7. The Empathy Curve and Your Online Identity

The video sets up a “soldiers in foreign war zone” scenario, to show two groups of armed men, with a member of one group shouting agitatedly at the other and gesticulating with his AK47. Because this is a British Army recruitment video, obviously one group is British Army soldiers led by an officer; the other is an unidentified armed group. The scenario looks set for escalation and mayhem until the moment the British Army officer removes his sunglasses to make eye contact with his shouting counterpart.

At that moment a very human connection is made. The shouting dies down and the scene devolves from a high-tension moment to an anticlimactic situation of two people trying to understand each other. The video can be seen on YouTube here: http://goo.gl/wGIqho.

The point, made by the video incredibly well, is that eye contact is important. It is how we have been biologically designed to “assess” another person and the situation we are in. Many TV advertisements in the past employed the use of eye contact to connect with their audience in a way that engenders trust and makes the message more accessible.

As a technique this is so effective that it is still employed today, as shown in Figure 7.1 in a government ad in Ireland aimed at parents.

Figure 7.1 The use of eye contact in ads is the surest way, still, of capturing attention, “stopping” the eye long enough for whatever message the ad contains to work on the mind.

The “ploy,” if we can call it that, never seems to date. It is employed right across the board in advertisements that push anything from books and films to perfume and aftershave, as Figure 7.2 shows.

Figure 7.2 The use of eye contact appears to be a standard device used endlessly by the advertising industry for a very specific reason: because it works.

The reason all this is pertinent here is that ads are meant to do a very specific thing: communicate a message that helps us form a sense of identity and engender trust in a product. Funnily enough, this is also what Hangouts on Air can do for brands and businesses. But there is a difference here and it is an important one. Stills, images, and carefully controlled ads lack spontaneity and, in the days of social media, come tainted with the suspicion of the carefully staged “reality.”

Hangouts on Air, on the other hand, take place in real time. Even the most carefully scripted one has an element of interactivity that makes it totally unpredictable and that raises its value in terms of it being “real” and therefore more trustworthy. Above and beyond everything else we have covered here, this is the most important benefit.

This is the ultimate channel for the kind of relationship management that marketing researcher Patrick E. Murphy was envisioning when he wrote in a paper for the University of Notre Dame in Indiana: “[I] envision relationship marketing as passing through three stages: establishment, maintenance and reinforcement.” The name of the paper was “An Ethical Basis for Relationship Marketing: A Virtue Ethics Perspective.”

Hangouts on Air provide an unparalleled opportunity to establish a channel that helps initiate all three stages of relationship marketing. The reason it can become so effective lies in the disambiguation of intent that the direct contact with another person whose body language you can see and whose eyes can meet brings into the medium of communication marketing.

Suddenly, it is not just what you say but how you say it and to whom that makes all the difference. This takes “marketing”—an activity that in the past was associated with mass media and mass communication and “one size fits all” approaches—and makes it personal, personable, and human.

Framing the argument in an article in London’s premier marketing magazine, The Hub, Jason Sorley, shopper-marketing Director of Marketing Drive, wrote: “Only three percent of in-store marketing communications is currently passed and seen by shoppers, according to POPAI’s MARI project, conducted by Sheridan Global Consulting. So, the biggest barrier facing a brand’s point-of-sale is simply to get noticed. To look at the problem another way, consider that 97 percent of in-store communication is completely missed by shoppers.” And he concluded that “brands that empathize both rationally and visually get more attention at the shelf.”

We see here in this description a sudden alignment of aims. The ability to get noticed, which is what every company or brand wants, coincides with the ability to connect. And after a connection is made, after a brand is “talking” to its target audience, things change. Marketing is assessed in a different light. Purchasing decisions are made based on shared values and personalized messages.

Hangouts on Air are a unique medium in that respect: direct, subversive as far as sleek marketing traditions go, and disruptive in the transparency they create. In a “marketing” environment where a company or a brand uses a HOA to connect with its customers, it lays the organizational structure bare by showing its very human element: people talking to people. This establishes the fact that connections can only really be made by people with people.

This is as radical an approach as you might think it is. One that requires an equally radical rethink of how direct marketing is done, how video is employed, and how its impact is then linked to the generation of brand equity and sales. At its most basic a Hangout on Air, in its totality, should be the perfect answer to the question “How do you show you care?”

This is a question that traditional advertising has never asked, never mind answered. Brands and companies are great at projecting product value but very poor at communicating how they care. This is now changing, and there is one ingredient, indeed, just one, that is required to make every Hangout on Air a total answer to this simple question.

That ingredient is empathy. In the next section we will see just how it should be used.

There are good reasons why this happened. What is important to us, however, is not the “why” but the fact that those reasons have now been outgrown. Marketing in that fashion can no longer happen, and we have to relearn to do the very thing that came naturally to us in the past.

In a landmark 372-page study conducted for the University of Nottingham in the United Kingdom, philosopher Veronica Reid looked at the role empathy plays in services in modern marketing to come up with five precepts that govern the behavior of customers (which she called the five antecedents of expectation):

1. Tangibles: The physical facilities and equipment and the appearance of personnel.

2. Reliability: The follow-through in providing what is promised, dependably and accurately.

3. Responsiveness: The willingness to help customers and provide prompt service.

4. Assurance: The knowledge and courtesy of employees and their ability to convey trust and confidence.

5. Empathy: The degree of caring and individual attention provided to customers.

She concluded: “The findings indicate that service quality expectations are significantly influenced by the five antecedents of expectations investigated and that word-of-mouth communications and past personal experience explained a greater proportion of the variance in service quality expectations than explicit and implicit service promises. Adding to previous studies, findings show that advertising was significant only as an antecedent of Tangible expectations, word-of-mouth communications was particularly important in developing Empathy expectations, and price was most important for developing Customer Care expectations.”

Empathy is central to maintaining a relationship, creating authenticity, and driving loyalty (which means brand value) because it’s based on a personal identification between a prospective customer and the human face of a brand.

The question here is, how do you establish this in a Hangout on Air where you have your own set goals to meet and a fluid situation with a live audience? The formula is as old as the hills even if the medium where it is applied is futuristic:

• Listen: Take careful note of what is being said. Seek to understand your customers’ point of view, and ask for clarity and qualifiers when necessary. Establish that essentially you are both on the same side of what is being discussed even if your views are opposing: You both want to resolve the issue or question and arrive at an answer. Collect facts but also listen to emotions. Do not dismiss them as unimportant because they are always part of the picture.

• Identify: After you have all the facts and have identified the problems, break down all the issues involved, including any emotional ones, so that they can be examined.

• Agree: Your interlocutors cannot know that you have understood a problem and seen their point of view, and you cannot know whether they have understood that you grasped the issues, unless you plainly discuss the issues by itemizing them and agreeing on them.

• Respond: This is the clincher. How you respond here will make all the other steps you took either meaningless or supremely meaningful. If your final response is corporate in the sense that you utter some meaningless marketing babble and brush customers off, you will have lost any possibility of empathizing with them. If, on the other hand, you respond as you would like to be treated if you were in their shoes, then the human connection we prize so much will have been made in the easiest way possible.

The manner and tone of the response also determine how successful you are at making that human connection that Hangouts on Air make so easy and how successful you are at being authentic.

A traditional marketer would never, for instance, admit culpability, say they’re sorry, or suggest they might not know something. Being genuine, however, also means behaving like a real person. The Hangout on Air environment is fluid and unpredictable. It is okay to do the following:

• Say you’re sorry

• Explain that you don’t know something

• Admit that you’ve made a mistake

These are all human emotions that do not easily fit into traditional marketing techniques. We are, in social media networks in general and in Google+ in particular, in a new marketing environment. One we live in as well as work in, and that makes all the difference. Its dynamic takes us back to the rustic village square of the past, where relationships were driven by two primary and closely related vectors: trust and empathy.

As Figure 7.3 shows, these two also determine likely outcomes in any kind of relational exchange, whether it is reputational in value or transactional (that is, a purchase).

Figure 7.3 Empathy and trust are key determinants in the way people relate to organizations and also in the way organizations relate to their target audience. The particular combination of empathy and trust that has been achieved determines the behavioral quadrant that is activated.

Within the Hangouts on Air environment certain things become easier. The hoop jumping that is usually involved in identity-creation efforts when there is no visual, personal contact involved disappears.

Tone and style are back in fashion as an identity-creation aid, as indeed is style of dress. In a visual/auditory environment all the visual/auditory cues apply afresh, with the important modifier that now, visual takes place in a social media environment. Treat this as an opportunity to do something different rather than the means to finally become a TV-style broadcaster. Approach it with the intention to push the envelope and experiment rather than start from a comfort-zone position.

Use Hangouts on Air to extend your connections, create better resources and access to those you communicate with, and foster a better understanding of who you are and what you do as a business and a brand. The technology is developing all the time, the uptake is increasing, and as it extends to mobile devices there might well come a time when a quick two-minute connection might save hours of emailing and troubleshooting.

The dictum that “online you are the content you create and the content you share” takes on new shape and form and obviously power when it comes to Hangouts on Air. Here, technology brings into the same plane your content and yourself in a visual image that is a clear representation of a very real person. To put it bluntly, in a Hangout on Air things are about as personal as you could wish them to be. This also dictates just how you behave in the medium.

In a forum discussion I took part in in Singapore to help develop online, digital, visual identities for global corporations, the attendants came up with five points that form a moral compass to help guide behavior. These were the points:

• Courtesy: Being courteous in how you conduct yourself and treat others sets immediate standards of expectation and, also, reputation. In an online environment where semantic density is so easily achieved, courtesy is required to an even higher degree than in an offline one, where there is a greater degree of redundancy in the way we communicate and “noise” can easily hide a “signal” that’s less than courteous.

• Integrity: Make sure you set out what you stand for, and stand for it regardless. Right always has to be right, just as wrong has to be wrong. In light of this, Google’s “Don’t Be Evil” slogan seems way ahead of its time in the way it is meant to help the company operate. Integrity is a reputational requirement and as such it is a component of trust.

• Perseverance: Set goals and stick with them. The current online environment is a paradox. Having at our disposal tools that allow us to connect with millions at once, we have to first crystallize all the reasons why a single individual should give us his time and attention. Define this first, persist in pursuing it, and the rest will follow.

• Self-control: This is a critical requirement. Unlike the offline world, our digital environment now creates permanent records and also magnifies every signal. “Losing it” is inexcusable and arguably catastrophic to one’s reputation and marketing plans. Always strive to use empathy to understand others first and consider their point of view before responding.

• Indomitable Spirit: Visual marketing, social media, and Hangouts on Air are not for the faint of heart or those who will wilt at the first obstacle. Yes, the online environment is hugely welcoming, but it is also a hard one to crack and one that expects you to prove your mettle and worth. No one is given an automatic free ride and that is exactly as it should be. Be bold and be brave and push the envelope to see how far you get.

These five principles are an easy hanger upon which you can rely to create an online identity, which can then be tailored to who you are and what you do through your own unique input.

In this final chapter we explored some of the options and the dynamics governing it all, so here’s what I hope you learned:

• Hangouts on Air are your “sunglasses moment” as a company or brand; they are the means through which you take off the mask and show that you are a person first, with very real concerns. It is the point at which you make a real connection with your online target audience.

• Empathy is key. If you cannot empathize with the people you hope to do business with, understanding their concerns and point of view, then it is unlikely that you will ever be able to do anything else online beyond copying traditional mass-marketing techniques, which do not work, and replicating them in an environment that is not really suited for them.

• Authenticity is a must. Despite the fact that we looked at a formulaic approach to creating it, you need to experiment with ways to help make you, well, you. This means working to identify what you really are as a brand, person, or business—what values give you your uniqueness and how you project them in an online world.

• Identity is a construct. It is created by the way we behave, the connections we make, and the content or message we broadcast because they become the “code” that means what we stand for and who we are. Your online identity is your responsibility. No one else’s.

• Hangouts on Air are a unique opportunity. This is the most disruptive marketing opportunity we have had for a long time. At a stroke you can dispel doubts about who you are and what you do, reach people, form relationships, and create new potential customers, and you can do it both in real time and asynchronously, increasing your marketing footprint with time.