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The Perfect Vsnap: Anatomy of your Message (Part 1 of 3)
By Dave McLaughlin, CEO & Co-Founder at Vsnap
We (Team Vsnap) study business video messaging behaviors and use cases like nobody else we know of. We. Geek. Out. We’ve never met a cocktail napkin we couldn’t cover in techno-glyphics. We secretly secured a black market NASA microscope in order to analyze the nano-properties of frequently retweeted vsnaps. Our monologues on the minutiae of titling have sparked fist-fights at family weddings.
We. Are. Obsessed.
And we make no apologies for our obsession. Because the web needs us. More precisely, businesses on the web need us. They need us to protect them from sinking into a bottomless pit of impersonal interactions where noisy noise echoes in our noisy noggins and where our empty hearts ache to be filled again by humanity.
Please note: we know that all revolutionaries say that the world needs them, and that in some cases it’s the first sign of insanity. Please also note: we’re right about this. People crave a personal touch. People need the emotional context for whatever information you are asking them to consume — especially if you want them to act on that information. People cannot decipher meaning in the absence of tone. People will not feel special when your servers send them an email that automatically changes the salutation to begin with their first name or something sort of close to their first name.
If you’re already exhausted by this post, what can I say? We believe. Anyway, that was just the intro. What I really want to share is the anatomy of the perfect vsnap. In the past we’ve blogged about the basic mechanics of looking your best, making sure you smile, how to title a vsnap, practical tips for using our mobile apps, and why it’s important to set up your signature. Now I want you to know three simple secrets that lie at the heart of how to send a vsnap that creates an amazingly powerful emotional connection with the most important person in your business: your customer.
The first secret is about you and your beliefs.
If you haven’t seen Simon Sinek’s TED talk “How Great Leaders Inspire Action” or read his book Start With Why (Amazon link, iTunes link), you should. His idea is that when you align with a customer at the level of belief, you create much deeper and more durable bonds than when you align around the features of your product. The customer who understands and shares your beliefs is more loyal, more zealous, and more vocal. All of which is incredibly valuable because emotion drives powerful word of mouth and authentic customer relationships buffer your business against the shock of even more rapid cycles of change.
Recently I’ve realized that the reason why a vsnap works so well is specifically because it offers a medium in which a belief statement actually translates. A format where the authenticity of the speaker’s conviction can be judged with the benefit of rich non-verbal cues that provide context usually missing from our online interactions. Tone, emotion, facial expression, etc. And without all the more malleable, manipulative aspects that we’ve come to expect in video. Editing, sound effects, etc.
See Vsnap offers you a very specific strain of online video. And its remarkable efficacy – the increased rate at which you can move people by engaging them via Vsnap – should be seen not as just another example of the common wisdom that video evokes a higher response rate than text. Vsnap works because it is a belief envelope. Which (nod to Mr. Sinek) makes it an engine for action.
Here’s the anatomy of a perfect vsnap message:
1. This is who I am
2. This is a belief I have (implied: I think you share this belief)
3. This is the action I’d like you to take (assuming you share my belief)
That’s it.
If you’re not sure what this looks like in practice, email me at dave@vsnap.com and tell me what your business does and what you care about. This will be even better if you vsnap this message to me, but if you’re still not quite comfortable with that, then no problem, just send me an email. I will respond with a vsnap that hits those three points in a way that is specific to you.
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