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Extensive back-end work has been going on. I enjoy this theme, its author was quick to answer a question I had re modifying it. Two contacts of mine both asked me to install it for them so they could use it on their sites/blogs – see @ramonthomas, and the up and coming Ecovest

I discovered a fantastic eCommerce SAAS application called ECWID. http://www.ecwid.com It took me under 5 mins to integrate it with a demo shopping page on my blog. I will use it for an upcoming site, click the link to see a demo. The demo video on their home page is 5 mins ling demonstrates it amazingly well in that time.

For some great free Web 2.0 icons, check here: http://www.iconspedia.com/pack/web-2-0-405/

Du came to my new apartment in Business Bay to install my 8Mb FTTH internet connection and land line. Previously, in a different suburb, Etisalat had installed a single fiber box, which enabled IP TV, 8Mb internet connection, land line – and supplied WiFi via an Aztech 4-port (early steam engine powered) ADSL router, which they charged a ridiculous amount of money for, after I’d told them I already have a router, thank you.

The Du technnician was friendly, helpful and polite, but apologetically stated that Du does not provide Wifi services. My first response was WTF? Being a technologist by profession I figured I’d figure it out, while scratching my head at the backward-thinking of the telco.

The technician then unpacked a 4-port non-wifi (clearly early diesel technology) router for the land line, and another for the internet. If I had ordered IP TV that would have meant a 3rd unit. Hmmm…. Good thing I haven’t watched TV since I was 16.

So… there I was, working internet, but no WiFI for my phone or laptop. I prefer cable on my PC.

I own the following router: http://www.linksysbycisco.com/EU/en/products/WRT54GH. A Linksys WRT54GH home router, bought for AED149 ($40) at Carrefour. It’s cheap, simple and works flawlessly.

• First, plug your home wifi router into your laptop or PC via cable to configure it.

The unit I have is preconfigured with a static IP address of 192.168.1.1, as is the Aztech ADSL router Etisalat had provided previously. The Du router has the same IP address. The direct cable connection is to avoid connectivity issues due to IP address conflicts on the network.

• Log in, then disable DHCP on your router.

The Du box will provide IP addresses for your network. If your home router has DHCP enabled it may cause IP address conflicts, affecting or even disabling internet connectivity.

• Change the default IP address on your router to 192.168.1.2

This step prevents IP address conflicts with the Du router, by giving your wifi router the next available address. I set all my networked devices (laptop, phone, PC etc.) to use DHCP rather than static IPs.

I plugged my PC into the Linksys using a cable on one of the standard ports. Do not use the WAN port, stick to one of the 4 standard device ports. I plugged my router into the wall socket using another cable and that was it, I had WiFi.

Du claims that no username and password is required for access to the internet. I checked the DU router, there is no username and password configuration, so this claim seems valid.

I have tried using the Aztech router Etisalat gave me for this purpose, but it wasn’t having any of it. Just changing the default IP has proved to be…. impossible.

Drop me a line if you have questions.

Lloyd

The original post, generously offered by Paul Castain, is here: http://salesplaybook.blogspot.com/2009/07/linkedin-right-way.html

In the spring of 2008 I addressed the Consolidated Graphics national sales force and told them they needed to get Linkedin! I told them it was the best thing since sliced bread and how their personal brand depended on a venue like LI. A month later, I scratched my head, clueless, wondering what all the fuss was about. 2 months later, I thought it sucked, wrote it off and moved on!

After some serious soul searching in November 2008, I had to face the hard, cold reality that I basically showed up to Linkedin, sat on the sidelines and expected the world to beat a path to my computer. I don’t think I’m the only one, who went about it all wrong and offer the following 25 tips for you to leverage this powerful venue to enhance your personal brand.

Warning: This is gonna be a lengthy post. I wasn’t about to milk 3 blog posts out of this. If you are like me, you want the info and you want it now. So fasten your seat belts!

1) Change your expectation of Social Networking. There is no quick fix, silver bullet, get rich quick. This is a long term strategy to say the least. Kind of sucks, huh? Well I think its safe to say that thanks to this economy many things are now long term strategies so perhaps a little patience is in order! Social Media Jedi Master Chris Brogan says “It’s not the kind of project where you show up, build your profiles, friend a few people and call it good. It’s a lot like tending the farm” Be sure to check out Chris’s blog by visiting http://www.chrisbrogan.com/

2) Put some thought into your profile and make sure it does justice to the wonderful brand we call you! Want to improve your “Googleability”? Then by all means make your profile public by clicking here http://www.linkedin.com/myprofile?editwp By the way, you Google potential clients, don’t you? Think they Google you? This will give you at least one good result that comes back. Consider using the privacy settings if you don’t want people to know that you viewed their profile. This way you can check out a potential client without them thinking you’re a stalker.

Thought: Do you want your connections visible to everyone in your network? Do you have some clients that may get a tad pissed if they find out you are doing work for their competitors? Then click here and change that bad boy https://www.linkedin.com/secure/settings?browse=&goback=%2Eaas

3) Use a cool tagline to help set you apart from the masses. Examples: Craig Wilson is the Chief Appreciation Officer of his Sendout Cards business. Mi Amigo Hank Trisler isn’t the President of The Trisler Companies . . . He’s the Supreme Commander! Desire McBride is The Print Diva. My favorite is John Hudson who is The Dark Lord of Staffing. Our biggest challenge these days folks is being memorable. These people get it!

4) Join Groups: The biggest mistake many people make is joining groups in their industry exclusively. I think that’s great, but you better branch out. I mean how many widgets do you think other widget dudes are gonna buy from ya Gomer? My advice to you is to join some sales groups as well. First, it will help you keep your finger on the pulse right now since sales people are pretty much out there on the front line. Second, you will pick up some good best practices and lastly, sales people can be a point of entry often overlooked in getting in the door. I would also recommend that you join some industry groups for the verticals you want to penetrate. Go where the money is right now. What industries aren’t hurting as much?

Did you know you can join up to 50 groups? When you share a group with someone you can usually send them a direct email without paying for inmails.

Did you also know? That emails sent through LI have a much higher open rate than traditional emails. Can you leverage that as a sales rep? Damn right you can!

5) Get off the damn sidelines! This is where I screwed up big time. I joined groups but didn’t participate. Get the feel of your group. Contribute! Add value. By the way, doesn’t this help make you more visible and help with the whole branding thing? If you do it right it does! Start your own discussions in those groups. This is how you stand out! What are some thought provoking. appropriate discussions you could start in your group(s)?

6) Want to look like a Grade A, Ahole? Then spam the discussions with ridiculous infomercials on your company, start discussions that are blatant self promotions or get cute and start a discussion with the old “For the rest of the story, click here” That’s how you build a brand as a jackass real quick.

Do you belong to a group that is littered with spam and self promotion? Tell the group moderator and if that doesn’t work, then put your efforts in elsewhere. They aren’t worth your time!

7) Facilitate your discussions for God’s sake! This is by far one of my biggest pet peeves on LI. If you start a discussion and then disappear, you are an idiot! You not only display bad manners in doing the disappearing act, you allow your discussion to go inactive, sooner. Why wouldn’t you want your discussion up at the top of the first page of discussions? Isn’t that a great visibility position? Check out my rant on this subject here http://salesplaybook.blogspot.com/2009/04/play-39-david-copperfield-and-linkedin.html

Show appreciation for those who contribute to your discussions 2 ways. First, you should always thank people in the discussion with a simple “Thank you for your input (insert name here)” By the way, do we all enjoy being acknowledged in front of our peers? Do you think acknowledging contributions encourages additional contributions as well as folks following you to other discussions and groups? Worked for me. The other way I show appreciation is by sending a TY in a quick email. It’s a great door opener and helps me differentiate from the masses!

9) Avoid ninjas like your online life depended on it. It amazes me how many otherwise intelligent adults will attack someone online in front of thousands. Trust me, when I tell you it will happen to you and if you are like me you will want to stick your virtual foot up their virtual ass. In a word, DON’T! You won’t change ignorant people and you will damage your brand in the process. Doesn’t mean you have to like it folks!

10) Use a hyperlink in your signature when you contribute to a discussion. If all you do is put the old “www” it would read as a link. Here’s how ya do it the right way: Put a handy dandy http:// in front of your domain and viola. Check out how I do it.

Respectfully,
Paul Castain
Vice President Consolidated Graphics
http://salesplaybook.blogspot.com/

11) Don’t use the automated invites, they are lame and you will sound like every other clueless person. Take a moment to make your invite personal. Think about the power of first impressions and more importantly, the power of being memorable. Reference something you have observed about them in the groups, a point they made, their company, some common ground or simply:

Dear Jake:

I would be honored if you would join my network.

12) How to minimize IDK’s: IDK’s stand for I Don’t Know. If you invite someone and they select I don’t know you get a real nifty snotgram from LI. If you continue to get them, LI can remove your ability to invite, because everyone has basically labeled you a dick. The real problem isn’t with LI its in the ignorance of the recipient. They simply don’t know how to tell you to piss off gracefully. That’s why you have to educate them.

Dear Jake:

I would be honored if you would join my network.

Should you choose not to connect, that’s fine, simply hit the “archive” button rather than the dreaded “I don’t know” button.

13) Start your own group: One bit of advice I always give in conventional networking is to get on a board in a leadership position. The same can be said for LI. I waited until I had enough involvement in the groups and started The Sales Playbook group. Its grown by more than 2300 members in 3 months and it has dramatically enhanced my brand. I’m also happy to say that I have done so by enhancing other people’s brands.

Come join our Linkedin Sales Playbook community by clicking here: http://www.linkedin.com/groups?about=&gid=1832739&trk=anet_ug_grppro

14) Post interesting articles in the news section. Use the “share” button to alert other folks in your network when you read an article of value to them. Comment on interesting articles. This contributes value to your group and keeps you visible in the process!

15) Add value to your network: One of the best ways you can do this is to be a matchmaker. Introduce them to people they want and need to meet. With so many displaced workers in these challenging times keep your eyes and ears open for opportunities. Not a bad idea to have a recruiter or three in your network while we are at it. Neil Wood replied to me privately when I asked for advice on some good branding books. He told me he had an extra copy of a really good book and sent it to me. Stacy Stateham has given her time very freely to folks that have needed advice and I too try my best to give value (even to my competitors believe it or not) When you do these types of things ladies and gentlemen, you don’t create followers, you create evangelists spreading the good news of your brand!

Branding 101 Moment With Uncle Paul: Do you think it packs more punch when someone else says cool things about you and your company or when you self promote? Sorry to get basic on ya but if you are on LI then you know there are many who didn’t get the spam memo!

16) Use LI as part of your meticulous pre call planning. I think its an incredible way for me to get inside my prospect’s head by getting a feel for how they think in the groups, perhaps they link to a blog etc. This is a great way for you to get the inside track!

17) Let people get inside your head by using the applications such as amazon bookshelf, slideshare and links to your blog. Tip: People buy from people they trust. One of the first steps towards trust is familiarity. Make sure you give your network every opportunity to experience “Brand YOU”

18) Cross pollinate your efforts by putting a link to your LI profile in your email auto signature.

19) Status updates: This is a great way for you to stay on your network’s radar screen. Avoid boring play by play. Donna Highfill puts inspirational quotes in her status updates. Others will put a link to a timely article, links to articles and blogs you have written. The key here is to stay on the radar screen by continuing to add value and avoidance of over saturation and taking it easy on the self promotion. You also need to use your head. Trust me when I tell you that your network doesn’t find value in a status update that informs us that a bottle of Cuervo has your name on it or that you are having a meltdown. I can’t make this shit up! Make sure you comment on status updates from your network. Example: someone in your network just mentioned that they started working at ABC company this week. Leave a congratulatory comment etc.

Tip: Scan the home page daily. There are tons of opportunities for you there but you have to remember Everyone’s favorite subject is usually them self so make it about them!

20) Want to expand your reach? Comment on the blogs of your connections. Doing this opens you up to their community. In today’s online world, it’s not who you know, it’s who knows you and who knows those who know those who know you and, well you get the picture.

21) Be consistent: You won’t build your brand worth a damn if you show up two days in a row, take two weeks off, come back for a day or two. This needs to be a daily investment. Remember, this is a long term investment. Don’t ever forget that!

22) Recommendations: Use your head on this one. Please! One of the quickest ways for me to yell Jackass is when someone I barely know, hits me up for a recommendation. When I call them out on it, I’m usually given an explanation that they used the automated send to all feature which is just plain stupid if you ask me. Be selective who you ask and be selective who you give recommendation’s to. Remember, its your credibility dude!

23) Stop with the juvenile “I want to have the most contacts” BS! How in the hell can you realistically connect properly with 12,000 contacts. Seriously dude! Better to have quality contacts. Be selective in who you ask to join your network. Be selective who you allow to connect with you too! Be deliberate and intentional in this department. By the way, I’m in the process of writing a book. When I first started I didn’t know a thing about finding an agent, a publisher and all that fun stuff. I purposely hunted folks with experience in these areas and avoided contacts that had nothing to do with what I do or who I can impact.

24) Ask and answer questions to further position you as a thought leader by clicking here:http://www.linkedin.com/answers?trk=hb_tab_ayn

Cool Tip: Want to get a better response and greater visibility when you ask a question? Choose the option to send the question out to up to 200 people in your network.

Hook a fellow Jedi up: by suggesting someone from your network as an expert to a question. This is a nice way for you to continue to add value to your network and encourage a really cool thing called reciprocation!

25) Understand that you must move this virtual online stuff to real time or its absolutely meaningless! One of the things I do is make a goal each week that I will connect live (face to face, phone, coffee, lunch, drink, etc) with at least 2 people from my network. When I do, I make sure my time with them is about them, not me. My goal is to not only get to know them, its to find out who an ideal client would be for them, their goals, their dreams their challenges.

I want to leave you with a bit of a challenge. One that I wish someone told me about when I left Linkedin after only 60 days of half assed effort. Try these things that I mentioned for 90 days. Give it your all. Be consistent and do something daily to enhance your online brand. Give value to people unconditionally and don’t keep a scorecard. Learn everything you can and if at the end of 90 days of you getting off the sidelines you feel it was a waste of time, then move on.

I, for one am quite pleased with my results. The Castain brand is alive and ticking and as a bonus, I’ve made some wonderful friends along the way. Also been talking to a few publishers so its nice to be moving toward that important milestone in my life!

I want you to think about something else that many people don’t realize. Your linkedin experience is about community. All human beings want to belong to or be a part of something. Can you leverage that?

There’s your million dollar question to chew on!

Please forward this to your community!

Subscribe to Paul Castain’s Sales Playbook by Email

To continue with the Emotional Intelligence theme, we go back to Emotional Literacy, this time distinguishing between our thoughts and our feelings.

Let’s ask ourselves: What is and what is not emotional literacy?

Emotional Literacy is demonstrated by phrases like:

I feel…

• criticised
• unimportant
• disrespected
• bored

These express our feelings. The better our vocabulary and internal awareness, the better our communication about our state.
The following phrases, however, are us expressing our thoughts.

• I feel like ….
• I feel that…
• I feel like you ….

The last one is a “you message” in disguise. From our first post, we indicated the difference between “I feel hurt” vs. “You are an obnoxious twit”.

I Messages vs You Messages

When we talk about our feelings using three word sentences we send what have been called “I messages”. When we say things like “You make me so jealous” we send a “you message”. These often put the other person on the defensive, thus hurting communication and relationships rather than helping. These messages can feel very much like placing blame, and can be used to avoid responsibility, or to “win” an argument without directing it towards a meaningful outcome for both parties if not handled carefully.

Remember then that when we say something like “I feel like you…” we are sending a “you message” disguised as an “I message”.

I met Linda Parkinson-Hardman on LinkedIn not long ago. She is the author of the new LinkedIn book, LinkedIn Made Easy – which is receiving some great reviews on her site http://whoselinked.com

She’s set herself the challenge that in the next 30 days she will:

1. Prove social networking works for ALL businesses regardless of their size and starting point
2. Raise £400,000 for charities focused on supporting entrepreneurs in developing countries
3. and to do it by selling 200,000 copies of her e-book, LinkedIn Made Easy.

For those with a charitable heart, buy a copy of her book and get cracking on making the best LinkedIn profile you can to promote yourself and your business – for visibility, credibility and profitability. For business owners, she’s also the owner of the web site Grow A Better Business. As a specialist in social media for business she practices what she preaches.

For some great tips on getting more out of LinkedIn, which is a more powerful business tool than many are aware, connecting 50 million businesses and professionals, check check her site – and support a great cause by buying a copy of her book.

To visit her LinkedIn profile, click here. For Twitterers, she’s here: http://www.twitter.com/lindaph/

Linda’s pic:

Linda Parkinson-Hardman - Author of LinkedIn Made Easy

Featured Review:

“How often does something really truly tick ALL the boxes? Well this new e-book does. First, “LinkedIn Made Easy” explains everything you never quite “got” about LinkedIn, helps you speed your way to a 100% completed profile, and shows you how to avoid the pitfalls whilst gaining the maximum possible professional benefit from your membership.”
by Tamara Essex

Emotional Intelligence (EQ) is one of those buzz phrases that gets thrown about, as important as “being cool”, but equally as vague.

There is exploration to be done here, so this subject may occupy a few articles.

Rather than debate definitions and argue semantics as the academics in the field do, let’s look at ways to demonstrate it, use it, express it. Without having to get a PhD in it.

We will start with Emotional Literacy.

Emotional literacy is the ability to identify and communicate our feelings. Only once we know what our feelings and responses are can we deal with them intelligently. If we have a vague or inaccurate idea of our feelings and emotions, we would be Emotionally Inept.

When we communicate how we feel, our state and experience can be described using 3-word sentences. Examples of this are:

• I feel sad
• I feel motivated
• I feel hurt
• I feel excited
• I feel afraid

So what steps do we take now to develop a higher degree of emotional literacy?

First, start labeling your feelings. Use 3-word sentences beginning with “I feel …”.

Avoid labeling people or situations. Say “I feel unsafe”, rather than “You drive like a frickin’ idiot”. Say “I feel hurt”, rather than “You’re an insensitive pr*ck”. Say “I feel disappointed with the outcome”, rather than “You guys are a bunch of losers”. Say “I feel distressed/distraught/pressured/uncomfortable right now”, rather than “I feel like a total frickin’ idiot”.

Learning theory says that “Learning has occurred when behaviour is changed”. Simply when you  begin to apply these changes in your communication,  you are demonstrating learning, and  you have actively improved your EQ.

This would require perhaps 10 articles to cover the subject fully. My aim is to keep the content simple and accessible for all and sundry. I hope you found this first step to be of value.

As always, please leave your comments below.

What if a scientist decided to do a factual study of incompetence, and then publish his findings? What would we learn about being certain vs being uncertain, about ability vs cluelessness?

We have all stumbled across incompetent people. I know I meet them every day (occasionally in the mirror). Dr. David Dunning, a professor of psychology at Cornell University, is concerned that he might be one of them.

He worries about this because, according to his research, most incompetent people do not know they are incompetent.

On the contrary. In studies conducted with graduate student, Justin Kruger, people who do things badly are usually supremely confident of their abilities, more confident than people who do things well.

“I began to think that there were probably lots of things that I was bad at and I didn’t know it”. As he discovered, there is good reason for us to make such a statement.

One reason that the ignorant tend to be the blissfully self-assured seems to be that the skills required for competence often are the same skills necessary to recognize competence.

Dunning and Kruger suggest, in a paper appearing in the December issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, that the incompetent suffer from a double burden.

“Not only do they reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realise it,” wrote Kruger and Dunning. Kruger is now an assistant professor at the University of Illinois.

The deficiency in “self-monitoring skills” helps explain the tendency of the humour-impaired to persist in telling jokes that are not funny, of day traders to repeatedly jump into the market – and repeatedly lose out – and the politically clueless to continue holding forth at dinner parties on the fine points of campaign strategy.

Some college students demonstrate a similar blindness: after doing badly on a test they spend hours in his office explaining why the answers he suggests for the test questions are wrong.

In a series of studies, Kruger and Dunning tested their theory of incompetence. They found that subjects who scored in the lowest 25 percent on tests of logic, English grammar and humour were also the most likely to “grossly overestimate” how well they had performed.

In all three tests, subjects’ ratings of their ability were positively linked to their actual scores. But the lowest-ranked participants showed much greater distortions in their self-estimates.

Asked to evaluate their performance on the test of logical reasoning, subjects who scored only in the 12th percentile guessed they had scored in the 62nd percentile, and deemed their overall skill at logical reasoning to be at the 68th percentile.

Similarly, subjects who scored at the 10th percentile on the grammar test ranked themselves at the 67th percentile in the ability to “identify grammatically correct standard English,” and estimated their test scores to be at the 61st percentile.

On the humor test, in which participants were asked to rate jokes according to their funniness (subjects’ ratings were matched against those of an “expert” panel of professional comedians), low-scoring subjects were also more apt to have an inflated perception of their skill. But because humor is idiosyncratically defined, the results are less conclusive.

Unlike their unskilled counterparts, the most able subjects in the study were likely to underestimate their own competence. In the absence of information about how others are doing, highly competent subjects assumed that others were performing as well as they were — a phenomenon psychologists term the “false consensus effect“.

When high scoring subjects were asked to “grade” the grammar tests of their peers, however, they quickly revised their evaluations of their own performance. In contrast, the self-assessments of those who scored badly themselves were unaffected by the experience of grading others; some subjects even further inflated their estimates of their own abilities.

“Incompetent individuals were less able to recognize competence in others,” the researchers concluded.

In some cases, as Professor Dunning pointed out, an awareness of one’s own incompetence is unavoidable: “In a golf game, when your ball is heading into the woods, you know you’re incompetent”.

But in other situations, feedback is absent, or at least more ambiguous.

All of which inspired in Dunning and his co-author a certain degree of nervousness in presenting their research to the public.

“This article may contain faulty logic, methodological errors or poor communication,” they cautioned in their journal report. “Let us assure our readers that to the extent this article is imperfect, it is not a sin we have committed knowingly.”

As always, please leave a comment below.

The purpose of science is to investigate the unexplained, not to explain the uninvestigated. — Dr. Stephen Rorke

Consider this for a moment. A seed weighs very little. A tree however, weighs quite a lot.
Where then, does the stuff that makes up the tree come from?

Have a look at your computer desk, or a chair for reference. Your wooden furniture started out as a seed.

I imagine you and I both reached the obvious, yet false, conclusion. I am almost certain that you, like me, will be surprised by the answer.

The answer… from the air. From CO2 in fact.

There has been a tremendous debate about carbon dioxide (CO2) in recent years, with heavy discussion of CO2 emissions. However, few of us are aware that there is another half to the Carbon equation: that being how much CO2 we soak up. This is what plants do for a living.

Sometimes, we accept a given set of answers too readily. So, as a throw-away question: are you aware that an aircraft’s wings create lift? The chances are hight that you said yes.

So how is it then, that aircraft can fly upside down?
I’ll leave you with that thought, and point you in the direction of a Bristol University study on CO2 and Climate Change.

University study: CO2 levels remained constant since 1850
http://www.ecnmag.com/article-co2-levels-remained-constant-111109.aspx

The study found that the level of CO2 has remained unchanged for 160 years, since 1850.
The Bristol university page on the study can be found here:
http://www.bristol.ac.uk/news/2009/6649.html

The title of the paper is: 
Is the airborne fraction of anthropogenic CO2 emissions increasing?
by Wolfgang Knorr. Geophysical Research Letters, VOL. 36, L21710, doi:10.1029/2009GL040613, 2009.

This excerpt describes the findings:

A central tenet of “climate change” dogma holds that increased emissions (2 billion tons a year in 1850 to 35 billion tons a year now) leads to greater CO₂ levels in the atmosphere. But a new study from the University of Bristol could shake up traditional assumptions. The study suggests that CO₂ levels have remained constant since 1850.

According to the University, “The results run contrary to a significant body of recent research which expects that the capacity of terrestrial ecosystems and the oceans to absorb CO₂ should start to diminish as CO₂ emissions increase, letting greenhouse gas levels skyrocket.” In fact, the trend in the airborne fraction has only been 0.7 ± 1.4% per decade (essentially zero).

Please leave your comments below.

The answer is no, it isn’t, except in a narrow context.

Both in business and in private life we have all regularly heard or ourselves made the claim that 93% of communication is nonverbal (facial expressions, body language and voice tonality), while only 7% of communication is verbal.

I used to then wonder why those who offered courses in communication would make the same claim, and then do the exact opposite. I’d see them spend 93% of the time on the verbal aspects like the spoken and written word, and 7% on the nonverbal parts.

There is a widely-held belief that spoken communication is mostly nonverbal, based on a distortion of Professor Albert Mehrabian’s (in)famous statistic, which in its original form states that:

* Total Liking = 7% verbal liking + 38% vocal liking + 55% facial liking

which was taken out of context and misunderstood to mean

* 55% of the meaning of communication is body language, 38% is in tonality, and 7% rests in the words themselves.

One has to ask though, what did he mean by “liking“?

It must be said that Professor Mehrabian’s research says nothing at all about these relative contributions in general speech. Not a word. And his research never set out to prove that communication is primarily nonverbal.

Professor Mehrabian’s research limited itself to situations where what someone says – e.g. “I like this” – is undermined by the way they say it, and the look on their face as they speak. He concluded that in situations like this when tone of voice and facial expression are inconsistent with what is being said, we tend believe what we see rather than what we hear. No surprise there.

So the formula attempts to quantify what happens when words are ambiguous, or when there is an incongruity between the words a person uses and the nonverbals. When there is ambiguity or conflict between these two channels people tend to rely more on the nonverbals to evaluate the emotional state of the person speaking and the value of the words.

However, since Mehrabian’s original search came into the public arena in the late sixties, it has been simplified and distorted beyond recognition. It really took hold when people began writing, saying, and teaching, that in spoken communication 93% of meaning is conveyed through body language – leaving only 7% of the meaning to the words.

In one example, when interviewer Tim Harford asked him directly if 93 percent of communication is nonverbal Professor Mehrabian replied, “Whenever I hear that misquote or misrepresentation of my findings, I cringe.”

As he further quotes, “this and other equations regarding relative importance of verbal and nonverbal messages were derived from experiments dealing with communications of feelings and attitudes (i.e. like and dislike). Unless a communicator is talking about their feelings or attitudes, these equations are not applicable.”

To illustrate:

Stop for a moment, and think of a situation in which you’ve had a disagreement with a someone but they insist they’re not annoyed with you despite the fact that their body language is closed, their face is turned away, they avoid eye contact and they deliver their words with a tense, flat tonality.

Or, remember a situation where you tell a friend a joke and they respond with a stony face but tell you they think your joke is really funny. You may recall that you are more influenced by the impassive, awkward look than the encouraging words.

As a result of his experiments, he concluded that when we’re faced with a mixed message like the ones above, we’re much more likely to believe that the real meaning is contained in the nonverbal signals the person is giving off, rather than in the words they’re saying. His famous statistic is his attempt to express this kind of experience in the form of an equation.

But – and this is the crucial point – we must not lose sight of the fact that Mehrabian’s statistic only makes sense when applied to the very narrow range of communication and experience that he was investigating, i.e. the ambiguous expression of feelings and attitudes.

To apply it to all face-to-face communication is, in his own words, not applicable.
Please leave your comments below.