I remember the first time I heard about the strange “ad man” living in the hills outside of Austin where I live. I was told he was some kind of hermit genius, rumored to command a fee of $25,000 a day to tell companies how to communicate persuasively. This was perhaps 2004 or 2005.
Then someone shared with me a copy of The Monday Morning Memo, a weekly email that talked about the reasons our ads work. I subscribed and was soon drawn into a collision of two worlds; of the science of the mind and the art of literature and painting.
It was the same genius hermit, whom I would come to know as Roy H. Williams III.
Williams had begun to build an unusual business school in on ranch land outside of Austin. It’s a school that would fundamentally change my life and influence the way I communicate with the world.
The school seeks to teach its students how to do what great communicators and artists do naturally. The subjects are not typical business school fare.
The Magical Worlds Workshop
Da Vinci and the 40 Answers
Advanced Thought Particles
Third Gravitating Bodies
The Languages of the Mind
The name of the school was even more stopping: The Wizard Academy. Don’t worry. The school predated the Harry Potter series of books and movies.
It was here that I first encountered Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg, who’s writing and teaching would form the foundation of Conversion Sciences.
And it was here that I first heard Williams flagship presentation: The Pendulum. Williams’ used music, literature and historical events to paint Western society as the swinging of a pendulum, from individually-centered “Me” society to the communal “We” society and back.
Each swing of the pendulum was on an 80-year circuit, from the self-centered society of the Rockefellers and Vanderbilts at the turn of the century, to the GI society of World War II, banding together to save the world, and back to the plastic, individualistic society that spawned the likes of Disco.
It was a fascinating way to look at society because it seemed to give us the ability to predict the future. In fact, in 2004, Williams said “Let’s hope the American economy doesn’t repeat in 2009 what it did in 1929.”
It did.
I’m not sure even he thought it would look so much like 1929 as we found ourselves in a “Great Recession” in 2009.
PENDULUM: 3000 Years of Swings
While Williams’ Pendulum presentation focused on the current cycle from 1923 to 2003, his new book with Michael Drew looks back 3000 years for evidence of this 80 year juggernaut.
The evidence is compelling.
According to Williams and Drew, the Pendulum works like this:
We oscillate between a civic-minded “We” society and an individualist “Me” society. In a “We” it is important to be part of something bigger than yourself. Society will come together to achieve some great task or fix some great ill.
Then we get a little nuts, insisting on conformity and ostracizing those who don’t adhere to group norms. We see witch hunts and McCarthyism during these extremes.
Then the “Me” society begins to emerge.
The “Me” society rewards individual accomplishment. Freedom and self-expression hold sway until things get out of hand (again) and our culture begins to honor fake, plastic and posing behavior. This is when we’ve seen Robber Barons rule (1903) and we’ve hired an actor for President (1983).
And the pendulum swings back.
During each swing there are transitionary periods, heralded by “alpha voices” in technology, literature, art and music. They predict the coming shifts from “Me” to “We” and then back again.
In Pendulum, Williams and Drew use data on book sales, the Billboard music charts and trends in art to map the most recent swings. Each swing is sliced into ten-year periods, in each of which we behave in similar ways as a society.
They then use the writings of historical figures and accounts of past events to map this 80-year cycle back over 2000 years.
It’s the most interesting history lesson I’ve read in some time.
The last portion of the book is a transcript of a conversation about the coming years
Predicting the Future: What does this mean for our craft?
Currently, we are swinging from a “Me” society to a “We”. In 2003 the pendulum swung past bottom and is now headed upward to a society that will celebrate working together, but will inevitably require conformity and punish those that don’t play along.
An right on cue, we have found the tools to collaborate and to solve the world’s problems in the Internet and mobile devices. Fewer and fewer decisions are made individually. Our youngsters have made saving the planet a rallying cry. “Be Green” is the new “New Deal” of the last swing to a “We” climax.
For those of us that communicate, it means that we can no longer control the message. We can no longer manipulate the masses by appealing to their self-centered desires. The community is deciding more and more what is valuable.
Transparency and authenticity are necessary to work together. And soon conformity.
Conflict is already developing as we join our tribes and fall in line. We are taking sides. Republican or Democrat? Are you the 99%? Do you go to church? Do you go to my kind of church?
Just as Communism and Democracy began taking sides in 1922, so too did we start taking sides in 2002.
Williams predicts that we will be more and more willing to give up our privacy for the common good. In the end, it will be the revelations from this openness that allows us to begin excluding others.
Create Your Tribe
If you are to believe Williams and Drew, then you will begin to create what Seth Godin (whom I believe to be an Alpha Voice in marketing) calls a tribe. As marketers, we must give our customers something to join, and a cause around which to rally.
We can no longer define ourselves by what we sell. We must stand for something.
Beginning in 2013, things start to turn nasty. As we swing higher to the Zenith of our “We” cycle, we will be tempted to exclude those that don’t conform to the rules of our tribe. it will become easiest to stand against something to keep your tribe in line.
Summary
Pendulum is a fun, fascinating romp through our recent history with a long glance back far back in time. You cannot read it without becoming aware of the way things are changing. You’ll begin to read the news with new eyes.
If you’re like me, it’ll scare you and excite you all at the same time.
Get ready to see your future.
Pendulum: How to Market in a “We” Society [REVIEW]
Conversion OptimizationI remember the first time I heard about the strange “ad man” living in the hills outside of Austin where I live. I was told he was some kind of hermit genius, rumored to command a fee of $25,000 a day to tell companies how to communicate persuasively. This was perhaps 2004 or 2005.
Then someone shared with me a copy of The Monday Morning Memo, a weekly email that talked about the reasons our ads work. I subscribed and was soon drawn into a collision of two worlds; of the science of the mind and the art of literature and painting.
It was the same genius hermit, whom I would come to know as Roy H. Williams III.
Williams had begun to build an unusual business school in on ranch land outside of Austin. It’s a school that would fundamentally change my life and influence the way I communicate with the world.
The school seeks to teach its students how to do what great communicators and artists do naturally. The subjects are not typical business school fare.
The Magical Worlds Workshop
Da Vinci and the 40 Answers
Advanced Thought Particles
Third Gravitating Bodies
The Languages of the Mind
The name of the school was even more stopping: The Wizard Academy. Don’t worry. The school predated the Harry Potter series of books and movies.
It was here that I first encountered Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg, who’s writing and teaching would form the foundation of Conversion Sciences.
And it was here that I first heard Williams flagship presentation: The Pendulum. Williams’ used music, literature and historical events to paint Western society as the swinging of a pendulum, from individually-centered “Me” society to the communal “We” society and back.
Each swing of the pendulum was on an 80-year circuit, from the self-centered society of the Rockefellers and Vanderbilts at the turn of the century, to the GI society of World War II, banding together to save the world, and back to the plastic, individualistic society that spawned the likes of Disco.
It was a fascinating way to look at society because it seemed to give us the ability to predict the future. In fact, in 2004, Williams said “Let’s hope the American economy doesn’t repeat in 2009 what it did in 1929.”
It did.
I’m not sure even he thought it would look so much like 1929 as we found ourselves in a “Great Recession” in 2009.
PENDULUM: 3000 Years of Swings
While Williams’ Pendulum presentation focused on the current cycle from 1923 to 2003, his new book with Michael Drew looks back 3000 years for evidence of this 80 year juggernaut.
The evidence is compelling.
According to Williams and Drew, the Pendulum works like this:
We oscillate between a civic-minded “We” society and an individualist “Me” society. In a “We” it is important to be part of something bigger than yourself. Society will come together to achieve some great task or fix some great ill.
Then we get a little nuts, insisting on conformity and ostracizing those who don’t adhere to group norms. We see witch hunts and McCarthyism during these extremes.
Then the “Me” society begins to emerge.
The “Me” society rewards individual accomplishment. Freedom and self-expression hold sway until things get out of hand (again) and our culture begins to honor fake, plastic and posing behavior. This is when we’ve seen Robber Barons rule (1903) and we’ve hired an actor for President (1983).
And the pendulum swings back.
During each swing there are transitionary periods, heralded by “alpha voices” in technology, literature, art and music. They predict the coming shifts from “Me” to “We” and then back again.
In Pendulum, Williams and Drew use data on book sales, the Billboard music charts and trends in art to map the most recent swings. Each swing is sliced into ten-year periods, in each of which we behave in similar ways as a society.
They then use the writings of historical figures and accounts of past events to map this 80-year cycle back over 2000 years.
It’s the most interesting history lesson I’ve read in some time.
The last portion of the book is a transcript of a conversation about the coming years
Predicting the Future: What does this mean for our craft?
Currently, we are swinging from a “Me” society to a “We”. In 2003 the pendulum swung past bottom and is now headed upward to a society that will celebrate working together, but will inevitably require conformity and punish those that don’t play along.
An right on cue, we have found the tools to collaborate and to solve the world’s problems in the Internet and mobile devices. Fewer and fewer decisions are made individually. Our youngsters have made saving the planet a rallying cry. “Be Green” is the new “New Deal” of the last swing to a “We” climax.
For those of us that communicate, it means that we can no longer control the message. We can no longer manipulate the masses by appealing to their self-centered desires. The community is deciding more and more what is valuable.
Transparency and authenticity are necessary to work together. And soon conformity.
Conflict is already developing as we join our tribes and fall in line. We are taking sides. Republican or Democrat? Are you the 99%? Do you go to church? Do you go to my kind of church?
Just as Communism and Democracy began taking sides in 1922, so too did we start taking sides in 2002.
Williams predicts that we will be more and more willing to give up our privacy for the common good. In the end, it will be the revelations from this openness that allows us to begin excluding others.
Create Your Tribe
If you are to believe Williams and Drew, then you will begin to create what Seth Godin (whom I believe to be an Alpha Voice in marketing) calls a tribe. As marketers, we must give our customers something to join, and a cause around which to rally.
We can no longer define ourselves by what we sell. We must stand for something.
Beginning in 2013, things start to turn nasty. As we swing higher to the Zenith of our “We” cycle, we will be tempted to exclude those that don’t conform to the rules of our tribe. it will become easiest to stand against something to keep your tribe in line.
Summary
Pendulum is a fun, fascinating romp through our recent history with a long glance back far back in time. You cannot read it without becoming aware of the way things are changing. You’ll begin to read the news with new eyes.
If you’re like me, it’ll scare you and excite you all at the same time.
Get ready to see your future.
Online Marketing and the Anti-Science Movement [AUDIO]
Conversion Marketing StrategyEven though the election season is over, I’ve opted to extend the debate and move it into the realm of online marketing. In 4 Anti-Science Marketing Attitudes That Keep Us In The Stone Ages I compare the anti-science efforts used by politicians and their campaigns to the anti-science efforts stacked against you, my fellow marketer.
The most egregious of the anti-science foes is the person who actively campaigns against data-driven marketing, using any of several excuses. You may have heard them yourself.
Read the entire article at Search Engine Land, or listen to the article via the Conversion Scientist Podcast.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Listen | Download | Subscribe
[bookpromo]
Does Higher Engagement mean Higher Conversion Rates?
Conversion Marketing Strategy, Conversion OptimizationWe’ve just finished some very interesting research here at Conversion Sciences labs, and we love it when our deeply held beliefs get blown out of the water.
It’s happened again.
Look at the following graph of three videos. These three different videos appeared on three otherwise identical landing pages. The graph is “Viewer Attention” as is recorded by YouTube. Basically, these graphs tell us how many visitors were still watching at any point in the video. It tells us how engaging a video is.
YouTube’s Viewer Attention metric would predict that “talking head” video would deliver the lowest conversion rate. In fact, it is the highest converting style of video. In this case, engagement doesn’t predict conversion.
Clearly, we would expect whiteboard style video to be the highest converting video, since viewers are more engaged for the entire length of the video. We expect slides to be almost as successful. However, we expect plain old talking head videos to perform poorly.
Now take a look at the following graph. This is a graph of the conversion rates of the same videos.
YouTube conversion rates graph.
This graph tells us that plain old talking head video is getting more visitors to click on our call-to-action button. This style of video is almost twice as likely to convert a visitor than the slide-style video found in most webinars.
How Does Engagement Affect Conversion Rates?
Clearly, engagement doesn’t predict conversion in this case. Here, engagement is actually distraction.
Learn more about the relationship between engagement, distraction and conversion in my article Can You Really Increase Conversions By Decreasing Engagement?
I think you’ll be surprised by what you will learn.
[bookpromo]
Instagraph: Why do some people succeed with testing while others fail?
CRO Tests | Multivariate | AB TestingDennis van der Heijden is in an enviable position. He is able to see the results of hundreds of split tests through his awesome split testing service, Convert Insights at Convert.com.
He’s noticed a few things about how successful businesses are at finding winning tests.
These numbers plus his ideas on why some have tests that frequently yield conversion rate lifts while others don’t is the subject of my Instagraph. This was recorded live at Conversion Conference East 2012 in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida on October 10.
Here is a time-lapse video of the creation of the Instagraph.
[bookpromo]
How to Make Your Blog ERUPT [VIDEO]
Conversion OptimizationIt was a Saturday. I was painting the walls of one of our bathrooms. The new color really brought out the tile we’d had installed the week before. Otherwise, things were pretty quiet around the house on this day.
But things were different on my blog.
As I painted, a series of machinations were in motion. A post I’d launched that morning which was being broadcast out to my mailing list.
My social networks — Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook – were being lit up with links to the content and people were clicking through.
Those spending Saturday morning with their iPads were seeing my post as a story in their electronic magazines using Flipboard and Zite.
All of this was happening without my participation. I was painting the bathroom.
Eruptions Happen Naturally
My content literally ERUPTS onto the web. I don’t have to push it. I don’t have to post and share.
How is this?
Content is a force on the Web. It wants to be shared. It needs to be set free.
All you have to do is give it a channel through which it can relieve the natural pressure.
Blogs are equipped with RSS feeds that make natural vents and fissures for your content.
It’s time you started letting your content free (while you do other things).
Free Video Preview Explains the Basics
Watch a short video (8 minutes) that I’ve put together for you. It’ll tell you why content creates pressure and detail many of the channels you can let your content escape through.
If you want to get more details, you can watch the full 40-minute video for just $29 at the Online Marketing Institute’s eLearning Center.
For that same $29, you will also get access to over 150 other videos on topics including:
All in one place.
All for $29 per month.
I can’t think of a better value on the Web. Get started with my free video.
[bookpromo]
Unexpected Formulas
Landing Page OptimizationSomeone once said, “The definition of insanity is to pet a dog that is on fire.”
Someone else once said, “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”
Stop doing the things that don’t work over and over.
Insanity is often a by-product of safety. “If everyone is doing it, it must work,” is the mantra of this kind of crazy. This is the place from which designers and developers work.
It’s time to find out for yourself what your audience wants and what makes your visitors turn in to prospects and customers on the Web.
Brandscaping by Andrew Davis [INFOGRAPH]
Conversion Marketing StrategyI just got back from Content Marketing World and wanted to share my notes from one of the presentations with you.
Andrew Davis gave the audience at nice overview of the concepts he champions in his new book Brandscaping, concepts that can fundamentally change the success of your brand today and in the coming years.
Here is my Instagraph of his presentation.
Click to Enlarge
Is Your Landing Page a .com or a …com?
Landing Page OptimizationMy daughter was complaining about the ellipsis (also known as the “…”) and how it could be a very unhelpful bit of punctuation. As a teenager, she is quite astute at finding things to complain about.
The ellipsis, she contends, requires the reader to fill in the thought hinted at by the little trio of dots. This is not fair (another frequent teenagerism).
It struck me that I deal every day with landing pages that ask their visitors to fill in the gaps. I thought that these sites were like …coms.
This was the inspiration for 3 Parts Of A Complete B2B Search Landing Page, my new column on Search Engine Land.
Excerpt:
Read the entire article or…
[bookpromo]
Get a Signed Copy of my New Book
News & EventsI am pleased to announce that (finally) my new book is being launched September 5 at Content Marketing World.
The book Your Customer Creation Equation: Unexpected Website Formulas of The Conversion Scientist is a “foundational” book on conversion written for those of you who will be responsible for the performance of a website.
That means business owners, corporate marketers and search engine optimizers. It tells you how to guide your online team to the glorious ecosystems that make your site work for your visitors and your business — your customer creation equation.
As a friend of The Conversion Scientist, I’d like to offer you a personally signed copy of the book. I’ll even pay for shipping.
Request your signed copy now, because I’m only signing a limited number of these.
PS: If you’re coming to Content Marketing World, don’t miss our book launch party on September 5, just after the Rick Springfield concert. This event will feature seven authors including yours truly all in one place.
PPS: If you want to get to know a couple of these authors, check out our Unsolicited Advice video series. You might find your site in there someday.
Unsolicited Website Advice #1 [Video]
Conversion-Centered DesignIn this video, four experts give free website advice to the owners of one website: Brian Massey, Andrew Davis, Josh Miles, and Todd Wheatland.
Unsolicited Advice is a short, high-energy video series in which we evaluate websites, giving tips on how to make them work.