How to Be Interesting on Video
Many of my clients are coming to me lately asking how to be interesting on video. They’re having more and more video calls and Zoom conferences. So they want to know how to stand out, make an impression, and win the call. I’ve been sharing my FOCUS Process with my clients (and on my blog, here), and the F of that process helps them to be more interesting on video.
F: Figure out your jury. You have a jury. Your jury is anyone you can to persuade or influence. For some of you it might be your boss, your team members, your clients or your customers. For others it might be your college friends that you’re seeing on Zoom for the first time in years. The people on the other end of that camera are your jury. When you want to influence or persuade your jury, you need to understand them. And if you want to be interesting on video, you have to be interested in your jury.
During jury selection at trial, we try to find out as much as possible about our juries. We have jury questionnaires which explore who they are, where they’re from, what they do, and how they live. But we only have minutes to review those questionnaires. Then, if we’re lucky, we get to have very short conversations with them where we do our best to explore whether they can be fair. And that’s is. Next, we have to work to influence and persuade these people with the information we have.
But you have a huge advantage. Before most of your calls and conferences you have the opportunity to figure out your jury a little more thoroughly. Who will be on that call? Find out as much about them as you can. Look them up on LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram. Find out what they love, what they hate, and what makes them worried. Then speak to that during the call.
I’ve seen this work in the courtroom. I once had a case where the jury was getting bored. Their attention would wander, and they’d even doze off. Two of the least engaged were a construction worker and a carpenter. When I had to put my expert on video for his testimony, I was nervous. If they were falling asleep during live testimony, how could we engage them with a video? My expert had the answer.
During his video testimony, he compared the surgery to building a house. And immediately, those two jurors were engaged. They leaned forward, nodded their heads, and took notes. When he spoke directly to the jury’s interests, they responded with obvious interest. And now we were getting somewhere!
You can engage your “jury” too. Figure out who they are, what they want, how they work. Then speak to that. That’s how to be interesting on video.
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