How to write powerful headlines, scoring IFA websites, and what to say with your hands.

Hello, and thank you for tuning in to today's episode of the Speak PR Podcast. My name is Jim James, and I'm your host, and I'm talking to you from my newly refurbished studio here in the UK. When I say refurbished, it's because I have put in some new blinds, got a fan because the children are still in lockdown, and so I have renovated the garden shed, and I'm now calling it. The studio. So, uh, it's my own little domain. Very proud of it too, and it's very comfortable. And I think it reminds me of the, uh, of the time nearly 25 years ago, back in 1995, when I left England at the age of 28 to set up my first company in Singapore, East West PR. So on the 14th of June, I should be celebrating starting that company up where I left England With a couple of suitcases and set up East West Public Relations. Here I am now, back all these years later on, and I'm still doing DIY to get the show on the road. So this morning, first thing though, I was listening to the great Progress Shed webinar led by the team here at Action Coach, and on the call this morning was Brian Hill. And Brian Hill is a multidisciplinary expert. He's a financial planner, a ski instructor, and also lives in Italy. But he's also just finished his MSc, and he is a specialist in body language and body language training. So listening to Brian this morning, and he was talking about the, the way that body language communicates so much about us. And I was interested in that, as always, because over 60% of all of our language is non-verbal, which means in PR, if we are writing press releases or doing anything that doesn't show the people, one of the greatest challenges is how you communicate the energy and the personality of the client and the, and the founder and of the product. So Brian was speaking this morning about the, about the 3-2-7 rule, and he was saying that there are 3 red flags that can be seen by people, that there could be 2 channels such as the hands, the eyes, what people say, and the general time limit is 7 seconds. People can catch themselves again within 7 seconds and move on to the next emotional response. Now it appears that a sneer is the cardinal sin, where one side of the face lifts up slightly. And, uh, and really, I guess this is where the Janus face concept comes from, um, from Latin times with the two-faced person. And he showed pictures of people, including Donald Trump, with a smirk on one side and on the other. Now I personally have a bit of a problem in that A number of years ago, about five years ago, I suffered from amablastoma, which is a tumor of the jaw, and it's rendered my left side of my face slightly without the same well without the same kind of nerve feelings and the same kind of control. So I think that sometimes I'm quite self-conscious now with video and otherwise because part of my face isn't isn't always feeling like it's exactly under my control. But I don't think I need to. I hope I don't have to explain that every time I see someone. I hope that they don't see that I'm in some way dismissing them or what they're saying. But Brian was talking about how we have all these different emotions, and they're expressed through our hands and our eyes and our words and our body language. And interesting enough, saying that the hands are the the greatest give or tell of all. I had thought it was the eyes, but it's the hands apparently that give the most indication of what people are thinking. And some studies were done on, uh, in juries where if the, if the person, the accused, had their hands under the table, their propensity to convict those people and consider them to be guilty was greater than if they had their hands above the table. Of course, I've just written recently about Boris Johnson having both hands on the table in his address but with clenched fists, and the impression of frustration and anger that that has given or shown that he's feeling at the time. So Brian mentioned the author Allan Pease and his wife, who— Allan is an Australian body language expert and the author of of over 15 books, and they've written some books of which 10 apparently are number one. And they talk about smiling and about watching— if you watch the video, he talks about how even tribes will all kind of lift their forehead slightly in recognition. They'll smile, show teeth with a proper crow's foot, and that they will then have some kind of a handshake which is an even straight-up handshake. And Alan says that the handshake actually comes originally from arm wrestling. So we have a straight up rather than over the top or underneath expression when we shake hands. So I asked the question about, well, what happens with Zoom? Because often with Zoom we don't see the people, we just see a small postage stamp. And the view and the studies apparently are that our cameras are too close on our desktops. And it's really a great case for buying an external camera. I have an external Logitech camera that I use so that really you can get a head and shoulders. And you'll notice some of the more professional presenters, and of course on TV, they'll have the whole upper body. So it might be that going forward, as we do PR interviews, for example with journalists, that we ask our clients to make sure that they are further away from the computer And that they're at eye level. Because at the moment when we're doing interviews and people are using their computers, or if you're using your computer camera, almost always it will be below. It'll be almost like an adult-child relationship in terms of the camera, which is bad body posture and bad body language. So we're ushering in now this challenge where we're looking at a camera and looking at a screen And our focus might be on the subject matter of the, of the screen, but we're trying to look at the camera. This creates some challenges. So what can we do then to overcome that? And one of the first things that we're talking about today is to make sure that if you are going to be on camera, can you stand back a little bit? Can you make sure that you're lit? And can you ensure somehow that your hands, even at the beginning, are in your screen. Now Brian is living in Italy, so he actually gesticulates a good deal, like anybody I suppose in Italy would. But realistically, we need to think about if we're not doing presentations at conferences and at regular meetings, how do we compensate for that when we're doing online? Brian then kindly offered to share his dissertation, and I And I asked for it, and I read that this afternoon, and it's fantastic. And what he's done actually is research on the impact of your website on the impression that a website gives on first impression to people that are about to visit your company. And of course, this is an extension of what happens when you are looking at somebody. The website is a proxy for the human, for the body, and for the face. And Brian writes about the what they call the ISCE, the immediate surface credibility evaluation for websites. So he's saying, what does your website say about you and your company on first impressions? And they had over 300 people take the test or take the the response, and they they analyzed ten IFA independent financial advisory firm. Websites. And, and what they found was that it did make a difference, that the color, the simplicity, the symmetry, and the prototypicality— in other words, does it look like everything else and what's to be expected— did impact the impression of the IFA's worthiness, their credibility, and interestingly enough, their expertise. Now, what's interesting about that for me is that often companies will delegate their website and indeed their PR to a third party. And having built websites for clients, they often think that it's a bit of text and a nice picture, and they don't see it as a direct extension of the DNA of the company. If you have a website, take another look at it and see Does it represent you and your company? Does it represent the products? And if someone was to visit that website, what, what impression would they be getting about you and your company? And does it stand out? Does it differentiate? Now, David Ogilvy, the advertising guru, wrote that 5 times as many people read the headline as the body copy. So when you've written your headline, you spent 80 cents of your advertising dollar. So on a website, there's often a tendency to put a great deal of content, but actually it could be the headlines and the workflow or the funnels that are really impactful. So Brian's research shows that the initial impression is very important, and the Ogilvy observation shows that we have a few things that we can say about ourselves or our product that will make an impact within those first 4 minutes. As Alan Pease said, you really have 4 minutes to make an impression. My experience on my website and websites of clients is that people will stay for about a minute to 2 minutes. Bounce rates may be as high as 30 to 40 or even higher. So the internet, you may have even less than that. So as I mentioned, I'm planning 25 years of East West PR on the 14th of June. And I, I've been trying, um, a new website called coscheduled.com because in light of what Brian has been saying and in light of what David O'Goffey is saying, I've been wondering, well, how do I represent myself? So I wrote in a headline which I might write as a press release because I, I know and have shared that press releases are what people want to read as journalists. And I wrote in, PR agency reaches 25 years And had a score of 66. Then I wrote in amazing PR agency scores 25 years of service in Asia, and I had a score of 64. So I had on emotions a 0%, 20% on common words, 10% on uncommon, 10% on power for the word amazing. 52 characters is about right. Apparently 55 is the optimum length. But my 10 words is too many. So when skimming content, most readers will tend to read the first and the last words of a headline, and 8 to 10 words is plenty. So I tried a new one, which is, how obnoxious staring Brit hits jackpot in forbidden Asia, but I got a 74. How to Write Powerful Headlines, which is the co-scheduled remit standard one, got 77. So my obnoxious daring Brit hits jackpot in forbidden Asia got 22% on emotional, 22% on power, 22% on common, and 0 on being uncommon. So we can see actually writing a headline is really not such an easy thing. After all, whether it's for press releases or for direct mail or for advertising. Now, on this website, they share a, a list of words, and I've downloaded them and I'll upload them, and you can, you can get them from eastwestpr.com. But they have words that drive traffic shares and search results and include emotion words like bumbling, catastrophe, colossal, delightful. Arrogant. And they have words like nightmare, payback, peril, provocative, surrender, underhanded. So common words— at, from, to, me— joining words can be minimal. But much like our companies, our keywords on our websites and in our press releases and in our videos all need to be solving a problem for somebody else. Their pro tip is to write a headline that suggests or promise a solution. So their pro tip is how to do something that will help you to do something else. The challenge with that, of course, is that if you're sending out a lot of content, then you're going to be keeping repeating the how But as we know, there's the how, what, why, when, and who, and where our businesses are solving all of those problems for clients on a daily or weekly or monthly basis, either on a one-off transaction or a multiple repeating basis. So as you look at writing your own or working with an agency or a writer, Think about not just what you would like to say and what is safe to say, but what is going to differentiate you. Now, I've had 25 years of running businesses. I've set up companies in Singapore, China, the UK, India. I've owned homes in England, Singapore, China, and even in Mongolia— sorry, Outer Mongolia. So as I start to think about how I differentiate myself as an international PR and entrepreneur counsellor, I have my own narrative, just as you will have your own narrative for your own company and your own product. And the real challenge is not to be too safe. Now, we talk about the challenge in COVID times being the need to have our PR and messaging being compassionate, optimistic, Values-based, informative, and digital. And that still holds true today. But what we're seeing now from, from the talk this morning from Brian is that we can give out red flags as companies. We can give out red flags. I talked earlier on about my experience with eBay. Does your company create any red flags for its customers? Or for its staff or its partners, those 3 key stakeholder groups. Because as we, with our program of Speak PR, we talk about, we talk about the need to storify, to personalize, to engage, to amplify, and to know. Part of what we need to know is how are we in our body language, both as individuals and as companies, Representing the core values that we've got so that we differentiate and make our company one that other people want to work and deal with. So thank you for listening, and I'm in my garden shed, I hope, otherwise known as the studio. It's very comfortable, and I pray that you've been as blessed as I have been with some good health, some profitability, and I do pray that you keep communicating. Thanks once again for listening to Speak PR.