How to Get People to Watch Your Whole Video

Hi there! Welcome to another video! Inside this video, I want to talk about something that happened to me about two weeks ago... I wanted to share the experience with you because I think it's very important for helping you deal better with your customers and clients especially when you're creating your online videos. What am I talking about? I'm talking about the management of expectations. This is something I came across a number of years ago. In fact in my first job, my first manager, he taught me this concept of management of expectations. It's absolutely critical if you want to really influence people and make sure that they are happy and make sure that they're getting what they want as a business person. About three weeks ago, our little girl got born about six weeks early. Talking about management of expectations, we were very surprised. We were totally not prepared for that, but we just had to deal with it. But what I want to talk about there is that inside the hospital, they told us that pre term babies (premature babies) normally need to stay the full term. They told us that our little girl had to stay for another six weeks inside the hospital. For us, that was a long time and of course we were not too happy with that. To cut the long story short, we ended up only staying about two weeks in the hospital and then she could come home, which is just so fantastic. For us parents, we were just so excited because we didn't have to wait six weeks anymore; it's only two weeks. I give credit to the hospital staff here because instead of telling us it could just be two weeks but it may take six weeks, they just said it normally takes six weeks but then they managed to bring it down to two weeks. In terms of managing our expectations, we were just so happy with what happened. If they went the other way, where they said you could come out in two weeks but we ended up waiting six weeks. Imagine what that would have done to our expectations! Now you need to do the same thing for your videos. I know it's a roundabout way of getting back to it, but when you think about creating your videos, you need to think carefully about how can you manage the expectations of your viewers? How can you begin or start your videos so that when people watch it, you set some sort of expectation so that when they watch the whole video, they come out of it feeling really good about themselves or really good about the information. One way of doing this is to create what I call a Zeigarnik effect or to throw a Zeigarnik in there. Zeigarnik was a social Psychologist who figured out that people's minds don't like open loops. We want to finish stuff, we want to close the loop. And we normally learn better when there is an open loop in a discussion for example. What you can do, is at the beginning of your videos, create some sort of an open loop, create some sort of mystery or cliffhanger right at the beginning... to create a sort of expectation that you're going to fill the gap. That will help people stay more connected to your videos; that will help people to watch your whole video if you can create something like that, it's very very powerful. Programs like the TV series "Lost" is an excellent example of that because that's exactly what they do. They create this open loop right at the beginning but then at the end they create another cliffhanger so they open up another loop. Which means you have to watch the next episode. They are just so good at it. They are so good at managing expectations. That's what you've got to do as well when you create your videos. This is just a real quick tip from me for managing the expectations of your video audience. My name is Gideon Shalwick and I look forward to seeing you inside my next video. If you'd like to get access to my latest report, Rapid Video Blogging, that shows you how to dominate your niche with online video, just go to my blog at GideonShalwick.com or simply go to RapidVideoBlogging.com and you should be able to get a copy there. Thank you for watching and I will see you soon!