“Call To Action” Reveals No Secrets, But Offers A Panoramic View Of The Online Space

“Humanity is acquiring all the right technology for all the wrong reasons.”
—R. Buckminster Fuller

“If you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there.”
—Lewis Carroll, "Alice in Wonderland"

As I was headed full-bore back into the SEO world, I had the book “Call to Action: Secret Formulas to Improve Online Results” by Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg (“with Lisa T. Davis,” is added onto the end, like some creepy addendum referencing some type of brother-led threesome) passed along by a former colleague for review. I found it be a wide-ranging, fairly comprehensive look at several tactics necessary to achieve online success. Since my most intensive work in that world came from a company later described as “an enigma wrapped inside a riddle wrapped inside a chicken finger,” “Call to Action” was a welcome re-introduction, even if it was found to be less of a guidebook than it was billed.

Much of the book dealt with user pathing and usability, a subject that’s pretty intriguing to me. The authors repeatedly hammered home the idea that, due to the huge volume of sites vying for the attention of potential customers (e.g., “We constantly get inquiries from companies like WeCanSellOverpricedIceToEskimosBecauseWeHaveAWebSite.com. They are beyond help. Don’t be one of them.”), you need to hold the prospect’s hand all the way through the buying cycle, so they’re not catapulted away at some of the confusing points of the sales funnel: “The bottom line: each evolutionary step [of sales] has forced the merchant to work harder and systematically to remove friction from the buyer’s experience … It’s up to you—the buyer is always one click away from goodbye.”

The biggest issue was that some of the information was slightly dated, since the book was initially published in 2005. Getting past that, however, the book touched on a variety of subjects that have an impact on online marketing: color, design, usability, writing, campaigns, lead nurturing, hyperlinks, scenarios, planning, conversion, metrics and testing were among the many topics touched on by the Eisenbergs (and their oddly referenced assistant-type lady).

Through pure repetition, it was hard to miss that the Eisenbergs pet baby is Persuasion Architecture (they’ve written other books on it), and its inherent phases: uncovery, storyboarding, development, wireframing, prototyping and optimization. As a writer, I found myself most interested in some of their ideas about online copywriting. None of them were exactly revelatory or even anything I had not heard before, but it is always good to be reminded of some of the content pitfalls. The book quoted Dr. Duane Lakin, who said, “Too often, people talk or write they way that makes THEM feel comfortable and ignore what is necessary to make the audience feel good or be open to the message.” So the authors’ advice? "Speak to the dog in the language of the dog about what matters to the heart of the dog." Along these lines, they also shared a copywriting reference that I had not heard before that got me to chuckling a bit: “Copy should be as long as a woman’s skirt: long enough to cover the essentials, but short enough to keep it interesting.”

In terms of a marketing and public relations slant, I thought “Call to Action” did a good job of acknowledging their roles in the online sales space, briefly touching on these topics without delving too deeply into areas where they’re not as comfortable. I would say one of the few concerns about this book was that it seemed to attempt to cover a bit too much ground without dwelling too deeply into any one area; to me, it was the literary equivalent of being a jack of all trades and a master of none. In the sense that it wasn’t supremely focused on any one subject for long and didn’t really include anything groundbreaking, I don’t think it quite lived up its tagline of “Secret Formulas to Improve Online Results,” even though I think there is some kind of publishing rule that states that the word “secret” has to be in any book such as this. But overall, I found this book to be a good read and a valuable desktop reference tool -- images of a Lisa T. Davis sandwich notwithstanding.