Lip smackers, Nokia 3310s, and Roger Ramjet
My childhood is a collection of memories involving hypercolour t-shirts, 60c Paddle Pops (rainbow FTW!), a TV that took about 90 seconds to warm up, bright pink roller skates (and playing Ship to Shore while Corona’s Rhythm of the Night blared through the rollerdrome), the chocolate coconut slice from the Women’s Weekly Cookbook, and Sunday afternoons spent with my right index finger hovering over the ‘record’ button on my fancy radio/cassette player during the top 40 countdown in the hopes of making the perfect mixtape to blast while I was smothering my lips in Strawberry Kiwi Comet Lip Smacker every morning before school.
Once I got to high school, it was all Good Charlotte and Jimmy Eat World, heavy textbooks lugged between classrooms, a strange phase of wearing Winnie the Pooh boxer shorts under my school dress, skirts the length of belts on weekends, polyphonic ringtones on a trusty red Nokia 3310, and crushes on Pacey — never Dawson.
College involved copious amounts of Passion Pop, borrowing friends’ discmans for afternoon runs (and inevitably slowing to a walk, partly because of the Passion Pop, and partly because it was impossible to find a running cadence that didn’t make the disc skip), weekly watch parties of The O.C. and 24-hour binges of 24, a $60 weekly allowance from my parents which — miraculously — paid for everything, ridiculous dress up parties (where I went as everything from Roger Ramjet to ‘thrush’), and choosing the *perfect* song for my MySpace account.
In other words, I was born in the mid-80s—
But isn’t the first version a more meaningful way to say it?
Maybe because YOU are a child of the 80s too, and slow-to-warm-up TVs and sparkly Lip Smackers are deliciously nostalgic, or perhaps because you’re not quite as old as me, but harboured a similar crush on Pacey, or maybe because you have a kid my age and all of this feels like it could be a note from them, or even because you’re young enough you had to google ‘what is a discman’ and now you see me as someone who is quaint or wise because my life involves relics from a different era.
(Is this the part where I tell you that, up until 2 years ago, we had a car with wind-up windows and a CD player?)
In other words, all those details make me real and relatable—
In a way I might not be if I wrote you a blog post focused solely on a bunch of my best achievements.
Quick litmus test for you...
Think about (or take a look at) the testimonials and reviews on your website.
Do they *only* feature the shiny ‘after effects’ or your products or services, or do they provide some delicious contextual nuggets that paint a full picture of the people behind them—
The kind of picture that allows your prospect to think "hey, if it’s possible for them, it’s possible for me too."
Fact is, your prospect is more readily swayed by the opinions of people who are ‘just like them’, which means that when they’re in need of your offers (and therefore sitting very much in the ‘before’ stage of whatever shift or transformation your products or services provide), it’s hard to see themselves reflected in the shiny ‘after’ of someone else’s story, and they’ll likely come up with 27 reasons why your offer won’t have the same results for them.
But, paint a picture that allows them to relate to the person in the frame, and those objections (mostly) melt away.
This is just one of the 4 ‘golden rules’ of social proof that, when followed, take your proof (testimonials, screenshots, reviews — all of it!) from a thing that sits on the page to a tool that does the selling for you.
You can find the other three, plus a bunch of annotated examples that bring them to life in real-world, how-to detail, inside the Social Proof Sidekick, along with:
The handy, spandy Build-A-Survey tool
Don’t know what questions to ask to get the good stuff or how to motivate people to *actually* respond? This piece of wizardry tackles the task for you, helping you build a bloody good survey in a matter of minutes. Just follow the prompts, add in the bits and bobs that are relevant to your offer, and this tool pulls it all together into a survey you can literally copy-paste directly into your survey platform, ready to send.
Foolproof scripts to help you get permission to use ‘unprompted social proof’ (aka all that good stuff your clients and customers share with you off-the-cuff in emails, on social media, and inside your group programs)
If you’ve ever felt awkward about making this particular ask, you’ll love these! Simply tweak ‘em so they sound like you, then copy-paste the tweaked version into your email, DM, or Slack channel — wherever you’re having the conversation you want to capture now and leverage later on.
A use case section that steps you through specific challenges, like proving a beta offer, proving an offer in a crowded market, and proving intangible outcomes
Expect strategic insights, specific instructions, and a whole bunch of examples that bring it all to life. And yep, you’re free to take as much inspiration from these as you need!
Plus!
If you buy the Sidekick before 9am AEST July 20, you get to join me for a Proofer-only workshop, where I’ll be stepping you through exactly how I’m leveraging everything inside the Sidekick to position + proof one of my new offers.
No holds barred, and no extra dollaroos — just an opportunity to see another example (there are TONS in the Sidekick!) of how the sausage is made.
Word on the street is it’s going to be good 😉
Click here for all the details on the Sidekick and the workshop. And, if it’s not a fit, I hope the free nugget in this post is one you can put to use.
Big love,
Kirsty xo
PS. In the interests of one of the other golden rules of social proof (*ooo* open loop), here’s a picture of 17-year-old me as Roger Ramjet.
Sadly, I don’t have any of me as ‘thrush’, so you’ll just have to take my word for it 😉