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Be careful of the face palm (🤦♀️) emoji: it's still a power move!
Lucio has said before that the winky face emoji (😉) can sometimes be a power move depending on the situation and context.
Well, that's not the only emoji that can be a power move.
Of course, any emoji that would resemble a power move in real life is still a power move, even if it's over the medium of text.
For example, the eye-rolling emoji: 🙄.
Someone rolling their eyes at you is often a negative judge role power move, showing disappointment, disapproval, annoyance, etc. And that holds true in both real life and text.
And the same dynamics apply to the face-palm emoji.
Moving on to the main case study now, I saw this email subject line this morning and didn't get a positive feeling from it:
This is an email from a real estate course teacher whose newsletter I'm subscribed to.
If you only read the subject line, you see:
- The face palm emoji: which implies that someone's mistake/blunder was obvious (framing themself in the teacher role as someone who "knew better")
- The "OMG": makes a bigger deal out of the blunder and only thread-expands on how obvious the mistake was, which makes the teacher look better and disempowers the student further
- The "please": at this point, now makes it feel like this person is "begging" you not to make the same mistake which is an overdramatic way of making the student even more of a social peg
This is, of course, more than likely a marketing move for added effect and a higher click-through rate (CTR).
And you can tell since the body of the email holds a different tone:
Her: "Have you ever experienced that gut-clenching, stomach-sinking, 'OMG I’ve made a huge mistake' moment? I think most of us have experienced this at least once in our lives (now admits that she has also fallen into the category of people who made the obvious, dumb mistake which closes the gap a bit between her and the readers who may have felt bad receiving her negative judgment). It's a terrible feeling (and empathizes to further smooth things over)."
She gets the initial clicks with the negative subject line and then switches to her usual nicer self in the email body.
Pulling these kinds of power moves and then making up for it to keep your audience doesn't feel the most eagle-like to me though. I'd prefer not to pull these power moves in the first place while still being persuasive, which is one of the goals of developing my own "high-quality eagle-like marketing" style.
However, even in a marketing context, it's still an entrepreneur pulling a power move on members of their audience who made any of those seven mistakes she mentions.
And in a text message conversation (where you're probably more likely to see this or other power move-y emojis), it's all the more important to respond effectively or risk becoming their social peg.
Happy to read any thoughts and feedback on this case study.
Hello Ali,
Definitely. To me, it even sounds insulting as to me it goes as far as implying that the recipient is dumb. Then there is the hook: "what are these 7 mistakes?" and finally he normalizes: "everyone can do this dumb thing, you're not actually dumb".
So it sounds manipulative and not genuine at all. More like a string of techniques.
Thanks for sharing.
Yeah I feel the same, Ali. The title implies a kind of negative shock and seems to be click-bait. The facepalm emoji is definitely in the realm of negative judge frame but in this case it's not necessary - the same message could be delivered with a neutral and respectful tone. I generally feel that marketers who use “OMG” or even words like “stupid”, “terrible” don't give the impression of high value content. It feels like a kind of sensational shock that tabloid newspapers would do.
