“IMAGE IS EVERYTHING”

Life is all about first impressions, Janine Willis and Alexander Todorov.

Forming a first impression takes 1/10th of a second.

In 1/10th of a second we decide someone’s Competence, Likeability and Influence by possibly viewing a profile photo of them.

How does this relate to Business?

“People buy from people they like know and trust”
If you don’t have a picture, how can you start the process?
More importantly how do you go about getting a good profile image?

A couple of years ago “Photofeeler” carried out some research using 800 profile images. Viewers were asked to rate the images against Competence, Likeability and Influence. The research did not include the characteristics like gender, age, and physical traits.

The following were considered the important areas discovered by the research, are you surprised?

Eyes

When viewing images of someone, people like to see the full facial features of who they are looking at. Obstructions such as hats, sunglasses or poor lighting can hide features and this reduces the likeability of what the viewer is seeing. Look into the camera, don’t hide.

Squinting

Ensure that you squint slightly when looking into the lens. Having wide open eyes gives the impression of the rabbit in the headlights, it denotes fear.

Having a slight squint, increases the perception of your
competence, influence, likeability and feels more comfortable for the viewer.

Face

Profile photos that show a defined Jawline increase your perception of competence, influence, and likeability.

Smiling

I know we have all made excuses, “I don’t like smiling”, “my teeth aren’t white”, “I’ll crack the lens” but that’s what they are excuses.

Want to increase the perception of people viewing you? Then an open smile is a good way of doing so. By smiling you appear friendlier, happier, healthier, and more relaxed.

If your smile is a closed smile (no teeth showing) then your perception of competence, influence, and likeability is likely to drop by half of that with an open smile.

Be careful though don’t turn the smile into a laugh, although this was found more likeable the competence and influence was shown to have dropped. So keep the smile controlled.

Body

The way you dress in a photo says a lot of who you are. Think it’s not important and anything will do?

The research showed that formal dress gained the greatest
perceived Competence and
Influence. That is a dark suit over a light coloured shirt/blouse, and men you need a tie.

By all means dress down for your photo but this will lose viewers perception of how credible you are. Also beware of stripes and bold colours.

Body Area Shown

How much of the body should be shown:

Close-up of the face?
Head and face?
Head and shoulders?
Head to waist?

The research showed that head and shoulders or head to waist shots fared better than face only close-ups.

Those people that used a full body shot negatively affected competence and influence.

Setting

The research never came up with an answer to this. However as a personal opinion the background needs to be plain or out of focus. The important thing is that the subject stands out.

Maybe you can experiment with different colours. Have your head-shot taken against a green screen and have a series of different background (colours or out of focus) being used.

Avoid direct sunlight images as you will either be squinting with the sun in your face or to dark (unless flash is used) with the sun at your back. Both of these viewers will lose confidence in you.

profile photo demonstrating an office setting with a blurred background

Editing

The key here is moderation; all digital photos benefit from some editing:

colour correction
Spots
Dandruff
Lightening
Softening
contrast etc.

But avoid anything extreme.

All photographs copyright © Martin Harris. All rights reserved.

Martin Harris

T: 07824 331 730

E: martin@mhphotographyhampshire.co.uk

W: www.mhphotographyhampshire.co.uk

“When you need a reliable and dependable expert”

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How much do you value your reputation?

Posted on 14th November 2016 by petercbw

Are you aware that documents you’re sending out by post or by email attachment may contain errors that might damage your hard-earned reputation?

The reason I ask is because I recently received an email from the Sales Director of a local company in which was attached a sales brochure. On reading this brochure I spotted 12 mistakes.

When I replied to notify him of this, he was devastated as he had no idea that he was sending out literature that contained mistakes. He said he would be going back to his marketing people to point this out and that a new brochure would come to me first for professional proofreading.

I’m sure I’m not the only one that will spot these mistakes. Whilst the product being promoted wasn’t appropriate for me, those for whom it would be appropriate are probably now making a negative judgement about the business and saying, “If they can’t be bothered to check their literature, then why should I be bothered to place an order?” The poor quality of the brochure gives the wrong impression to prospective customers.

You probably do everything necessary to ensure that your products and services are delivered to the best of your ability. You protect your staff, yet how much care do you take over all the various bits of written material that your business produces?

I’m talking about stuff like website content, blog content, publicity/marketing material, emails, newsletters, reports…..the list goes on.

Many of us may take all this for granted as it is just something we do without thinking about it. But let’s think about it for a minute……..

Any piece of written material that you ‘publish’ by sending it to a customer or out into the public domain via a website or a blog, for example, is either promoting your business or it will reflect back on the quality of your business, without you even knowing it.

Did you know, in a recent survey, 59% of respondents said they would not do business with a company whose marketing material contained errors?

So, what do you do to make sure that your written content is accurate and error free? Do you rely totally on your auto-correct functions and a spellchecker? That’s fine, but did you realise that if a word is spelt correctly but you might have keyed it incorrectly, a spellchecker won’t pick it up? That could be embarrassing if you type ‘naked’ instead of ‘named’.

Reading and re-reading your own work is not only time consuming – time that you could be using to better effect – but you’re more likely to miss those small errors because your eyes and brain recognise what you’ve written and will skim over it even though it could be wrong.

The brain is an incredible thing. If you’re reading something and you spot a mistake then your brain will automatically flip into a different mode and focus on finding the next mistake instead of the message contained within the writing. So, if you’ve got an important message to get across to your potential clients, you must make sure that it’s error-free otherwise you’ll lose the reader’s attention.

These are classic examples of how a trained proofreader can help businesses to preserve and enhance reputations through the publication of professional-looking and error-free copy.