This YouTube transcript excerpt explains mirror neurons via a live demonstration (eating a lemon) and connects the neuroscience concept to marketing: showing people (photos, selfies, presenters) creates a sense of virtual proximity that triggers viewers' mirror-neuron responses and increases engagement. The speakers give practical examples (selfies onstage, photos in support/sales) and an anecdote that a selfie at Inbound became a top-10 engagement post among ~25,000 attendees.
Questions this video answers
Top 10 for engagement at the Inbound event.
About 25,000 people.
Chapters
You. We've shared a whole bunch of examples of ways that you can get closer physically to your customers in order to build fans. But you might say to us, well, you know, that sounds great, but we can't create a conference. We don't sell things door to door. We don't run a business where we can bring our fans together. But so you're in luck, because through a really cool concept called mirror neurons, you're able to actually bring people in virtual proximity with you and your employees and virtual proximity of other people through a concept called mirror neurons. So let me explain this idea of mirror neurons. When I do something, my brain fires. So let me do something right now. This is a lemon, and I'm gonna take a bite of this lemon. Oh, my gosh. And it makes my eyes scrunch up. I can feel it on my tongue. And I can feel my saliva's going.
And I can feel it, too.
You can feel it, too.
And so this is what mirror neurons are. There are certain neurons that are in my brain. They're in a lot of animals brains. A lot of the research was actually done on monkeys that fire both when the person does an action like eat a lemon, and when someone watching sees someone do that action. And so I have mirror neurons firing when I watch David eat that lemon, and then I have my saliva going because of that.
And I would guess that every single person watching this had a reaction, a physical reaction, as if you were eating that lemon, too. And what's interesting about this, this idea of mirror neurons, this idea that we humans have something firing in our brain when we see something as if we are doing it ourself, is a fascinating concept for building fans for your business using the idea of virtual proximity. And there's a couple of different ways you can do that. One way is that you can use photographs and images in your marketing, photographs and images in your customer support in your sales. It's one of the reasons why you may have noticed this, that photos of people, especially people who are in, who look as if they are in your personal social space, tend to do way better in terms of engagement on social networks than photos of things that don't include people. That's because our brain is firing, because we're seeing those people, we're reacting to them. That's also one of the reasons why we believe we personally movie stars and television stars. And why, when you've watched a television news presenter for weeks or months or years at a time, you feel like, oh, my gosh, I know this person. Really, really well, even though you've never met them before.
Share those inside jokes.
Yeah, exactly. And so selfies are. You know, people think selfies are frivolous, but. No. What's interesting about a selfie is if you take it by definition. How long is my arm? Less than four feet. So we're in that same zone. So photographs and ways that we can connect are really important. So we presented together at inbound.
We did.
We did. And that moment. Talk about that moment. That moment was really cool.
It was fun. I mean, it was the first time that I was on a stage that big, and it was a little bit, you know, scary for me, but then you caught me up, and we did a little selfie, and it. It felt like personal again, like we were close and a little bit of fumbling in the beginning, but it was fun.
It worked. It was the first time we done a selfie on a stage. It's the first time we'd done a selfie with our book. And what was cool about that was the engagement.
Yeah. Afterward, seeing all the communication on Twitter, seeing people, like, was fun.
And it turns out that that photo, one little selfie, because it felt as if we were in proximity to one another, and other people felt as if we were in proximity to them, became in the top 10 of all of inbound. 25,000 people. The top 10 of engagement. That's the power of mirror neurons. That's the power of that kind of engagement.
