Episode 125 - Bryan Eisenberg on Persona Marketing, Persuasion Marketing and Trimming the Fat

Transcript

Susan Bratton: Welcome to Dishy Mix. I’m your host Susan Bratton, and on today’s show you’re going to get to meet Bryan Eisenberg. Bryan is probably first and foremost a professional speaker at this point in his life because he knows a lot of stuff that you’re going to want to find out about. He’s a best selling author and he’s really an authority in online marketing and runs some very important categories that are in the conversion optimization world but have to do with something called persuasion architecture and persona marketing. Bryan is the coauthor of a Wall Street Journal, Business Week and USA Today and New York Times best selling book. He’s written Call To Action, Waiting For Your Cat To Bark, and his latest, Always Be Testing. So I want to get him on the show and we’re going to teach you the latest thinking around persona marketing and persuasion architecture. It started back with the Greeks and we’re going to bring it right up into the 21st century. Welcome Bryan.

Bryan Eisenberg: Thank you so much Susan. So happy to finally be on the show.

Susan Bratton: I know. Well it took us a while to get together, but you are just a perfect fit for Dishy Mix will of the things that you’re about to tell us. So Bryan I actually want to dive right in to persuasion architecture, and I’d like you to explain it to us, knowing that Dishy Mix listeners are the people who manage all of the website development and design, we get, you know, targets and segmentation and web optimization, so take us at a really high level about what’s going on today and the latest thinking about persuasion architecture.

Bryan Eisenberg: Well I mean I think the key to persuasion architecture is really trying to understand how to get the right message to the right person at the right time. And the model that we built for planning content as well as for optimizing websites is based on three very simple questions - and again, because the web is such a self service medium and it’s all about the customer, the first question is “Who are we trying to persuade? What are we trying to, you know… What are their backgrounds? What are their motivations? What are their needs? You know, do we know a lot about them? Do we know a little about them? Are they early in the buying cycle? Are they late in the buying cycle? You know, what kind of media do they prefer? Do they prefer video? Do they prefer audio? Do they prefer, you know, copy?”, and start there. And then look at the second question, which is, “What action do we want them to take?” And there are both the macro actions – right, the “I want them to buy from me”, “become a lead”, “subscribe”, “download a podcast”, you know, “sign up for a webinar”, whatever they are. And then there are all the little micro actions in between, right – “I need them to click from the, you know, from the category page to the product page, from the product page to the shopping cart page, from the shopping cart page to the billing page”, and on and on and on. And then the last question, which I think is the most critical question, is “What action do they want to take?”, right. Online I think, you know., all digital marketing really is about the customer being in control and, you know, I think that’s one of the core fundamental concepts we wrote about in Waiting For Your Cat To Bark, is why would they want to take that action and what do we need to do in order to make them feel confident that taking that next click or subscribing or buying or becoming a fan of Dishy Mix is the right action for them to do.

Susan Bratton: So you ask yourself these questions, but what if you think you know the answer but maybe you really don’t know the answer? Is online serving a good way to find out more about what your customer’s trying to accomplish so that you can deliver it to them?

Bryan Eisenberg: Yeah, it’s a fabulous question ‘cause really one of the things that we established early on is that, you know, these personas are models; just like any other models, you know, they need to be a little bit flexible. You’re going to go in with your best assumptions, and you can gather assumptions from, you know, surveys, from keyword research, right, seeing what keyword people talk about. Again, different keywords, different types of personas are going to prefer if you’re talking abrupt processes and methodologies, you know, it’s probably not going to be someone who’s kind of humanistic, it’s probably going to be someone who’s a little bit more methodical. You know, when you’re talking about financial matters it’s probably not going to be the person who, you know, who may be the end user of your software product. So , you know, you really can start bucketing people this way. We also love talking to sales people on customers service and looking at live chats. And so, yeah, all of these things are tools that we use to gather this, but the most important tool is, you know, once you have your assumptions and you start planning your content, you’ll want to measure it to make sure it’s working, right – ‘cause the whole premise of continuous improvement, right, you’ve got your plan, which is based on your persona, what you think they want to do…

Susan Bratton: Always be testing.

Bryan Eisenberg: Yup, you’re going to measure it and then you’ve got to test it, right; you’re going to try to come up with some variations to see if you can make it better. And you keep looking to improve it over and over again until you know that, yes, you know, this is specifically what this persona is interested in, I’m being most effective with this type of persona.

Susan Bratton: When you’re thinking about writing web copy and managing user interaction and doing it with this overlay concept of persuasion architecture, one of the other fundamental components that you’ve often talked about is persona marketing.

Bryan Eisenberg: Mm hmm.

Susan Bratton: How does a person who, a marketer who maybe is a small/medium business isn’t a large company with a big budget, lots of research dollars, agencies to serve them, how does a small or medium business owner who wants to make sure that they’re speaking to the right customer develop their personas – or their persona – for their business?

Bryan Eisenberg: Yeah, so it’s actually funny ‘cause, you know, we’ve dealt with both, you know, the one person shops all the way up to, you know, the big, you know, fortune ten, and it’s funny ‘cause, you know, the fortune ten have all that research, but often times it actually doesn’t lead them to understanding their personas well enough because they may not have the research that really ties into how people prefer to buy. You know, they may not have a lot of demographic information about them, they may know, you know, some of their, you know, media preferences; you know, but it may not necessarily tie into how people look at their purchase cycle, and I think that’s really one of the most interesting things that the small to business owner, to medium size business owner has a better opportunity to take advantage of, ‘cause they actually to speak to customers more often, you know. And they can start asking the questions, like, you know, “How did you make the decision that, you know, you needed this type of product or service? What were some of the questions? What were some of the alternatives you looked at? You know, do you remember some of the searches you did?” And just start getting a sense of that as you’re going along; you know talk to your customers, find out what, you know, what, you know, pains they have and dealing with it there. So, you know, it really, I think it’s actually a stronger component for the small business because they really have much closer ties in to the end customer.

Susan Bratton: When I was developing the 40 shows on the Personal Life Media Network I worked with each of the hosts to develop a persona for their show, an amalgam of their listeners so that when they were doing their show they had a person in mind and they were talking to that person in the way that that person liked to be spoken to. I have one for my show, and it’s probably somebody that you know: it’s Andy Sernovitz…

Bryan Eisenberg: Mm hmm.

Susan Bratton: He personifies, for me, a Dishy Mix listener because Andy knows a lot about a lot. He’s a very sophisticated person in the world of social media marketing, word of mouth, online email; I mean he goes back forever, he knows the business. But he’s also interested in the people. So when I have Bryan Eisenberg on the show, Andy wants to know the latest and greatest about your thinking with regard to personas and persuasion architecture to keep up with it. He also wants to know what books you’ve written lately, and he also wants to know how you lost sixty pounds, which we’re going to talk about later in the show. So when I’m doing the show with you, I’m thinking about asking questions that are going to satisfy him, ‘cause he’s sophisticated and that’s who listens to my show. And so for each case we’re using, in our minds as hosts of a show, a person. It could be a made up person, it could be a real person. I often tell people to think of a real person that’s the closest you could get to who your persona will be. And now that we’ve launched the publishing division, we’re doing exactly the same thing: thinking about the embodiment of our customer and speaking directly to them, like we get them, we understand them. Another thing that I’ve noticed in information product marketing is the idea of the ask survey; asking your customers a lot about their preferences and how they approach a particular subject, and then using that exact verbiage back in your copy to market your product to them. Is this what a lot of marketers are doing and do you see it happening out there in this way, or could you make what I’m doing better?

Bryan Eisenberg: You know, I wish there were more marketers this, ‘cause I think we’d start seeing, you know, definitely messages that resonate better with people. You know, I still think all too often… You know, it’s funny, ‘cause you mentioned what the upcoming book was and, you know, I’m working on a book called Trim The Fat. And, you know, as you were talking about this, you know, I’m imagining a lot of marketers, what they do is they like to eat white bread. And, you know, if you know anything about white bread, you know it’s processed refined flower, you know, it’s, you know, terrible for you in so many different ways. And, you know, it’s just, it’ll satisfy you but not really in a very good way. And it’s kind of what we do with our customers. You know, unfortunately if you start thinking about it only as on person, like Andy Sernovitz, you know what, you miss the people who may be a lot more like, you know, an Anne Holland, right, or someone who, you know, doesn’t have Andy’s experience with listening to you. So if you only think about one listener you I think kind of miss some of the fringes that persona marketing can benefit you with. And it’s the same thing; you know, we’ve actually worked with people who’ve, we’ve helped them to develop the personas for their business, and they were getting ready to write a book about their, about what they do and the way they see the world – and in fact the one I’m thinking of particularly, you know, is financial services based. And he’d literally planned the chapters of his book based on the personas of what questions they would have and how they would want to approach things, and then the same thing, you know, use their verbiage in the marketing and all that, and of course he wrote a New York Times best seller out of it. So, yeah, I mean absolutely. I just think that too many people, you know, like to think, “Oh yeah, well my average customer is, you know, a 34, to 44 years old female. You know, she reads Vogue and she reads Boing Boing online”, you know, and it’s just not enough. It doesn’t really get you to the core of what this person’s thinking. And the fact of the matter is, you know, it used to be, you know, America was, you know, a couple of different niches – you know, you could be on a couple different channels and you could probably reach everybody. But, you know, today we’re so, really become so much more unique creatures. You know, we have millions of media options to choose from, so it’s not an effective way to look at the world anymore. So by being able to kind of – what we like to do instead of, you know, personalization approach this, we do the persona-lization approach, what are the core characteristics, and so the way we start is really simple. We take a two by two grid and we put one side logical, one side emotional, another side quick and another side slow or deliberate. And we literally start listing attributes of our customers or keywords our customers use, and we plot them according to this two by two graph. And we start then saying, “Okay, you know, these kind of, you know, this piece here and this piece here, they kind of fit together”, and we start creating a narrative of who this person is, and the closer that we can make it to real people that we can imagine – because the ideal thing, if you can take this persona to one of your sales people or customer service people, you know, or someone, a direct client or account manager, and say, “Do you recognize this person? Have you heard them say these kind of things?”, and the more it rings true, the more likely you are that you’re really accurate in your description of your personas.

Susan Bratton: What were the first two? I know that one was deliberate and one was quick. What were the first two?

Bryan Eisenberg: Logical and emotional.

Susan Bratton: Oh yeah. Of course, logical and emotional. That’s great. I like that. And starting with keywords, that’s very good. It’s so important to get the copy right, isn’t it?

Bryan Eisenberg: Oh, absolutely.

Susan Bratton: Yeah. So before we go to the break I have an unfair question for you…

Bryan Eisenberg: Uh oh.

Susan Bratton: We’re going to talk after the break about Trim The Fat and your professional speaking and what you’ve been up to. But before we go I have, the unfair question I have is could you net out two sentences, the most revealing insight of each of the three books you’ve written so far? What’s the key takeaway?

Bryan Eisenberg: So Call To Action I would say is there are five main areas to planning your website, each one is critical in making sure your customers buy and you need to understand the dynamics behind them. Waiting For Your Cat To Bark, as I mentioned before, your customers are in control. You know, we need things, you know, we need to understand the transparency and the nature of how the internet is changing the buying process and made a plan for moving customers forward and their purchase cycles. And Always Be Testing is the basic premise is that, you know, there are those five main areas that we talked about in Always Be Testing and Call To Action, and we take a deeper dive into how to identify each of those five and if you have areas in each of those five that are challenges for you and what are different things that you can test within each one of those areas and giving you a process to think about testing that’s more affective than what I call slice and dice optimization.

Susan Bratton: Nice! Oh that sounds really good. You know, I haven’t read that book, and I would like to. And I think that some of my Dishy Mix listeners would like to receive a personally autographed copy of one of your books, and you’ve offered two copies up to my Dishy Mix listeners, right?

Bryan Eisenberg: Absolutely.

Susan Bratton: That’s awesome! Now can they pick whichever one they want?

Bryan Eisenberg: Yeah, I think actually, I think I have some copies of each one sitting in the office.

Susan Bratton: Oh fantastic! So if you’re new to Dishy Mix or if you’re a constant Dishy Mix listener, here’s the drill, here’s how you get to be one of the people who gets a personally autographed copy of any of Bryan’s three books: you go to dishymixfan.com. That’s my Face Book page to Dishy Mix. You fan my page and you post your request right on the wall, and all you have to do is say why you’d  like to have. If you tell Bryan and I that you love the show and that you think his work is awesome that really increases your chances. (unintelligible) anyway, I don’t need to ask him to do that. It’s so nice. I love my wall. So just post there and Bryan and I will select two people, and you can let us know which of the three books you’d like to have, or maybe you’ll want to hold out for his new book, which we’re going to talk about after the break. So we’re going to go to break. You’re getting to know Bryan Eisenberg, and we’ll be right back. I’m your host, Susan Bratton. Stay tuned.

Susan Bratton: We’re back and I’m Susan Bratton, with Bryan Eisenberg. He is of course author of Call To Action, Waiting For Your Cat To Bark and Always Be Testing, and Bryan you are working a new book called – is this the real title or the working title – Trim The Fat?

Bryan Eisenberg: It’s the working title, but I – my brother and I are having a conflict about it because unfortunately a lot of people think trimming the fat is, you know, a negative thing and I don’t really look at it as that. I mean, you know, in the business setting a lot of people think it’s negative.

Susan Bratton: Well they think about it being layoffs, losing your job or losing their budgets to do their work.

Bryan Eisenberg: Yeah, and unfortunately it’s really not what we’re trying to get across. You know, obviously the subtitle’s going to have to be a complete contradictory statement to that to kind of put people into the right mindset of it, because what I’m really talking about is what W. Edwards Deming kind of introduced after World War 2 to the Japanese, which was, “Look if you improve quality you can reduce expenses while increasing productivity and market share.” And you’re doing that by focusing on improving experience, improving the quality, and that’s what I mean. It’s like often times as marketers we have a set it and forget mentality. We’ve become, by our very nature in the last, you know, 35-45 years, very passive creatures, when we think about marketing because for the most part we’ve been trained by being yelled at by the TV, right, and sitting back and letting people, you know, interrupt us, and you know, you develop habits from very young. And we need to overcome those, and I think that it’s part of the same reason why a lot of people unfortunately put on a few of those unhealthy pounds.

Susan Bratton: So you just lost 60 pounds. And you’re still going, right?

Bryan Eisenberg: I have lost 54 pounds now, so almost 60, yeah…

Susan Bratton: Great!

Bryan Eisenberg: And the goal is for another 20.

Susan Bratton: Okay. And how did you do it and how long did it take you?

Bryan Eisenberg: Well interestingly enough I lost 30 pounds the first month after my baby was born – this is my third child…

Susan Bratton: But wait, you didn’t have the baby…

Bryan Eisenberg: Yeah, I think you…

Susan Bratton: You can’t fool me.

Bryan Eisenberg: at least get a little bit of pregnancy weight, it’s sympathy, it’s, you know, eating the late night snacks, you know, even if it’s one or two spoons of ice cream, which I almost never eat, but, you know, my wife was eating it, I was there for her, so I was there to support her one way or another. And, you know, also obviously she, my wife had a horrible pregnancy, she was sick throughout the whole thing – God bless her. I don’t know how she did it, but… It also took a lot of time also away from me doing other activities, so… And again, you know, we get very entrenched with what we do online, you know, and we live in front of the screen and we forget that, you know, there’s a life outside there where, you know, it’s called walking and exercising and…

Susan Bratton: Right.

Bryan Eisenberg: You know, really, that’s one of the first steps to making this work.

Susan Bratton: Getting your exercise. So you’ve been bike riding.

Bryan Eisenberg: I’ve been bike riding but, you know, it’s funny. You know, people, you know, people here, you know, I ride 15 to 18 miles a day and they say, “Well I can’t do it.” I say, “Yeah, well you know how I started? I started by walking, you know, 10 blocks a day, 15 blocks a day…

Susan Bratton: Right.

Bryan Eisenberg: and just building up from there”, ‘cause it’s not going to happen overnight. And the big problem that happens when most people do weight loss – and it’s the same thing I’ve seen in optimization space – is “Yeah, when are you going to go do testing?” So they go in, they set up a couple tests or they go on, you know, this crash diet and they lose a couple pounds or they go to the gym, and they come back from that first, you know, workout in the gym and they’re all sore and achy and their back hurts, and you know, you do your first test and you really don’t get a lift and you put a lot of resources into it, a lot of trust, and you don’t get a result. And then you’re like, “You know what, this is too much work. I’m going to give up.” And unfortunately that is what happens all too often. And, you know, I’ve been there, I’ve had my weight go up and go down. You know, my mom struggle with her weight all throughout her life as well. So, you know, I really understand, you know, the concept of diet and exercise. My original background was in health and nutritional sciences, and it became increasing obvious to me that you know what, I just need to change my behaviors, I need to change the slowly, I need to make better decisions, I can’t… And when I make a mistake, that’s okay, you know, people…

Susan Bratton: Right, forgive.

Bryan Eisenberg: are going to make mistakes; you just got to go ahead and learn from it and take the next step, “How do I prevent it the next time” or “How do I do something better the next time.” And you know, now it’s just turned into a lifestyle and it’s one of the reasons why, you know, I’m here trying to work full time as a professional speaker because it give me more of a lifestyle where I don’t need to be in front of the screen 24/7. I can spend an hour or two everyday working out, spend more time with my family, cooking the healthy foods instead of trying to grab foods, you know, quickly on the fly, and, you know, it’s all those little steps that really make a difference, not only in the quality of your life, but the quality of your marketing.

Susan Bratton: I wouldn’t say you’re reinventing your brand, but you’re definitely polishing your brand at this point. And I have a question for you. This is a fantasy question. I know that you’re really focused on bryaneisenberg.com and creating your brand and getting your speaking engagements, etcetera. If I were going to find a, if I were going to book you a fantasy speaking engagement, to whom would you speak – who would be your audience – and what would be the subject?

Bryan Eisenberg: You know, I think the subject would be… Well lets start with the audience would be CEO’s, and it really doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter if it’s large business, small business or, you know, something in between. I think it’s people who have to make that decision as the head of the company. And one of my core messages right now – I mean, I’ve asked this question from a ton of people. Susan, if you had a million dollars 50 years ago and the opportunity to invest in either General Motors or Toyota 50 years ago, who would you invest it with?

Susan Bratton: Well 50 years ago I would’ve put it in GM.

Bryan Eisenberg: Right, they had all the marketing muscle, all the great innovation, all the great distribution and almost 50 years ago almost nobody wanted to touch a Japanese car. But the Japanese manufacturing, thanks to Deming, they realized a couple of things. Number one, we don’t have to worry about the innovations. We can watch other peoples innovations and just reiterate them and make them better…

Susan Bratton: Be a fast follower.

Bryan Eisenberg: Yeah.

Susan Bratton: Mm hmm.

Bryan Eisenberg: And be always concerned about – and this is the thing that I think most people get wrong about web analytics and optimization, is that it’s a math thing. I never, I’m not a math person. You know, actually one of the reasons I, one of the reasons I never decided to finally go into computer science in school, I went to health and nutrition sciences, ‘cause I hated statistics, okay. I think that’ll be a shocking revelation for a lot of people, but… You know, I’m not a math junky; I don’t love playing with numbers. I love people, right, and I was a social worker before this. So it’s all about why people do the things they do. And so what I want to get them understanding is what the Japanese did and this whole concept of continuous improvement or Kaizen, is focus on how do we make this experience – the car, the product – better, not only for the end consumer, but also for our employees. How do we let people be more human and enjoy what they’re doing? And that helps to be more productive, and at the end result you actually gain market share, which is Deming’s whole vision for all this. And it works. And the problem is – and Deming said… I’m actually trying to identify the, I haven’t been able to identify the year – but he said, you know, “The Japanese are in trouble, but the Americans are in worse trouble because we don’t even know how much trouble we’re in yet.”

Susan Bratton: Certainly proving out now.

Bryan Eisenberg: And unfortunately you know, time has sped up, right. This internet thing that we play around in has sped up the nature of communication, of innovation, of how fast people can do things today. And you need to live in a world that reacts that fast, you know. If you have a, you know, someone who puts up a viral video on YouTube about, you know, a flaw in your electronic arts golf game with Tiger Woods that he can walk on water and it takes you nine months to produce a response, that’s a problem, right. That’s not how humans communicate. It would be like, you know, me asking Susan, you know, “How are you feeling today?” You know, 35 minutes later you come say, “Great.” It would just feel awkward. And the problem is we have forgotten how to communicate with people, we’ve forgotten how to be social creatures, because unfortunately – it’s no ones fault – but we were left in front of a TV to grow up, we were left with, you know, being interrupted, we were left with processed foods and fast foods, and we were ingrained with all these, you know, culturally and business focused bad behaviors that we need to start changing if we want to have better results with our life and with our business.

Susan Bratton: Amen, brother! Woo! I have one final thing I want to do with you in our remaining minutes. I want to do something I call Five in Five. You’re such a good sport; I feel like I can talk you into doing anything. I have five questions, I want five answers in five minutes or less. Can you do it?

Bryan Eisenberg: I’ll try.

Susan Bratton: Alright. Oh, just say yes. You won’t say yes?

Bryan Eisenberg: Well it’s the consultant still with me; it hasn’t totally been washed out. Everything is like, you know, I’m a consultant so I like to say, you know, it depends.

Susan Bratton: Exactly. I know you can do this. Are you ready?

Bryan Eisenberg: I’m ready.

Susan Bratton: You can have the five minutes and you can spend it anywhere you want, but I have five questions and you don’t know what they are. So you might want to make them short or you might want to make them long. It’s going to be a tricky one. Here we go. First question, answer this: What social media can and can’t do for you?

Bryan Eisenberg: Social media allows you to show how human you are and allows you to connect to other humans.

Susan Bratton: What can’t it do?

Bryan Eisenberg: What can’t it do? It’s not a magic pill for bringing you tons of traffic and all kinds of new people to your business.

Susan Bratton: When is landing page optimization not enough?

Bryan Eisenberg: Interestingly enough, you know, often times we see people who have great websites, low bounce rates, and the problem is that the experience just doesn’t happen on one page, it happens over a series of multiple pages. You know, people just don’t come to a landing page, “Here’s the product I need, I’m ready to buy it, I click and I’m done.” They need to keep clicking over and over again all throughout, you know, from first click to the ultimate checkout. And you need to spend the time persuading every single one of those clicks, so just fixing one page sometimes is not enough.

Susan Bratton: What is a true conversion rate.

Bryan Eisenberg: The true conversion rate is when you can basically wipe out all the traffic that’s not supposed to be there. So if you take, lets say your bounce rate for people who, you know, lets say they typed in ‘shingle’ and they meant, you know, roofing material and not skin conditions and you say, “Okay, lets get rid of all of those.” And then you look at all the potential people who are not coming for customer service and all that, and all these people are real potential buyers, what percent of those are you actually converting from a visitor to a sale.

Susan Bratton: Got it. Why do you have a five eyed frog as your symbol? Where did it come from and what does it mean?

Bryan Eisenberg: So it’s actually a Martian, and back in the very, very early days when Jeffery and I were starting to tinker around with the idea of optimizing websites for conversions we had come up with this concept of the Grock, ‘cause if you remember back then everybody loved talking about eyeballs and having more economy and we were just saying “Bullshit.” And it was a little hard for two people from the outside to compensate us because, you know, we weren’t agency guys, we weren’t ad guys – you know, again, I’m a social worker so we were a little bit from the outside, so we decided to have this character who we called the Grock. And if you’ve read Stranger In A Strange Land, you know that ‘grock’ means, you know, to understand from like a deep cellular level. And one of the administrative assistants to the person who ran a, an incubator, said, “You know what, I see him as a character.” And so we had some characters drawn of him.

Susan Bratton: So it’s a Martian. It looks like a five eyed frog. I got it now. That’s funny. Okay. Last question, and you’re doing really well. I want you to describe in as visual language as possible or a sensual language as possible – you can use visual, auditory, smell – I want you to describe in that kind of…

Bryan Eisenberg: All factory.

Susan Bratton: all factory, visual, auditory and all factory language, your recent trip to the Norwegian Fiords.

Bryan Eisenberg: I’m going to sum it up with what I think was one of the most, two of the most memorable things. One, I went on a wonderful boat tour of the Fiords with my good friend Andrew Goodman. You know, we had escaped from the conference, we figured we’d take just a couple of hours and we went around there. It’s just absolutely gorgeous scenery and a beautiful city and, you know, we really got to walk around. And the other was the night after the event our host, Oleg, took us to a restaurant right outside the city overlooking the city and the hills, and for just a majestic six course meal that just, the flavors, the hospitality, it was just, really it was just an unbelievable place.

Susan Bratton: And was that in Oslow?

Bryan Eisenberg: That was in Oslow, yeah.

Susan Bratton: Mm hmm. Yeah, I think Norway’s just so stunning – the mountains and the small little buildings and all of the boats and it’s…

Bryan Eisenberg: The little watch houses…

Susan Bratton: Yeah.

Bryan Eisenberg: Yeah, it’s just a, you know, the little islands have one house on there that one family’s been living on for, you know, forever and ever. Yeah, it’s a pretty amazing place.

Susan Bratton: It’s exquisite scenery. And I agree with you, the food is remarkably good. It’s great. But it’s cold. It’s cold there.

Bryan Eisenberg: No, it was actually a beautiful temperature when we went just a couple of weeks ago. It was…

Susan Bratton: Yeah, well…

Bryan Eisenberg: You know, it was something like in the, you know, the mid 60, 70 degrees….

Susan Bratton: Nice!

Bryan Eisenberg: you know. I brought a jacket and didn’t even need it…

Susan Bratton: Good.

Bryan Eisenberg: It was a pleasure.

Susan Bratton: Yeah. The Fiords are stunning. Well great! Well Bryan, I’ve had such a good time with you. I’ve learned many new things. I really appreciate your offer of two personally autographed copies of any one of your books to a Dishy Mix fan; that’s awesome. And if there’s anything that we can do to support you, ask for it right now.

Bryan Eisenberg: Happy for people to start finding me now. I’m blogging again at brianeisenberg.com and, you know, they can also find me on Twitter, @thegrock or connect with me on Face Book as well.

Susan Bratton: Perfect. We’ll do it all. I’m your host Susan Bratton. You’ve gotten to meet Bryan Eisenberg at brianeisenberg.com. Check him out, friend him up, follow, Tweet him, do it all. And sign up for Dishy Mix Fan and get your book. Alright, have a great day.