What makes for a credible witness?
And how can you use it to build your own credibility?
In our last post, we looked at how to build your credibility.
You learned the key to credibility is this: your consistent words, behaviors, and actions slowly result in and establish your credibility. And just like consistently heating water to turn it into steam, consistently building your credibility turns it into trust.
And you learned the basis of credibility is whether people believe you.
You learned two quick marketing lessons, with a fistful of examples of how to build your credibility:
- Lesson #1: credibility begins with you. You need to be believable
- Lesson #2: your audience has to be capable of believing
Given the fact that Mass Persuasionis truly powerful, and given the fact that you are a responsible person truly concerned about the welfare of your prospects rather than merely being interested in harvesting their bank accounts, you absolutely need to understand this extremely important element:
What are the factors that establish credibility?
If credibility is belief, and the key to establishing it is in being consistent with your words, behaviors, and actions, and there are a gazillion ways to build credibility (as we just saw in the list in the last post), can’t we just boil down all of those into a few groups and make it easy?
Yes, we can!
And we’ll do our boiling this way: think of a jury listening to a key witness who comes back to testify over and over in a court of law, listening and watching hard to see if they believe the witness or not. What makes them a credible witness?
- No contradictions in words: their facts in the story remain the same each time
- No contradictions in behavior: they don’t start twitching and sweating — they look like they’re telling the truth
- No contradictions in action: instead of the witness, think of the attorney: do they show up on time, demonstrate they know what they’re doing, and produce witnesses they claimed would testify?
- Recognized authority: are they widely known to be an expert?
- General reputation or character: regardless of their expertise (such as world-class art thief or hedge fund operator), do they generally lie, cheat, or steal?
- Motive: what’s in it for them? What do they have to gain (such as testifying for a financial reward as an expert, for revenge, or against someone else for a lighter sentence)? How much does this affect the truth of what they’re saying?
For our next factor, let’s step out of the courtroom and into the attorney’s marketing department, where it claims on TV it can successfully defend you, based on past successes with other clients:
- Results: this is where you deliver your proof elements: testimonials, endorsements, third-party evaluations and reviews, before-and-after photos, and case studies.
- In the last post, we talked about the Catch 22 of no experience and therefore no way to demonstrate your experience. How do you solve this? Simply take on a new business project at a discounted rate in return for proof elements:
- It’s done all the time by seasoned marketers before they launch new products
- It’s a well-known model used in the early stages of marketing technology — by partnering with industry leaders — with the near-term goal of industry domination and long-term goal of massive market penetration and domination across industries. Think of Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint; Adobe Acrobat; and Macromedia Flash
- In the last post, we talked about the Catch 22 of no experience and therefore no way to demonstrate your experience. How do you solve this? Simply take on a new business project at a discounted rate in return for proof elements:
Finally, we get to the Mother of All Factors of credibility: it’s the “talk is cheap” factor:
- Action itself: this goes hand in hand with reputation or character, and is one of the most significant ways your audience will judge you and believe you or not. It is also one of the most significant factors used by powerful people who decide who they’ll lift to higher levels where life is easier. It is: Do you do what you say you’ll do when you say you’ll do it?
In a later section, Choosing the Leader, we talk about action in detail and how it helps you get around bragging about yourself — because others do it for you! It’s called “propaganda of the deed.”
So you can see that the infinite varieties and combinations of factors that you can use really do boil down to just a handful. And even in that handful, one factor towers above all others in building your credibility and getting your audience to trust you. Action itself.
You can have Lights. You can have Cameras. But you must have actors taking Action!
And you need to consistently and continuously apply your Action, as you’ll see next time in “Consistency: the thread that ties all factors together.”
Find out which is more important: your audience’s suspicion and distrust of you OR you sabotaging your own efforts?
The answer is easy as baking a cake. Find out in our next post covering Mass Persuasion.
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