Trust me!

My interest in social media as a tool and a phenomenon has recently led me in the direction of thinking a lot about the issue of trust. If you want to inform people, to spread the word, to educate or enlighten then there are several efficient methods for doing this using the Internet. There are many ways to draw traffic to your site and channels through which you can push out e-mails, for example. Spreading information requires of course thought and work but it's not that difficult. It becomes a totally different issue when you want people to act on that information. Whatever it is you want them to do: to help you spread the information further, to change their behaviour, to buy something, to support something and so on. This is when you also need trust and credibility.

So, simply put, whenever you're selling in the broader sense of the word then you need to invest in building relationships with other people that involve some degree of trust. Of course that's not to say that you don't need trust or credibility to spread information. Without some possibility of judging its source the information can become quite worthless. But there's a big step involved in getting people to act.

So if you take the example of standing in front of an audience holding a presentation and you need to make the transition from being a credible source of information to a trustworthy influencer of people's behaviour, how do do this? Well, I have a lot to say about this! Not really enough room here, but here's one simple thing.

Take a look at this video on TED.com: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/shai_agassi_on_electric_cars.html

Watch it without the sound for a while. This is a person who has a tremendously powerful message. Credibility at a high level and impressive in many ways. I think this comes across even without hearing the words. And I think one of the reasons has to do with his posture. This is a good example of what is sometimes called the Professor's Stance. Leaning slightly forward, hands clasped in front of the chest, shoulders slightly forward and maybe a bit raised. Head also forward, gaze predominantly downwards. You can contrast this with the so-called Heart Stance where the solar plexus is projected forward, head slightly back, chin up, eyes looking mostly upwards and accompanied by a wide and open gestures with the hands. 

The professor's stance gives an impression of a learned person, of introversion, of attention to detail and all the things we associate with an intellectual. But it shuts out other people. It gives us an impression of a closed world to which we're not admitted and unfortunately is often accompanied by a language that does the same thing, full of specialised terms, details and complications.

The heart stance is a collection of gestures that signals "you can trust me, I have nothing to hide, and I trust you not to attack me!" the throat is exposed, the gaze is open and direct, palms of the hands are visible and more importantly the sensitive area on the inside of the wrists.

This is all extremely powerful stuff. It sends signals that go directly to our unconscious primitive selves and it's quite hard to ignore the gut feeling that we get. So despite the fact that this person is talking great sense and there are many things in the message that convince us intellectually,  I'm not sure that he would succeed in actually getting people to act. In other words really SELLING the ideas. And in just one word: trust. We are, after all, mostly unmoved by logic or purpose or intention, unfortunately. If we were, not many people would smoke... Gut feelings, a relationship with the person who's influencing us and motivation that comes from our emotions are just some of the things that are needed to get people to spring into action. 

So body language is just one small thing, in a situation where you're giving a talk. As I said, there's a WHOLE lot more.