

Ah, yes, the four buying modes; Spontaneous, Competitive, Methodical and Humanistic.

Since I was stuck in Competitive (fast + logical) buying mode, I ended up blogging about how Mint’s site addressed my trust concerns by using trigger words — “does not store your account numbers”; “bank-level data security”; “anonymous” — that appealed to me. Meanwhile, our former client, Patrick from JigsawHealth.com (see small picture above), was looking at the big picture.

Patrick even did a screencast to show how understanding the four buying modes is essential to creating a website that converts by speaking to many types of visitors at the same time.

If you’re interested, you can read the Inc. Magazine case study on how Patrick worked with FutureNow to double his landing page conversion rate from 10% to 20% making just a few copy and design adjustments in order to speak to these different buying modes.

There’s no doubt that Patrick’s a smart guy, but this is hardly the first time one of our clients has outwitted me with our own methodology. To be perfectly honest, it happens every day. Brian Bond, our VP of Marketing and Product, the guy who markets the marketers, is a former client.

I’d like to think the reason our clients consistently get strong results is because everyone who works here is a genius, but that’s not true. Could it be that only smart clients hire us? (As much as I’d like to say that and mean it, past experience suggests otherwise.) No, it’s much simpler than that. The reason FutureNow’s clients get results is because, once you optimize your website from the visitor’s perspective, you’ll never look at websites — any website — the same way.

Here’s a great example of using video to sell a book online:

Riverhead Books and Penguin Books hired Lindsey Testolin to make made the words of Daniel H. Pink and the illustrations of Rob Ten Pas come to life in the shape of a film trailer — complete with gratuitous needle-dragging-on-record sound effect to suggest a sudden change of expectations. There’s a strong call to action for the book’s website and it insists at the end credits that Johnny Bunko is the best graduation gift of 2008.

Poor Johnny may not know where his career’s headed, but he sure knows how to market a book.

ERRATUM: Turns out that the publisher had nothing to do with the creation of the trailer. Hmm… No surprise there, really. Publishers, take note. This sort of content is worth your money.

What: From the event website:

Google AdWords. Yahoo Search Marketing. Microsoft adCenter. Together, they take in nearly $20 billion a year from advertisers. The reason for their success is simple: measurable, direct responses from target customers… without intrusive methods. Fabrice Taylor recently wrote that Google AdWords is like a “smart bomb” that threatens to push many old media models into obsolescence.

Is it time to get your company up to speed?

This hands-on, intensive half-day seminar is designed to kick your paid search campaign performance into high gear. Led by authors and globally recognized speakers Andrew Goodman (Winning Results with Google AdWords) and Mona Elesseily (Mastering Panama).

A combination of the latest tips and techniques, insights into the principles driving profitable campaigns today, and hands-on custom workshop sessions using live campaigns. A small-group setting ensures personalized attention to your marketing objectives.

When: 9 a.m. – 1 p.m. EST | Thursday, May 15, 2008

Where:Westin Harbour Castle Hotel, Toronto, Ontario

Why: Because you’re responsible for online marketing campaigns and you’re looking to learn direct response methodologies as they’re manifested through keyword searches.

How much? Only $329 CDN, with a lot of bonus materials included. See the Page Zero event site for details.