SEM Synergy Returns with Guest Bryan Eisenberg

Red carpet rolls out.

Trumpets blare.

Announcer cries:

“Please welcome the return of the weekly radio show and podcast…
Your source for interviews with the leading minds of Internet marketing…
Brought to you by a team dedicated to advancing Internet marketing discourse and strategy…
SEM Synergy!”

The crowd goes wild!

Weird dream, huh? But that’s the sort of thing that keeps me up at night. And this week has been a doozy because, with some luck, support and elbow grease, we present to you the return of SEM Synergy!

If nothing else, I want you to remember:

THURSDAYS at NOON Pacific / 3 PM Eastern on WEBMASTERRADIO.FM

Listen to the debut episode of a “new season” of SEM Synergy airing tomorrow on WebmasterRadio. As usual, you’ll always be able to listen to the show at SEMSynergy.com and download the marketing podcast on iTunes. And to get the full interactive SEM Synergy community experience, drop into the WebmasterRadio chat room during the broadcast.

What’s In Store Tomorrow

Bruce, Aaron, Susan (who’s birthday it is today!) and I take a look at a few news stories, including ICANN’s domain name extension expansion, social network privacy concerns and SES San Francisco plans. However, the real treasure lies in Bryan Eisenberg’s insights into user behavior.

As Bryan explains, the marketing industry has needed to shift its point of focus. The key to reaching, getting the attention of, and converting viewers into consumers today lies in giving people what they want.

“The concept used to be in marketer, years ago, that you always have to keep a close eye on your competitors to see what they were doing so you can keep pace with them. Correct? What I tell marketers today is that you no longer have to worry about your competitors. Your challenge is keeping up with your customers.

If you just think, literally, how much changes for customers ─ forget about year to year, think about week to week. Two weeks ago we weren’t talking about Google Plus. Where Google Plus is going, it’s constantly changing. What happens is, as marketers, we can’t just do the traditional stuff. It’s changing ─ what’s working is changing all the time. Yes, there are some fundamentals, and the conversion trinity is part of those fundamentals, and we’ll talk about that. But if you’re not experimenting and testing on a regular basis, you’re just losing pace with your customers.”

Bryan believes that keeping pace with customers means staying up on advancements in technology. He explains how Google+ illustrates a change in the way Internet users interact online.

“People don’t understand the full context of what’s happened. First of all, we’ve gone from Facebook, which was a necessary evil. I call them the AOL of the 2000 decade. If you think about that parallel, I don’t know how long you’ve been online, but I’ve been connecting to online services since 1983 when I first started my first bulletin board system on my Atari 800. Even back then I was optimizing the interface to get people to go places, by the way. But people weren’t used to getting onto the Internet. There were things like CompuServe. There were these closed systems and they were kind of nerdy and geeky and very few people interacted with them.

Along came AOL and they offered this CD, they plastered it everywhere, and allowed people to sort of connect to the Internet in this closed, comfortable environment that actually attracted tons of people to the Internet. As people got more comfortable, they started going into more open systems where they enjoyed more of the freedom of the Internet and they didn’t need that restriction that AOL provided.

Well, Facebook was kind of that same thing for social networking. It provided an easy atmosphere, pretty simple to engage in. Your family and friends were on there, you shared pictures. It was all wonderful. And now Google’s coming in and saying, you know what, now that you’ve gotten used to that, let me give you an open system where the data doesn’t all belong to Facebook. We can integrate this with more things, have much richer experiences and leverage it across your whole life experience.”

That’s just a peek at what’s waiting for you tomorrow on the first new episode of SEM Synergy. So I guess it goes without saying, but, see you there?

Virginia Nussey is the director of content marketing at MobileMonkey. Prior to joining this startup in 2018, Virginia was the operations and content manager at Bruce Clay Inc., having joined the company in 2008 as a writer and blogger.

See Virginia's author page for links to connect on social media.