Tiking the Tok
Time is our most precious commodity. Regardless of where we come from, who we are or where we’ve been, the amount of it that we have is both limited and unknown. How we choose to spend it, however, defines us in how we live and what we become.
As we all lie locked into enclosed spaces, find new ways of entertaining ourselves with our disgruntled loved ones, and are forced to work from home while days merge into each other and weekends lose meaning, we are suddenly forced to rethink our approach to time & what we do with it. For millions of us, suddenly brutally deprived of rights we took for granted tied to our most basic human need for connection, that answer has been social media.
This made me think: How can we meaningfully use our time now, when we are physically limited, to best represent ourselves and work towards our life goals through these platforms that have become digital extensions of our society?
As my final year as an MBA student at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business comes to a close (Go Class of 2020!!), this question has become even more prescient as I will have to establish myself and navigate my next professional steps purely online for the next few months, at least. Our rockstar Reputation Management professor, Allison Kluger, always says “Reputation is what precedes you when you enter a room”. Well, for us it will be when we enter the chatroom.
In comes Kudzi Chikumbu, proud African, Gen Z expert, TikTok extraordinaire. Seeing that elegant, poised, cool social media guru take us through his philosophy and advice for achieving great online presence during our Reputation Management class was an almost messianic sight, amidst an ocean of coffee-stained Patagonia vests and scruffy quarantine beards. Kudzi lives & breathes his values. The image that he presented to us, through our sterile Zoom screens, was a colourful, passionate embodiment of how he thinks we should aim to be: our authentic, online selves.
Kudzi was one of the first team members of TikTok, a skyrocketing social media app known for having made content production easy & accessible to whole new segments of the population (hello viral dance moves!). According to his rich experience, if you want to be a successful content creator today, you should follow these 3 rules:
1- Post regularly — Make ’em rain (at equal intervals)!
2- Engage more than you post — Be generous, be a giver.
3- Use diverse mediums — Sound on! Your stories will have more engagement.
As soon-to-be graduates entering a now uncertain and unstable future, Kudzi advised us not to be afraid of promoting our own work — it will make us known and open up opportunities for us.
“If you don’t amplify your own voice, no one else will”
Kudzi’s big belief is that uniqueness is our superpower: being ourselves, using our authentic voice to lift up others, “not being a clone” and standing for something are all objectives he thinks we should pursue.
“Being different is better than being better”
He however urges us to, first and foremost, do so with intention, to be purposeful of when and how we use social media, to use our voice for reason. Our social media histories have become indelible graveyards of who we used to be, weapons with which others can attack our present and future selves. Daring to be different and daring to be our raw, authentic selves can come back to haunt us, especially as we grow, learn and change our opinions as we open our eyes to the world.
I am half French half Lebanese and grew up in the United Arab Emirates through several wars, the democratisation of the internet and the birth of the smartphone. As this week’s worldwide social media fueled human rights protests bring back strong feelings and emotions of events that have peppered my life, from the “Arab Spring”, to the 2006 Israel-Lebanon war, to the French “No fear” marches amidst seemingly endless waves of terrorist attacks, I am reminded of what an important place social media now has in our world order. Chinua Achebe’s wise and eloquent words, quoted to us by Kudzi in class, particularly spoke to me:
“Until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will glorify the hunter”.
It used to take considerable time and resources for the voice of the few to reach the many. Today, almost every single human being with an internet connection can have their one voice instantly reach billions. This carries great power but also great weight, and great responsibility. The flames of revolt are, after all, set ablaze by the timely fanning of the smallest spark.
We can choose to recklessly post content without much thought or reflection, impermeable to the harm we might cause directly or indirectly, so long as it generates engagement, as our words ripple through the seas of online-formed opinion. But we can also choose to spend our time to make conscious and informed choices vis-a-vis our online presence, without losing our voice and authenticity. But it does take effort and it does take time, and time is our most precious commodity.
What will you do with yours?
Tick. Tock.
