Chapter 10

Recognizing Faces

No one can lie, no one can hide anything, when he looks directly into someone’s eyes.

—Paulo Coelho

Commerce has always been personal, people doing business with each other face-to-face. Think about those old vacuum and encyclopedia salespeople knocking on doors. Think about a local farmer’s market. Think about Ogilvie’s hardware store. Face-to-face is the way we form relationships in the real world. And, as we have said, every sale forms a relationship of some kind. In small towns across the country, we might make a purchase at the corner store, and not be surprised to see the proprietor again at the school board meeting that night.

Behaviors in buying and selling products have evolved over time. What began as a very chaotic process (i.e., the marketplace) morphed into an industry (i.e., cold-calling, door-to-door sales, and retail) and eventually became mechanical (i.e., e-commerce). You can see what happened here—the personal nature of sales has disappeared. There may be lots of reasons for that. Ultimately, though, we believe that as consumers became more savvy and informed and salespeople continued trying to “force” them into the mysterious “sales funnel,” consumers simply stopped wanting to deal with them. It makes the whole process simpler for the consumer if they can meet all of their own needs.

This is why, more than ever before, organizations need to rehumanize buying and selling. If the buying and selling processes are so mechanical, what keeps a customer “loyal”? How can organizations ensure that they retain life-long connections with their customers? The answer to that is the reason for this whole book—relationships. Relationships are the glue that bonds loyal customers to your organization. Yet, if that is the answer, then the growing popularity of the digital buying process is undermining relationships. Think about how dehumanizing digital can be. You click. Purchase. Receive. Maybe even use? All without ever seeing another human face. It would be like walking into a store where all it had was self-service checkouts, cameras monitoring the floor, inventory stocked automatically, and, oh yeah, that cleanup on aisle seven? Say hello to Roomba. A frightening image, isn’t it? Something straight out of a science-fiction movie. Or is it? Isn’t that what e-commerce really is? Without the human interaction, or, more importantly, the face-to-face interaction, which exemplified the methods by which we used buy and sell in the analog world, it becomes harder and harder to keep people in the tribe.

So, how can we reintroduce the power of face-to-face interaction into the digital world? How can we at least create the sense of human interaction that has been the crux of business for so long?

Easy.

Video.

But before we tackle video, let’s explore why face-to-face communication is so necessary.

Why Face-to-Face Is So Important (to business)

Before digital, at the heart of almost anything that was bought, sold, negotiated, or agreed upon was some face-to-face communication. Why? Because face-to-face interaction was critical for developing a sense of trust.

Consider the story of Jon:

In the summer of 1999, when Jon was still a junior in high school, he started working as an entry-level distributor, selling Cutco kitchen products. The job had him going into customers’ homes, selling knives. It was one of the most intimate sales situations imaginable, not in a boardroom or a car dealership, but inside a potential client’s kitchen selling them a product they’d use daily to help put food on the table.

The result?

Jon turned his affinity for serious conversation, and for adopting an advisory role rather than a persuasive one, into a kind of therapy for his prospects. “I discovered early on that people don’t buy from me because they understand what I’m selling,” explains Jon. “They buy from me because they feel understood.”1

In a study published in International Business Review, Sonia Ketkar, codirector of the Center for Emerging Market Policies and assistant professor of Global Business and Policy at George Mason University, and coauthors concluded that face-to-face communication plays a significant role in establishing trust between buyers and suppliers.2

Why? Because when we see how people react in conversations, we can gauge their trustworthiness and their predilection to use what we tell them against us to gain advantage in terms of the sale.

Is There Any Trust in Digital?

It would seem that there’s an apparent problem with digital—trust. How can we engender trust when no one can “look us in the eye”? It might seem that a good solution is video conferencing. Skype and others are becoming more popular, especially in business. But video conferencing, although solving the face-to-face issue, doesn’t scale. Imagine the staff at Ogilvie’s videoconferencing with customers around the world, trying to replicate their old-fashioned service experience in the digital world. It would take an army of them, and still would not make a dent in appeasing the face-to-face needs of all the people trying to connect to their company.

But what if we could replicate the feeling of “face-to-face” communication, the familiarity of faces, and still get the scale of developing all the relationships that digital makes available?

Online Video Is Growing Stupid Fast

Over the past five years, our consumption of online video has grown exponentially. According to Cisco’s annual report on Internet traffic, mobile video accounted for over 50 percent of all mobile traffic in 2012,3 and portends to account for approximately 70 percent of all Internet traffic by 2017.4 It seems that we have a love for online video that is probably born of our love for television. In order to understand why we love “moving pictures” in the first place, we need to understand what about us as humans attracts us to the format.

The Science behind Why We Like Video

Again, there is real science that explains why we like video so much. As we mentioned in Chapter 1 and dug into in Chapter 2, Susan Weinschenk, PhD—also known as “The Brain Lady”—has uncovered four core, very human reasons why we are drawn to video:

1. We focus on the face. Dr. Weinschenk puts it a little more scientifically than that. According to her, the fusiform facial area makes us pay attention to faces. This actual brain function makes us hard-wired to use a human face as a centralized point for information and believability.
2. Voice makes more meaning. When we hear a human voice speaking, we are more apt to convert the information into meaningful content.
3. Seeing is believing! When we see people have emotional experiences (versus reading about them and trying to imagine them ourselves), we have a greater connection. Body language is a powerful feature of human-to-human interaction.
4. It’s all about the movement. Since the Stone Age, we have survived by noticing things moving around us. Fail to notice that pride of lions—get eaten. Peripheral vision is deeply ingrained in our anthropological DNA. We are drawn to things that move.
What Kind of Video Works Best?
As human beings, our brains can only take so much input, at which point they “overload.” That’s precisely what scientists Richard E. Mayer at the University of Southern California, Santa Barbara, and Roxana Moreno at the University of New Mexico researched in their study, “Nine Ways to Reduce Cognitive Load in Multimedia Learning.” Their conclusion? “In our research, concise narrated animation fostered meaningful learning without creating cognitive overload.”5

Video: The One-Two Punch for Businesses?

So what can video do for business? As part of a curation strategy (which improves the value of an organization’s utility in a relationship), it would seem that video is a must have. But does it have a meaningful impact on developing relationships? Well, if you think about relationships as a factor of purchasing (i.e., a more positive relationship leads to a better chance of converting any audience member to a customer), then video definitely has a demonstrable impact:

  • Regularly posting videos helped the company’s website receive 200 to 300 percent more monthly unique visitors and a 100 percent longer average time-on-site spent per visitor. The average time spent on pages with videos was three minutes compared to one minute and 30 seconds averaged on pages without videos.6
  • According to Internet Retailer, 52 percent of consumers say that watching product videos makes them more confident in their online purchase decisions. When a video is information-intensive, 66 percent of consumers will watch the video two or more times.7
  • Shoppers who view video at Onlineshoes.com convert at a 45 percent higher rate than other shoppers. The site has also seen a 359 percent year-over-year increase in video views. Product pages with video have higher conversion rates than product pages without video.8
  • Mediapost reports that product videos play a key role in consumer purchase decisions, citing a ninefold increase in retail video views at the start of the 2011 holiday season.9

Those numbers demonstrate one concept very clearly—consumers are willing to purchase more based on the principles of face-to-face interaction. We have a fascination with video. We are wired to pay attention to faces. Combine the two and what do you get? Improved opportunity to develop a long-term relationship and, more importantly, potentially improve sales.

Online Video as Your Gateway to Trust

There are many ways that you can use video as part of the content you publish to attract people’s attention. You can create animated whiteboard videos. You can create cute little animations about your company. But you can also opt to focus more on the human element of videos. You can create video content that features company executives, customers, people using products, customer testimonials, and so on. What does this do? It invites people’s brains to judge the intention of the person in the video (even if it is rehearsed). In fact, researchers found that when presented with rich media (video) and non-rich media (text) information, “users chose the rich media representations because they considered them to give the best insight into the trustworthiness of a piece of advice. . . . For designers interested in high levels of trust (even at the risk of inducing media bias), video is the best representation. . . .”10

Building a Compelling Video Library

Too much of any one thing isn’t a good thing, and the same goes for any single style of video content. People will get bored. And if we haven’t punctuated it enough, online audiences are fickle and easily swayed by the latest shiny object (i.e., a new video from a competitor).

Our Attention Spans Are Fickle
What does digital do to our attention spans? Well, as we talked about in Chapter 3, the proliferation of digital channels and content feeds our need for novelty. In fact, one could argue that it addicts us. But there are others, like Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to our Brain, who believe that the Internet is stripping away our ability to focus on longer, more in-depth content (such as books): “And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation.” This is perhaps related to the way we are wired: “as soon as something in the environment changes, we need to take notice because it might mean danger—or opportunity.”11 In other words, the more information there is for us to find, the more distracted we get. Video, because it’s constantly in motion, challenges us to keep watching to make sure we don’t miss something that could mean “life or death” (well, perhaps in a primitive way, deep in our subconscious).

That’s why we have to keep our entire digital presence fresh. The best way to do that with video is by having a stable of video formats to choose from:

  • Customer testimonial videos: What beats having customers talk about your product or your brand in their own words? Not only are they great for communicating with prospects and other customers, because it is flattering to be considered an “unofficial spokesperson,” testimonial videos are also a great way to cement long-term relationships with key customers.
  • Company/brand story: What’s the history behind the organization? What is its story? Company story videos, when told from the perspective of executives, employees, founders, customers, and others, can create a lasting emotional impression.
  • Product reviews: Third-party opinion videos can add a lot of credibility especially in conjunction with customer testimonials.
  • Product demonstrations: Showing people how to use your product, doing a feature walk-through, or showing people actually using the product are awesome uses for video. These do not need high production value. Google+ Hangouts provide a perfect home-brew approach to demonstrating products and services. Adding a “live” element can drive up demand. Remember to record them so that you can make them available later to people who couldn’t attend the live event.
  • Video Blog: The goal of incorporating video into your digital presence is to mimic the face-to-face interaction that is so necessary for establishing trust in the real world. Video blogs are extremely intimate. Two of the best creators? Robert Scoble12 and Chris Pirillo.13 Both of them use video to help establish virtual, yet personal, relationships with their audiences.
  • Animations: There are many services out there to help you create animated videos of your ideas. Sometimes, the best and most cost-effective means of expressing complex ideas is through animation.
  • Ad-hoc: Not every video needs to be driven by a script. With devices like Google Glass, Go Pro, and your smartphone, you can capture all sorts of video whenever you want. At a trade show? Interview a customer. At a conference? Run a survey. There are many ways you can use video every day to simulate the effect of face-to-face interactions.
Mobile: The Complicating Factor
No need to beat around the bush on this one—mobile complicates delivering video. You have to worry about screen size. You have to worry about bandwidth (which means that you need to provide your video in multiple bit rates). You have to worry about format (many mobile phones require a particular video format that is different from what you would deliver to a desktop computer). And if we are to believe Google in “The New Multi-Screen World: Understanding Cross-Platform Consumer Behavior,” consumers are employing more screens every day (see Figure 10.1).

Figure 10.1 Our Daily Media Interactions by Device

Source: Google.

image

Summing It Up

It’s clear that face-to-face communication is important because it helps us generate trust, the most important element to relationships. In fact, according to psychologist J. B. Rotter, “The entire fabric of our day-to-day living, of our social world, rests on trust—buying gasoline, paying taxes, going to the dentist, flying to a convention—almost all our decisions involve trusting someone else.”14 It’s a sentiment that everyone can relate to when they step back and think hard about how they interact with the world—the ability to form relationships and operate in the social world is completely predicated on trust.15

In the digital world, that face-to-face is embodied in video, which, thankfully, we have a real penchant for watching. In fact, we love to watch moving pictures, which probably accounts for the fact that we are watching more and more as we migrate from traditional TV to a more multiscreen behavior. Thankfully, there are lots of different kinds of video we can create that will add variety in a world where attention is so fleeting.

Helpful Takeaways

Developing a strategy to incorporate video into the way you engage with your audience will undoubtedly have measurable business impact—more time spent on site, better conversions, and improved engagement. But the real win? When you incorporate real people into your videos, you build the trust that you’ll need to develop the relationships you want with your audience. Here are some helpful tips, tricks, techniques, and things you can do today. Note that these aren’t in any particular order.

  • It’s okay for your video to be “home-grown.” A lot of organizations fear that if their video isn’t “Hollywood quality,” that people won’t take it seriously. Far from the case. If you remember what Michael Dubin of Dollar Shave Club accomplished with $4k and a video camera, you’ll realize two things: first, that the content of your video is far more significant than what it looks like; and second, that having a face in your video really adds that personal touch, which makes the whole endeavor more authentic.
  • When it’s live, there’s built-in demand. Ever feel obligated to try a new restaurant or club when there’s a line? Do you feel the urge to get the latest smartphone before anyone else has one? There’s a psychological reason for that (called FOMO or “fear of missing out”), which you can capitalize on by having live events.16 Perhaps you host a Google+ Hangout with a couple of customers to let people ask questions. Or you demonstrate the use of your product. Or you just have a live event to talk about a critical challenge in the market (part of being helpful).
  • You don’t have to go it alone. Video can be complicated—from setting up the servers to deliver it, to having the bandwidth to support multiple viewers, to converting video from one format into another. It can be so complicated that many organizations shy away from incorporating video at all. But there are countless partners out there (organizations that will help you create your video, organizations that will help you store and deliver it) to help you be successful with adding video to your audience-engagement strategy.
  • Don’t put all your eggs into one YouTube basket. YouTube is great. With billions of video minutes watched each day (and the second largest search engine), having your video on the site improves your chances for discovery. But YouTube won’t provide you the kind of analytics you need to understand user engagement behavior with your content. And, let’s be frank: if your video is hot, YouTube benefits . . . not you. When you publish your video, you should send it to as many external channels as you can but always have them point back to your website.
  • Don’t forget your call to actions. The worst thing is watching a video that is disconnected from the rest of a digital presence. Sure, people know that your organization produced it, but they aren’t sure what to do afterwards. Always put a call to action in your videos and their descriptions. Make sure your video is clearly part of your larger story so that people understand where it fits in the greater scheme of things.
  • Write your own script. Dubin wrote his, and you need to tell your story yourself, too. Get help from the experts to hone and polish, but do not let anyone outside the organization try to write your story.
  • Get to the point. Fast. Dubin’s “F∗∗king Great” sign glues your eyeballs to the screen for the rest of the video.
  • Make it their story, not yours. The problem is their problem. Buying razors is an expensive hassle for you. Here is why. Here is how we fix it.
  • Show, don’t tell. Dubin could have described the quality of his blades, but chose to show you a child shaving a man’s head with them instead.
  • Prove it. Use whatever you have. Case studies and customer references are best, but find a way to present proof. On the day Dollar Shave Club launched, Dubin had no proof that what he was selling—a monthly subscription to razors—would capture customers. So, instead he relied on swagger and humor to win his audience’s confidence.
  • Focus. Make sure you know what the purpose of your video is, and stick to it. What is the goal? Do you want to convert attention into sales? Garner votes? Save souls? Stick to one purpose per video.
  • Ask for the order. Don’t be afraid to close your audience on taking the next step in building the relationship. Like us, share this video, sign up for our newsletter, download our white paper, buy our shoes, join our club—don’t leave them guessing.
  • Promote the blazes out of it. Tag it and post it everywhere—blogs, websites, Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, everywhere.

Notes

1. Susan Cain, Quiet (New York: Broadway Books, 2012).

2. S. Ketkar, N. Kock, R. Parente, and J. Verville, “The Impact of Individualism on Buyer-Supplier Relationship Norms, Trust and Market Performance: An Analysis of Data from Brazil and the U.S.A.” International Business Review 21 (2012): 782–793.

3. Cisco, “Cisco Visual Networking Index: Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast Update, 2012–2017,” February 6, 2013, www.cisco.com/en/US/solutions/collateral/ns341/ns525/ns537/ns705/ns827/white_paper_c11-520862.html.

4. Cisco, “The Zettabyte Era—Trends and Analysis,” www.cisco.com/en/US/solutions/collateral/ns341/ns525/ns537/ns705/ns827/VNI_Hyperconnectivity_WP.html.

5. R. E. Mayer and R. Moreno, “Nine Ways to Reduce Cognitive Load in Multimedia Learning,” Educational Psychology 38, no. 1 (2003): 43–52.

6. Adam T. Sutton, “How To: Content Marketing: Videos Attrach 300% More Traffic and Nurture Leads,” MarketingSherpa.com, December 14, 2012, www.marketingsherpa.com/article/how-to/videos-attract-300-more-traffic.

7. Amy Dusto, “Online Videos Help Build Confidence in Purchases,” InternetRetailer.com, April 5, 2012, www.internetretailer.com/2012/04/05/online-videos-help-build-confidence-purchases.

8. Internet Retailer via www.invodo.com/resources/statistics/.

9. Daisy Whitney, Product Videos Drive Online Purchase Rates; Nine Times Increases in Views,” Mediapost.com, January 11, 2012, www.mediapost.com/publications/article/165580/product-videos-drive-online-purchase-rates-nine-t.html.

10. Jens Riegelsberger, M. Angela Sasse, and John D. McCarthy, “Do People Trust Their Eyes More Than Their Ears? Media Bias While Seeking Expert Advice,”www0.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/j.riegelsberger/lbr_188_do_people_trust_2_final.pdf.

11. Maya Pines, “Sensing Change in the Environment,” Seeing, Hearing, and Smelling in the World: A Report from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, February, 1995, www.hhmi.org/senses/a120.html.

12. www.facebook.com/RobertScoble.

13. http://chris.pirillo.com/.

14. J. B. Rotter, “Generalized Expectancies for Interpersonal Trust,” American Psychologist 26 (1970): 443–452.

15. E. Erikson, Childhood and Society (New York: Norton & Company, 1950).

16. Rishon Roberts, “This Beer Can Proves That FOMO Makes Us Buy Things,” Business Insider, August 8, 2013, www.businessinsider.com/psychology-of-buying-exclusivity-drives-purchases-2013-8.

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