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You’d have to be a mind reader! How could you simply guess about what will trigger thoughts and feelings that would be conducive to connection & influence.
It’s a Facebook World
If you “knew” when someone was scared, distrusting, connected, distant, distracted, disturbed, in denial….that could be a big advantage in selling and in marketing in general.
The fact is that as I take a tour around Facebook, there are 1,000,000,000 people that have a page. That’s a whole bunch of people.
You can select any person at random and find out precisely how they say they are feeling…you can also see what they had for lunch. I pick on a lot of people for sharing their “food photos.” I’ve never taken a picture of food…on purpose. BUT, when you KNOW what kind of food people LOVE, as in LUST, that can be useful in the context of influence, right?
Can you imagine how much easier it is to influence ANYONE when you have the information they’ve put out there for the world to see in their profile and on their timeline?
Facebook is the best free marketing research you could ever hope to have. And it costs you nothing but a few hours to find out who your clients and customers are.
Everything you ever wanted to know about human feelings and NEEDS is THERE.
And it’s shaping our feelings and expression OFF the web and in the real world too. I’ll talk about that later. In fact, when I show you how to utilize what you learn on Facebook for marketing (a few weeks down the road) you will be enlightened.
Find out how they feel and what they feel ABOUT, and you get a pretty darn good sampling of the universe they represent.
The most important thing you learn on Facebook is how each person “decides” they will trust YOU.
I understand = They like you.
Read a person’s Facebook profile. Read their Google Plus, Twitter and LinkedIn Profiles. People want you to know all of this about them. 20 years ago, marketers dug for 1% of this kind of information. Now, people tell you what they like, hate, eat, drink, what their relationship is like and you see photos of them and all the people they want you to see photos of them with.
Think about it.
You live in a rare time where you can know almost everything about another person long before you meet them.
And when you know people, you can understand them. That means they LIKE YOU. Liking is almost as important as trust when it comes to influence. In some contexts it’s more important. They like you ==> They are more likely to trust you and do business with you.
You and I do business with people we like if we can.
“They don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.” Zig Ziglar
Turns out it’s not just a cool notion, it’s brain science.
Developing Empathy
If empathy is so important to persuasion and selling then the obvious question for the non-empathic person is, “how does someone develop empathy?”.
Empathy comes from observing others in situations and life experiences and then watching what happens to them: seeing their reactions and responses, watching the expressions on their faces, seeing their body language, and learning what it all means.
A lot of people shut themselves off from “emotional things” or “bad things” (like the news or newspaper), and therefore have little ability to experience empathy. They literally don’t have a range of emotional experience.
You want to make it your goal to observe people having emotional moments. Joy, happiness, surprise, anger, contempt, disgust, apathy. You want to know how those things all feel inside.
Those in denial are only matched by the pathological. These are an often dangerous lot and they make up 1 in 20. Unfortunately they often possess characteristics that are believable and plausible. It often takes a few conversations before you realize the sociopath is not simply unsettling.
You can influence as a sociopath, but you’re better off developing empathy. That means it’s time to give those mirror neurons a workout and become truly influential.
OK, let’s do the Mirror Neuron Work Out, and with your permission I’d like to give you one of the most potent persuasion tactics you’ll ever use.
You see it all the time but never pay any attention to it.
Every single day you observe how people replicate other people’s behavior. From dawn til dusk people consistently do what other people do. When one child jumps on Mom’s back, the other follows suit.
The toy one child plays with is precisely the one the other child wants. All of the other toys combined can’t become as valuable as The Taken Toy.
A meme is basically an idea that jumps from one person’s brain into another person’s brain. Manifested in the real world that’s like one guy shouts “DEE-FENSE” and the guy next to him does the same.
Meme: Sounds like repeating constellations of neurons at work to me…
This phenomenon never goes away. As people age, the experiences become more common. Now people don’t just do what other people do, they look at other people with the same facial expressions and with the same body postures. Even the worst of enemies “feel” or “sense” a similarity when this occurs.
The Mirror Neuron Memetic Workout
Pay close attention to this every single day. Begin noting contexts and who is replicating other people’s actions and who is not. Ask yourself WHY? Over and over again.
Mirror neurons contribute to skills such as empathy, socialized behavior, and language acquisition. The new findings contribute to our understanding of how conceptually related instances of language and action, and sound and action, are linked in the brain, and how the brain distinguishes actions perpetrated by “self” and by “other.”
Mirror neurons were first identified in the cortex of macaque monkeys: A particular subset of these neurons fire when, for example, a monkey picks up a banana, and when the monkey observes a human picking up a banana in a similar way.
Mirror neuron activity appears to be highly specific, such that a somewhat different set of mirror neurons would fire if a banana were poked, for example, rather than picked up. There is also evidence that mirror neurons link actions not only with visual stimuli, but also with other types of sensory cues. Technical limitations have impeded identification of individual mirror neurons in humans, but brain-imaging studies support the existence of these neurons. Ultimately whether it’s one cell or a million, is not important. What matters is that BEHAVIORALLY you have predictable results.
Researchers used a brain-imaging technique to investigate how literal phrases describing actions performed by the mouth, hand, or foot influenced cortical neurons that are activated by the sight of actions being performed by mouth, hand, or foot.
The researchers found a significant concordance between activation of certain cortical areas in response to linguistic descriptions and observed actions relating to the different body parts carrying out the actions.
For example, when individuals read literal phrases such as “biting the peach” or “biting the banana,” some brain areas activated that were also stimulated by videos of fruit being bitten. Similar findings were obtained for hand actions (for example, grasping a pen) and foot actions (for example, pressing a piano pedal).
Together, the findings suggest that mirror neurons play a key role in the mental “re-enactment” of actions when linguistic descriptions of those actions are conceptually processed.
Triggering mirror neurons at the right moment can be downright life altering.
Imagine how signing a check for the waiter might trigger the brain of the person to be engaged in the process of signing the deal…
Imagine how you giving someone a remote control in the living room might cause them to flip on the TV… Imagine how when you read about the TV being flipped on, you actually saw the process of grabbing the remote control and flipping it on in your own mind…
You’ve always wanted to run someone’s brain, now you have one of the actual keys.
And there is another way to influence the person with Mirror Neurons as the conduit…
It all means that people are triggered to ACT and BEHAVE by tiny little things like gestures and pens. Things once thought unimportant in shifting behavior now are most obviously very important.
It’s pretty clear.
Ideas jump from brain to brain. Behaviors are replicated and predictably so.
You can activate their brain to act with images, words, sounds, pictures. Become effective at this skill and you will find people “mirroring you” quite quickly. They will become comfortable with you in almost a moment.
Here’s what I’ve done for 20 years with predictable results. I first wrote about this in The Psychology of Persuasion.
What does it mean to forge an empathetic relationship? Continue reading…
