(GUEST POST) Stop Kony 2012 in the view of an international development professional based in Kenya

The Stop Kony 2012 social media campaign launched by Invisible Children had slick production values and a compelling message, but was it factually correct and ethical? And  what did the campaign have to do with international development? What was the campaign for? All important questions for social media professionals.

The following is a guest post on Stop Kony 2012 written by my friend Dave Algoso, an international development professional based in Nairobi, Kenya. He generously agreed to share it with my readers. He blogs at Find What Works, which he says revolves around "international development, politics, and whatever else catches my eye". 

I resisted. I really tried. But here I am anyway. Writing about this campaign. If you’re on Facebook or other social media, you don’t need me to include the video itself, since it’s popping up everywhere. But this post won’t make much sense without it, so here it is.

Invisible Children’s “Kony 2012″ video

If you follow me on twitter, you might have seen that I posted commentary last night as I watched it. It’s 30 minutes long, but took well over an hour to watch on my internet connection. That allowed me plenty of time to chew it over. Afterward I checked out their website. I resisted the urge to write anything substantial until I’d read other critical commentary, then slept on it, and woke up with a reluctant decision to blog.

Reviewing the tape

On the one hand, this is a very well done film. The videography, editing, music, everything. It looks good. It’s crafted well enough that millions of Americans are spending half an hour to watch something about a conflict on the other side of the world. That’s no small feat.

On the other hand, those millions of Americans are learning almost nothing about that conflict. I’m so impressed with the filmmakers’ ability to capture attention that I wish they would put it to better use. I wish there was some discussion of Uganda’s political situation or even a mere mention of the name Museveni, because what Invisible Children proposes will have both positive and negative ramifications for that country. I also wish they wouldn’t focus so much on Uganda, because Joseph Kony isn’t even there anymore and the LRA is a regional problem. And while we’re at it: I wish they wouldn’t refer to Uganda as being in Central Africa, because it’s actually in East Africa.

How did I spend half an hour watching this, yet learn so little? Partly because the filmmakers have a strained relationship with questions of empowerment and agency. I wish the ratio of empowered-white-people to crying-black-children in the video wasn’t so high, and that the levels of both were lower. There are a lot of amazing Ugandans doing amazing work to better their communities. Those are stories worth telling.

Finally, there’s what Invisible Children actually advocates: grassroots pressure from Americans to ensure that the U.S. military continues to assist with the tracking and capture of Joseph Kony. In some ways, this is an ideal role for U.S. special forces advisers. If our country has the expertise and the resources to help end a long-running conflict, then let’s do it. But what happens if limited support fails — a strong possibility given Kony’s demonstrated skill at living on the run — and Washington’s decision-makers feel public pressure to do more? Do we switch to drone strikes? Commitment of ground forces?

Whipping the American public into believing that we’re morally right to intervene militarily is always fraught with danger. Stripping away the nuance and complexity of the issue makes it worse. And make no mistake: while Kony is undoubtedly an evil man who should be stopped, the history of the LRA and the governance/military situation in the region make this whole thing more complicated than it seems.

Advocacy’s Golden Rule: simplify but don’t distort

I’ve written about advocacy campaigns before. My stance is a bit contrary to that of many other development bloggers, likely due to our different backgrounds: I started my career in advocacy, while many of my blogging friends are academics. While academics cringe at the narratives used by advocacy groups, I’ve made my peace with their need for simplification. If a given problem requires government action, and we think about the politics and strategy required to make the government move, we can’t help but conclude that our messages must be simple. Otherwise our cause gets lost in the noise of Capitol Hill, or Turtle Bay, or wherever.

But that doesn’t give advocates a free pass. While writing about conflict minerals legislation a few years ago, I distinguished simplifications of reality from distortions of it. This is what I wrote:

Unlike a distortion, a simplification is actually backed by and derived from a more considered analysis. A simplification is tied by a clear (if unstated) chain to a comprehensive and nuanced understanding of the problem. Some advocates would claim that it’s okay to use a distorted narrative, as long as it leads to the right policies. This thinking is dangerous because it detaches your policy agenda from reality. You start believing your own distortions and lose any assurance that you really are pursuing the right policies. Even worse, other people start believing your distortions.

So simplify, but don’t distort. I’m only stretching the term a bit when I call this the “Golden Rule” of advocacy. When you distort an issue, you encroach on other issues. If you inflate the numbers on the severity of the problem you’re addressing, you steal resources from other programs. If you misrepresent the causal chain or fail to give sufficient history, you hamstring policymakers and future advocates (including a future you) who have to deal with a mis-educated grassroots movement (see “Save Darfur“). Do unto other issues as you would have other advocates do unto yours.

Invisible Children has done a great job of slimming down reality into a simple narrative, packaging it, and selling it. And boy, do they sell it. You can get an action kit complete with bracelets, t-shirts, posters and more. But they’ve gone too far. Too much style, not enough substance. Their “policy manifesto” weighs in at a mere two and a half pages. The story they tell about Joseph Kony and the policy they advocate for stopping him amounts to distortions of reality. They’ve got the resources, the networks, and the skills to truly promote better U.S. policy in the region, yet they’ve focused it too narrowly in order to make something attention grabbing. I wish they had set their sights higher.

________________________

The posts I linked to above, and other resources:

• Stop Kony, yes. But don’t stop asking questions – Musa Okwonga, The Independent
• Joseph Kony is not in Uganda (and other complicated things) – Michael Wilkerson, ForeignPolicy
• A Peace of my mind: Respect my agency 2012! – TMS Ruge, Project Diaspora
• The #Kony2012 show – Elliott Ross, Africa is a Country
• The Trouble with #StopKony – Elizabeth Dickinson, World Affairs
• And lest you think me unfair: Invisible Children’s response to the critiques
• For more commentary than you can shake a stick at, see WhyDev’s collection of Kony2012 posts

1 unbelievably fun tip for memorizing anything (Hack Your Brain #2)

Corporate communications professionals have to juggle unbelievable amounts of information and relationships. Come to think of it, EVERYONE needs to do that.

How can this be done?

Memory. Aside from using tools, such as Radian6, a strong memory makes all the difference for your getting work done efficiently and enjoying your life.

Unfortunately, many people are intimidated by the idea of relying upon their minds, rather than committing their thoughts to paper. They don’t know how to do it, aside from the usual tips to break down items into abbreviated lists and so on.

Abbreviations work. But you can do much, MUCH better.

If you’re like me, memorizing things can be tricky. That is, until I heard of the Memory Palace technique. People use this simple trick to quickly memorize unbelievable amounts of information. An eight-time world memory champion, Dominic O’Brien, was able to memorize 54 decks of cards in sequence looking at each card only once using this tip.

Intrigued? So was I. Practicing this technique has forever changed how I approach memorization.

I’ll explain how it works.

How your memory works

Your brain is an amazingly powerful organ. And it can remember things far beyond what you might think is the expiration date. How often have you tasted a dish and been transported back to your childhood, or seen a beautiful sight that stays for years? Clearly, it is possible to store info for long periods, without apparently trying very hard and this is all the more true if those thoughts are highly emotional.

The other thing that matters a lot to your remembering information is that your Hippocampus, a visual center in the brain, is intimately tied to your memorizing abilities.

Activate your Hippocampus and chances are that you will be more likely to remember once fleeting thoughts. Make your thoughts highly emotional and you can bank on not forgetting as easily as you once might have.

How can we take advantage of our neurological wiring? We build a palace. 

Build a place in your mind that you already know well

The Memory Palace is highly effective as a memorization tool largely because it activates the Hippocampus. 

Here’s how to do it. In your mind, visualize a place that you already know intimately. The place you visually might be a home you lived in for years, or a path you walk every day through your workplace. The place really doesn’t matter so much as your knowledge of it. If it is a place that you feel strong about, all the better. Your visualized place is your palace.

Now, associate your items for memorizing with the place you have visualized

Create relationships between different areas in your palace with the items you want to memorize. For example, if you want to remember a pencil, you might consider visualizing a pencil as you enter your palace. As you walk through your palace in your mind’s eye, you see other objects you need – a tomato, a crocodile, tickets to an NBA game.

You know what? Let’s keep these items in mind as we go to the next step – a pencil, a tomato, a crocodile, and tickets to an NBA game.

Make your thoughts as emotional and strange as possible (a practical example)

We have already nailed an important part of memory by building memory palaces. Now lets really make those thoughts stick.

The Romans, who came up with the Memory Palace technique, suggested making the thoughts we memorize as gory as possible. They said that the more weird and emotional the image, the better.

Here is how I would do it.

As I walk into my childhood home through the garage, I see the pencil. It is a HUGE pencil, with the circumference of a log. Better escape into the next room, the pencil is rolling after me and might crush my toes! RUN!

Whew, made it. … Uh, the floor is covered in squashed tomatoes … who is going to have to clean up this mess? Ugh!

(Luckily there is a cartoon crocodile in the living room, his teeth dripping with blood and guts. I say luckily, because he has begun sweeping up the tomatoes.)

Better go in the kitchen, this is a little weird. And I don’t like the way the tomatoes are squelching underfoot.

Woah! … It’s Derrick Rose, my favorite player for the Chicago Bulls, and he’s sitting at the kitchen table. Why is he here? … He’s handing over those NBA tickets for my family that I wanted! What a great day.

See what I mean? You might be able to memorize my list more easily than before I made it so bizarre. The more bizarre, emotional and disgusting, the better.

On a side note, there is a major reason I used a childhood theme for my recent Burt and Ernie teach Twitter techniques post. Memories of childhood shows and experiences can be a powerful way of helping others remember our social media content. Of course such content has to be memorable for the right reasons, otherwise it can more easily remain in the mind for the wrong reasons!

How to begin applying the Memory Palace to your work

Now it’s time to practice this technique yourself. While you’re at home, write down a grocery list and commit the items to memory by building a crazy Memory Palace. Leave the list at home; do not look at the list while shopping.

After you get back, check how many items you remembered. If you forgot any items, really think about why that might be. Was your association between the items and the place you constructed strong enough? Were the razor blades you needed not scary enough?

Don’t get discouraged if you were not 100% successful the first time. The more you practice the Memory Palace technique, the easier it will be to remember items. On the other hand, you might find yourself getting perfect scores from the beginning. The key to success is really activating your brain’s emotional and visual center.

Once you have become good at memorizing lists of up to 30 items, you can graduate to relying on this technique at work. Once you can do this reliably with memorizing physical objects, you might try using Memory Palaces to recall abstract concepts linked strongly to physical objects in your mind’s eye. 

For example, if you want to memorize “honor”, you might find remembering a knight in shining armor useful to memorizing that concept. The more you learn how your mind works, the more you can fine tune this process. Eventually you would always want to use the same objects to recall specific concepts.

Well, what do you think? Have you ever used the Memory Palace, and what sort of results have you gotten? I would love to hear your thoughts.

Happy memorizing!

Hack your brain post #1: How to kill writer’s block and unleash your hidden creativity

This week in Public Persuasion class at Northwestern University, teacher Jason DeSanto covered a technique to unleash hidden creativity that had long time communications professionals in the class amazed.

What is that technique you ask? 

Freewriting.

I have already been freewriting as a way to hack into my brain’s creative side since I was a teenager many moons ago. Actually, freewriting turned me on to writing in the first place. Until a tutor advised me to freewrite, I honestly hated writing. Yes, really.

I have been engaging in freewriting for many years now. It was one of the first things I learned when I began writing more seriously in high school, and it has never ceased to be a tool that I fall back on. I have used the same technique for brainstorming design concepts as well, including for a graphic design class I took at COD in the beginning of 2011. In fact, my best creative writing has always had a strong freewriting streak and I regularly use the technique to jog my social media juices.

And now, here I am, writing all over different social media channels, including for this blog. Something must have worked! Freewriting is fun, and gosh darn it highly therapeutic at stressful times as well. You have not lived until you’ve tasted the Kool Aid that is freewriting!  

Full disclosure: before I really get into this post and explain what is freewriting, I’m going to mention that there is already a great book about this topic. Accidental Genius: Using Writing to Generate Your Best Ideas, Insight, and Content by Mark Levy gives you the sort of ideas you need to get a creative edge over your competitors in almost any industry. We read this book for DeSanto’s class and had a great discussion on the topic last Friday. Those sources spurred me to start my Brain Hack series, and I respect for them both. 

Where does creativity come from and why does it get blocked?

Here is the thing. We all have moments where we accidentally stumble across great thoughts that can solve problems. Often times it is when we are doing the most inane of tasks and not thinking very hard. Levy says that there is a reason for this. The human mind is highly robust and capable of greatness, provided that it is not hamstrung.

What could hamstring the mind? Trying to find “the perfect idea”, for one. Another is trying to be everything to everyone because we are more worried about pleasing others than being ourselves. Or maybe we get caught up in the process and become too self-conscious about what we “should” think.

Luckily, there’s an app for that.

You’ve intrigued me. Now get to the point. What is freewriting?

Freewriting is a technique for turning on the faucet of ideas in the mind which, for whatever reason, has been turned off. It hinges on writing as quickly as one possibly can, without worrying about typos or grammatical constructions. The important thing here is to produce for ourselves, not for others. Just choose any topic that is of interest to you, whether it is a work problem, or a relationship, or a class, or a design challenge. The choice is yours.

If you push yourself to freewrite, at first it will likely feel very awkward, but keep at it. You will notice your mind becoming more spontaneously within a short time and thoughts spilling across the pages you might not have realized you ever had.

What does it feel like to freewrite?

Like I said, many things are hidden in our minds by different conditioning factors that can be uncovered by engaging in freewriting. Our thoughts weave a tangled web, and when one part of the web is shaken, another part will often move and make itself apparent in ways we never noticed. This takes practice. Without practice, freewriting and other brain hacks like it can feel very awkward and scary – there is nowhere to hide when you confront your own thoughts.

My favorite way to confront myself – this is the way I approach freewriting – is to work against a timer and pour out my heart and soul. I race to get everything on the page while staring off, Ray Charles like, to ignore the editing marks that scratch against my mind. It doesn’t matter to me what anyone else thinks when I am in this zone, because I am doing what I love for myself, and to see if there is anything I need to work on regarding my thought processes. 


I actually wrote that last paragraph freewriting.


I’ll give you another practical example of freewriting in action this week. I first chose to let my thoughts wander over an interview that I was scheduled for on Friday, giving myself just three minutes (the interview was for a social media position with a PR firm in the suburbs.)

Throughout the week before sitting down on my couch to write this piece, I had been pulling out all the stops to make sure that my interview would be a success. But while I think that I have been doing everything I can to be ready for my big interview, that is not to say that I have no fears or am not nervous. These fears clearly came out in my writing. I might not have realized these and known to address them if I had not engaged in freewriting.

Cool, but for some people this is easier said than done. How can I actually do it?

Here are five major tips tips that will get you freewriting today.

1. Try easy. Don’t reach for very complicated language or try to be clever. Just be yourself.

2. Write quickly and continuously. No slowing down or fixing your mistakes. Try to look away from the computer screen or paper while you’re writing and just push yourself to go as quickly as it takes for words to flow without thought.  

3. Work against a time limit. Setting a time limit introduces an element of discipline to our writing that does not interfere with our creativity. Time limits also subconsciously push us to produce more than we might have otherwise. I suggest starting with 3 minutes. Levy says we try a marathon session of 7-8 hours, which I think is just a tad sadomasochistic, but to each their own.

4. Write the way you think. Just write whatever you are thinking immediately on the page. This will prove invaluable in uncovering your thought processes.

5. Go with the thought. Don’t stop to think about how something could sound better if worded differently. You can always go back and edit your work later. The point with this brain hack is to be spontaneous, not methodical. Don't worry about your mind wandering off if a thought becomes exhausted. Getting lost is fine with freewriting!

What topics should I start off with? 

You might want to try any of the following themes:

1. Pick a point and go the opposite direction.

2. What if _____ weren’t important at all?

3. If I weren’t at my job now, I would be …

4. If I hadn’t studied ______ in undergrad, I would have / could have …

5. If I were in the world’s best ______ that would mean …

6. If I were the world’s best ______ that would look like …

7. If my colleagues already believed in my plan …

8. This might sound crazy, but I would be 500% more productive if …


Great, but what do I do with this now?

With any luck, you've written some great ideas that you might not have thought about before. Repeat exercises, review ideas, rinse off writer's block. 

Aatif Bokhari is a social media specialist. You can find him on LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/aatifbokhari and Twitter at @aatifbokhari.

What Bert and Ernie taught me about Twitter (VIDEO + POST)

Bert and Ernie? How did I ever get into Bert and Ernie and what do they have to do with Twitter?

When you have a kid, a lot of things change. And when you love social media as much as me, you start learning lessons from the most surprising of places.

Here’s how it started. Every morning my 16-month-old son, Ali Raza, has breakfast. Getting him to sit still is sometimes tricky. Why would he when he could be playing with his Elmo doll?

But we’ve found that there is a solution: Play videos of Bert and Ernie on YouTube. Ali Raza seems to enter a different zone when he starts watching Sesame Street or Mr. Rogers that, conveniently for his parents, makes it a LOT easier to feed him.

There is one video of Bert and Ernie in particular that Ali Raza loves, when they go fishing. We can watch this 10 times in a row and he doesn’t get bored. Of course I end up watching it too and memorizing the whole plot.

Here is the video: 

At first I, unlike Ali Raza, WAS getting bored. But then I started actually thinking about what Burt and Ernie were saying.

Basically it boils down to this. It’s not WHAT you say, but HOW you say it that really counts. And this is such an important concept, especially when you are trying to reach out to people on Twitter.

Often times people don’t hear us on Twitter. They’re “underwater”, as Ernie explains, drowning in a sea of tweets. So doing something to stand out is important. If you want to build Twitter engagement with followers, it takes work.

This is fishing class. Here are some tips to start reeling in your followers.

1. Pack in the content in each tweet!

Yes, content. What do I mean by packing in the content? I mean try to say as much as possible in 140 characters. Throw out vowels if you have to, use number symbols instead of writing out, do whatever it takes to say a lot in just 140 characters. It’s clever, forces you to think, and keeps everyone on their toes. Part of the Twitter tactics I used after I launched my own media organization back in 2007 was to tweet recipes, for example, hummus. It’s amazing what that sort of approach can do to get fish biting!

2. Ask questions

This is a corner stone of good social media. Have you noticed how a good question can stop and make you think? There, I just showed you. Start your tweets with who, what, when, where, why and how, and you will see your Twitter peeps starting to take notice.

3. Comment on links you post

Posting links seems like a no brainer, right? The thing is, going overboard with posting links is good way to annoy people and its only half of the equation. Instead of only posting links, make it a point to review the links and offer your thoughts as well. If we do this, we look like real people, not robo tweeters. A good way to break this cycle is to tweet about where you are at the moment, even if you're just sitting in a boat.

4. Use the ‘@’ symbol generously

The “@” symbol is one of the most powerful ways of building rapport with your followers. Think about it: if you’re at a party, do you usually go over and speak to the wallflower talking to the middle of the room without directing their words to anyone in particular, like Bert? Or do you talk to the charming person who brings up stories and ideas, and talks directly to you with passion, like Ernie? Make sure to comment on other people’s posts. If they don’t engage with you after several tweets, stop following them.

Oh, and don’t use the @ symbol in posts without content for the sole purpose of getting people to pay attention to you. That scares away the fishes. Be bold, but give something for people to listen to.

Btw, try to not start posts with the @ symbol if you can. It doesn’t read well and makes it more difficult for the fish to bite.

5. Post consistently and thoughtfully

Quantity of posts is not as important, I think, as consistency and quality. When we show a regular presence, we become trusted by our followers. That is hugely important to engaging people and becoming friends. On the other hand, if you fill up people’s Twitter feed with posts, they very likely are going to get turned off. Unless you’re already a celebrity of some sort and have fans who follow you for reasons other than Twitter.

6. Don’t be afraid to be laughed at or judged

This is HUGELY important.  Some people use Twitter, but they don’t know how to be original with the site. They copy other people rather than offering original content, because they are afraid to be laughed at. Don’t go there. The world is filled with Burts accustomed to doing what they have been told is the right thing to say or do. It’s important to have a strong foundation, but we have to be Ernies, ready to be ourselves and use techniques we know work from our own personal experience.

7. Retweet carefully

It’s ok to retweet praise, but seriously, who likes hearing people always talking about how others say how good they are? It comes off as arrogant and petty. It’s much better to simply retweet comments that you find insightful or useful.

8. Hashtags? Use them sparingly!

Hashtags (the “#” sign) can be a good way to get attention for a subject, but they definitely can be overdone. Personally, I don’t even like to use them. I think they’re another symbol that is overused. Try to keep your tweets interesting enough.

[Edit April 9, 2012: Beverly Shepard, an expert marketer, asked a great question on LinkedIn regarding this section on hash tags. I’m posting my response to that part of the question now.] As you know, hashtags are utilized because they help Twitter users find content. However, hashtags are too often used on inane words that no one is really going to search for. Pretty easy to understand, I think. 

Other times hash tags are used by people for trending topics. Trending topics are fun to play around with to get thinking and "free write" which can be a huge boost for creativity and productivity in our lives (something I will blog on later in the week -- check it out on Thursday!), but they tend to update VERY quickly because many people are trying to get attention using them. Whither the days of yore when Twitter was not used by every Tom, Dick and Harry! Hope that explains why I find trending hashes to be generally a waste of time -- they are supposed to be used to make finding content more easy, not more difficult. 

Now, this is not to mean that hash tags are not at all useful. For example, journalists tend to use hashtags very selectively and effectively to mine the site for breaking info. If you can get a hold of trending topics for journalists, that would be much more useful than the general Twitter trending topics. That's because journalists can be a great source of information and even if they are not going to work your story, they often times can be good people to keep in touch with. Getting on their radar screen is a first step. 

The other way in which hash tags are useful is if a small group of people are using unusual tags for the purpose of keeping in touch over an important matter, for example, a conference, class or work project. In that case hash tags are VERY important in staying connected with other without directing attention to one group of people, I still think the pool of people aware of the tag should be a relatively small or focused one.

9. Try to engage with your real friends on subjects that matter to you both

If you want to be good at Twitter, but don’t know where to start, start with your friends. Maybe you have a class or a workout regimen that you’re both crazy for. Or maybe there are recipes you enjoy sharing. Talk about that first as you learn how Twitter works. 

A great professor of Marketing at Northwestern, Rick Kolsky, used Twitter last quarter for one of my classes in this way. He set up a Hoot Course module and measured our class participation in part by how much we engaged each other microblogging on different topics:

This was a great way to engage the class and get us talking about things that we wouldn't have otherwise. I learned a lot more from my classmates and the material we were reading than if I had just been studying by own. Twitter can and should be useful for us, as well as our followers. There's no reason why this approach couldn't be used to build up followings on Twitter around niche subjects, and in fact many of the most successful Twitterpreneurs use this very approach.

10. Use relevant pictures

A picture says a thousand words, which is nice when you only have 140 characters to work with. Taking your own pics is very useful and can pay dividends. I just won a prize from a social media marketing agency for doing this, which was cool because I don’t win prizes every day and it was a huge honor. I’ll explain.

I had gone to a great Northwestern University career fair hosted by the Medill Journalism School where I ran into a great word-of-mouth and social media marketing organization called Zócalo Group. I took home some of their fliers, including a paper on their word-of-mouth services. While I wasn’t looking, my son, Ali Raza, grabbed the word-of-mouth flier and ate part of it.

Here’s the pic:

I tweeted what had happened to @ZocaloGroup along with the picture. A short while later they sent me a direct message asking for my address so they could mail me a prize! It’s a huge personal honor to be recognized – even if it’s a small prize, getting attention from pros at Zócalo means a lot to me. I’m convinced it had something to do with using a funny picture.

11. Enjoy!

Don’t worry about crafting the perfect tweet, there’s no such thing! Instead, just have fun with Twitter.

Some people begin by following several celebrities and get confused. They don’t know what to do with Twitter and get discouraged after just a few tweets because no one is talking to them. The fact is, Twitter seems simple, but it is an art that takes time and some practice to master. It begins by keeping an open mind and literally willing to look for inspiration anywhere.

Use these tips and you could see fish start jumping into the boat today! What other tips can you think of to build relationships on Twitter and what are your stories?

Aatif Bokhari is a social media specialist. You can find him on LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/aatifbokhari and Twitter at @aatifbokhari.

Managers, you can't actually use social media to manipulate employees into liking you!

[There] are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – there are things we do not know we don't know. 

Donald Rumsfeld, former Secretary of Defense of the United States of America

Do you follow Rumsfeld's logic? 

Yeah, me neither. 

But I do know that not knowing what people are thinking in an organization can cause serious problems for managers. 

Newsflash: social media on its own can not make bosses liked by employees without other factors coming into play. By the way, I say this as a guy who is totally in love with social media (as if you couldn't tell!). I just think that face-to-face contact can never fully be replaced by social media or emails.

Knowing what other people know in the organization is facilitated not only by understanding the formal structure of the organization, but also knowing the underlying informal networks. These are the relationships that naturally develop between people, which although important, are not going to be found on your typical organizational chart. 

Before tapping into these informal networks, employers need to get something straight: snooping on employees or trying to get their social media passwords is not only unethical, it will only backfire by making employees more resentful. Resentful employees tend to do unpleasant things like anonymously bash their workplace online. Once word gets out, hiring talent becomes a LOT tougher.

All relationships are underpinned to some degree by trust. Understanding how people trust each other comes first, followed distantly by social media. You don't even have to be interested in social media to see that understanding how trust works in organizations has a direct impact on company performance. Let me explain.

Formal structures on their own are important to establishing authority and responsibility. However, the underlying informal networks are far more important, I believe. A manager may be able to exert power over others by way of the formal structure, but he or she will not be able to know and influence others without having their trust. Trust is a "fuzzy" concept, but one that is immensely important in terms of how employees actually will work with one another.

Managers cannot hope to know what is happening without understanding organizational relationships, but unfortunately because they cannot be everywhere they are often left to draw conclusions based on superficial observations. Such an approach can have myriad consequences. By not understanding the way people actually operate, managers may put people in positions of power who have little real influence over personnel.

Employees may choose to build or break alliances on tacitly and explicitly agreed upon choices, at least in the absence of the manager. Employees untrained in technology they perceive as foisted upon them may seek to hinder the manager’s initiatives. At worst this may undermine the organization’s production and completely devastate morale. Managers perceived as being out of touch are not generally well respected.

I think that there are a number of things that managers can do to know what other people know in the organization. Raising awareness should not be viewed as unimportant by managers used to dealing with hard information, rather than fuzzy concepts, such as trust, but be treated as an integral part of making the organization run more efficiently.

The first is to not stifle debate or discussion. An environment in which speaking out is stifled will only force the discourse elsewhere, where it cannot be as easily influenced or followed. An example of such a work place is Microsoft, which encourages criticism so long as it is not personal. Such discourse can be facilitated by strategies that range from complex, such as the use of exclusive social media forums for company personnel, as is the case with General Electric, which has its own social media network for employees, to simple, as is the case with thousands of small businesses around the world that hold meetings where employees are encouraged to speak out. 

Companies that do choose to build employee only social media networks tend to have better morale and loyalty than companies that do not. This doesn't have to be an expensive system. Even a list serv or simple closed group on Facebook can serve this purpose.

Secondly, managers should take time to get to know their employees and instill a sense of pride in their role. Employees who feel valued within the organization by their manager are more likely to report what is happening out of loyalty. Google encourages this feeling of loyalty by proclaiming itself to have a revolutionary culture that says “don’t be evil”.

Third, managers should initiate 360 degree anonymous evaluations for employees engineered to measure trust and other positive factors. These can be graded for trust and should be understood by employees as being part of making the company better, not for the purpose of promotions and demotions. Armed with such data, managers should begin shifting their attention from advice networks to trust networks, which are more representative of the underlying state of the organization, and building advice networks to reflect this reality accordingly.  

These are a few ideas I have. I’m looking forward to hearing my classmates discuss this topic in class tomorrow (Managing Info and Innovation), and am sure I’ll be learning some new things I’ve never thought of. 

I know I can trust them to keep pushing me to learn more. 

Aatif Bokhari's LinkedIn profile can be found here.