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1. 00:01 The social media social media is not a communication tool. They are not communication tools. Social media is plural many. Yeah. So social don’t say social media is but social media are. So social media are not communication tools. Anyone who thinks that you can
2. 00:21 communicate with people via social media is misusing social media and they are not effective at communication. Social media are not effective at communication because people come to social media to to hear what they want to hear. They’re not coming to social
3. 00:38 media to learn something. They’re not coming to social media to change their minds. They’re not coming to social media to be enlightened. They’re coming to social media to support their own views. They have views and they come to social media to find other people who
4. 00:53 agree with them. We call this echo chamber. Echo chamber or thought silo.
5. 01:10 [Music] So in social media people come in order to find likeminded people, people who would agree with them and then they form groups together. They never listen to people who disagree with them. This is important for you to to realize. Do not use social media to educate people to
6. 01:34 change their point of view to create a real debate to you’re you’re wasting your time completely. If you have a certain point of view, certain belief, certain value, certain idea, a project, whatever, find the people who would agree with you, not the
7. 01:51 people who would disagree with you. you’re wasting your time. Find the people who would agree with you and form groups. Form a group only with like-minded people. Social media is not a communication tool and social media is also not media. They’re not they’re also not media.
8. 02:13 In media we have objectivity or we are supposed to have objectivity. We are supposed to have neutrality. In media we are supposed to represent various points of view. In media we are supposed to foster debate. None of this happens on social media. The word media is very
9. 02:30 misleading. These are not media. These are platforms and they are platforms for people who like each other, people who agree with each other to flock together and create collectives, create forums or create groups or create that’s it. That’s what
10. 02:48 social media do. Nothing else, nothing more. Don’t expect them to do anything else. If you dare to use social media wrongly, you will end up boycotted, blocked, hated, banned. Remember this. If you’re trying to use social media, for example, to convince
11. 03:09 people of your point of view, these people will hate you, will block you, will become aggressive, and so on. Some people are doing this and they are known as trolls. Trolling. You You heard of trolls. Trolling. You heard of it?
12. 03:33 Trolls join groups and then they disagree with the people in the group. So they join a group and then they say, “No, I disagree. It’s not true. It’s wrong.” And everyone hates the trolls. The trolls are hated universally. So don’t misuse social media. Do not think
13. 03:51 of it as a media as media. Do not think of it as communication. So what is it? What is it? It is social. It is a tool for building communities. You use social media to build communities. How do you build communities?
14. 04:15 you find what is trending. You know, every social medium provides you with a list of trending words or trending hashtags or trending keywords. You find out these list and you identify in the list hashtags or keywords that fit your agenda, that fit your political
15. 04:36 direction, your values, your beliefs, your political platform and so on. So you identify trend trends or trending and then around the trending you post messages around the trending you post messages and these messages attract to you people who are like you people who
16. 04:56 agree with you people who will never argue with you and this enhances your strength and makes you the algorithm recognizes you as an influencer. and helps you. Influencers never ever work with people who disagree with them. Influencers do not accept criticism.
17. 05:20 They don’t they’re not open to this. So, I built my mini empire. It’s 600,000 people is not small. I built this by eliminating everyone who disagreed with me, everyone who criticized me. Eliminating, blocking, banning. No, deleted. Why? Because social media is not for
18. 05:44 communication. If I want to talk to people who disagree with me, if I want to talk to people who criticize me, I come here. I come to the universities where I teach. I’m open. Of course, no problem. I’m not stupid. I don’t think I know everything. But social media is not
19. 06:01 the are not the place for this. You want to build an empire. You want to have power. You want to influence people. You want to accomplish results. You want to motivate people. You do this by finding the people who support you and enjoying the collective power of the numbers. You
20. 06:22 understand this? This is the key to social media. Ignore all the nonsense that you read that social media is great because it allows people to interact and to communicate and many opinions. This is all trash. Complete nonsense. None of it is true. Next.
21. 06:43 So you build a community. You build a community and within the community you must create intimacy. A community without intimacy falls apart. disappears after some time. To build intimacy, you need to let the people get to know you. You need to become a
22. 07:07 real person. Not just an avatar, not just an icon, not just someone who is, but reveal yourself as a true person, as a three-dimensional full-fledged person, a person with hopes and fears and dreams and wishes and family and background and past and future and country and nation
23. 07:29 and ethnicity. And you reveal yourself as a full-fledged, fullyfledged person. If you do this, you become intimate with your followers and they will become in turn intimate with you. And intimacy, intimacy creates stickiness.
24. 07:53 Stickiness means that if you build a community, the people stay, remain, keep coming back. They don’t abandon you. They don’t go away. They don’t reject the community. They don’t disappear, but they keep coming back. This is called stickiness. The only way to create
25. 08:09 stickiness on social media is via intimacy. When you reveal yourself as a full-fledged human being, similar to the to your similar to your followers, similar to your supporters and so on, you need to do it in a way that you don’t look weak or stupid or or
26. 08:31 um wrong. You need to do it in a way you need to reveal yourself. You need to expose yourself. You need to be truthful about yourself. You need to share your vulnerabilities but not become a clown. It’s a very thin line. You can expose who you are, your vulnerabilities, your
27. 08:53 hopes, your disappointments, your desires. And if you do it in a certain way, people will be disgusted. disgusted by you. They say that’s a stupid guy or that’s a weak person or that’s you know oh we cannot trust him he’s not stable unstable unpredictable crazy you know so
28. 09:13 you it’s a very delicate line how to expose but not overexpose how to share but not overshare and what not to share what to share and what to not share of course. So this is an art. This is an art form. But sharing is crucial because it creates intimacy and intimacy creates
29. 09:36 stickiness. And that means your base will grow all the time. All the time. People want other people. People want human interactions. They don’t want avatars. They don’t want text. They don’t want images. They want another person. They want to interact with another person. Now
30. 09:58 I said that you should be truthful and that means you should offer your followers reality not fantasy. But when you offer them reality you need to offer them also solutions or hope you need to give hope. I mean I can describe reality to you and
31. 10:24 then all of you will go out and most of you will commit suicide. What did I achieve? Okay, that’s not the right way. Even if I describe reality to you and I disabuse you of the fantasy, I tell you this is fantasy. Don’t don’t think that way. It’s wrong and so on. I still I’m
32. 10:42 still trying to give you some direction, some solution, some hope. In other words, even when you when you interact with your social media group, be truthful, be grounded in reality, but always be hopeful. And always be solutionoriented. Don’t just criticize, don’t just
33. 11:03 criticize, don’t just hate, don’t just destroy, don’t just reject, don’t just, you know, because at some point people will get tired of you and people will say, “We know all this, you know, what do you have to offer? what are you offering us that we don’t know what’s
34. 11:18 what’s in it? So you need to combine. So it’s like a doctor. The doctor tells you okay we finish the test and you have cancer and uh it’s advanced but don’t worry I have medications for you and if you take the medication you will be completely
35. 11:36 healthy in two years. This is the right combination. Don’t come to your followers and say you have cancer you’re all going to die. Bye-bye. That won’t work in the lockdown. Okay. You then need to decide what type of politician you are because on you on
36. 11:55 social media an image will emerge. Do not build your image. Do not think you are too clever that you can build an image because building an image is deceiving. When you build an image, you are trying to manipulate people. You’re trying to deceive them and this always fails.
37. 12:17 Don’t think you can create an image. We have the example of Elon Musk. Elon Musk created an image with the best advisers and consultants in the world. He created an image and then in the past few months he was exposed as a bumbling fool. So all this image building. So don’t
38. 12:38 don’t manage your image. Don’t manage impressions. Don’t create images. But instead let an image emerge from your actions and from your speech, from what you are saying. The image will emerge. People will form an image of you based on what you’re saying and based on
39. 13:00 the way you act. So these two together will create the image. Don’t manage it. But even then you have to make a decision about who you are. Are you for example exclusionary or inclusionary? In other words, do you welcome everyone who who supports
40. 13:19 your platform, supports your mission, agrees with your vision, of course, but do you welcome everyone or are there certain types of people that you don’t want to have? So, are you inclusionary or exclusionary? Are you welcoming or are you putting firewalls
41. 13:35 so that some people will not enter? So I don’t know for example you could be an Albanian politician and your constituency is Albanian and all your work is focused on making living conditions for Albanians better the well-being of Albanians better and
42. 13:51 so on so forth and you are perfectly entitled to say I welcome only Albanians to my group because I want to discuss Albanian issues. I don’t welcome anyone else. That’s an exclusionary politician. You could be an inclusionary politician. You could say the Albanians,
43. 14:09 Macedonians, Greeks even. I mean, everyone, they are interconnected. They influence each other. There’s no way to isolate one group and benefit. So, I welcome everyone. Everyone who’s willing to discuss these issues and has my vision, agrees with me, is welcome to
44. 14:23 the group. So, this is an inclusionary politician. You need to decide what you are because the shape of your group, your messaging is highly dependent on whether you welcome everyone or exclude some. In other words, are you an in-group politician or outgroup politician? So
45. 14:43 these are the the professional terms. Next thing you need to decide is whether you are past oriented or future oriented. Pasttoriented means you’re focused on history, on traditional values, on past institutions. You’re focused backwards. So make America great again. That’s a
46. 15:09 past orientation. America was great, now he’s not. Make it great again. That’s the past. Traditional family values. Traditional family values. Traditional sexual orientations. Uh conservative approach to for example work and welfare. All these are pastoriented.
47. 15:29 It’s totally legitimate. Totally legitimate. You could say for example, I think the welfare state, social security, pension is too much. I think people should get less and I think people should work more. That’s okay. You could say I used to like the country
48. 15:46 more 20 years ago than now and I want it to be again the same. That’s okay. It’s okay to be past oriented but you need to define yourself. You need to identify yourself or you can be future oriented. You can say I don’t care about the past so much. I care about the future. I want
49. 16:04 to shape the future. This is my vision of the future. And yes, my vision of the future is not very dependent on the past. For example, in the United States, you have LGBTQ activists. They’re saying sexual orientation is fluid and so on so forth. So, we want to support same-sex
50. 16:22 marriage and transgender operations and this has nothing to do with the past. This is there’s no connection between this and the past. None of this existed in the past. On the contrary, it it it counters the past. It’s against the past. So, but these people are future
51. 16:40 oriented. This is their vision and they want to shape the world in their image the way they see it. So, you need to choose what you are past oriented or future oriented. Now you also need to decide in the current state of affairs what is preferable destruction or construction.
52. 17:02 Do you want to destroy things and institutions and so on or do you want to build them? That is also an orientation. You you need to decide what who you are. I’m mentioning all this because these parameters define your messaging on social media.
53. 17:19 When you start in social media, you need to have the answers to these questions and you you do not change these answers. It’s not like you start for example as a uh past oriented politician and suddenly you become future oriented politician. If you start on social media with one
54. 17:38 identity and then you change your identity, people will distrust you. They will abandon you. You can forget about your career. You must make these decisions early on. Who are you as a politician? The minute you decide, all your social media emanate from this and reflect your
55. 17:59 chosen identity, which never changes if you want to survive in politics. That’s why people who one day are SDSM and another day and then again SDSM, they don’t get far, right? Because they’re perceived as traitors or unpredictable or unstable. or opportunities just taking
56. 18:19 opportunities. Okay, you need you need to have clean hands. Corruption is not only about taking money under the table. Corruption is the appearance of taking money under the table. Maybe you’re not doing anything. But if you don’t manage your image as clean people, then you
57. 18:49 have a problem. So appearances matter. Appearances are even more important than what’s really happening. Avoid all the appearances of potential corruption. Avoid it. So in the United States there is a Supreme Court judge his name is Clarence Thomas.
58. 19:11 Clarence Thomas received gifts, many gifts, big gifts from multi-billionaires in the United States. He’s the judge of the Supreme Court and he received many gifts from rich people and his wife uh is activist in a in a group that is trying to reverse the elections in the
59. 19:34 United States to undo the elections. This is a judge of the Supreme Court. He maybe he didn’t do anything. Maybe he didn’t do anything. Maybe he’s not corrupt but he appears to be corrupt. He should have never taken these gifts from the rich people. Never.
60. 19:53 By taking these gifts from the rich people, he made himself susceptible to suspicion. You need to manage appearances much more than you need manage reality in social media. Of course, fine. Um next thing is um you can choose to manipulate people or
61. 20:15 you can choose to motivate people. Don’t confuse the two. When you manipulate people, the motivation is yours. When you motivate people, the motivation is theirs. So when you manipulate people, you create a fictitious, fellacious environment
62. 20:35 that causes people to behave in specific ways that they would not have behaved otherwise. You force them, you force people to not be themselves. When you manipulate people, you force people to change who they are. And they dislike you and hate you for this. Manipulation creates
63. 20:55 hatred in people. So always choose to motivate people not to manipulate them. You motivate people by sharing a vision and allocating roles saying to people this is the end goal and this is your job. This is what you should do to reach this goal to reach this vision this
64. 21:15 promised land. This is your role. This is your task. This is your assignment. This is what you should do. That motivates you need to motivate. And finally you need to have nuances. You need to have subtleties. You need to if you can’t say for example
65. 21:36 this politician is all bad or this political party is all good or this nation is all bad or this this is called splitting. This this is known as splitting defense. You should never do this. You should have nuances. No one is all good and no one is all bad. No
66. 21:55 institution is all good. No institution is all bad. No nation is all good and no nation is all bad. This is nonsense. There are bad people and good people everywhere. You need to see the gray, the nuances, the the subtleties and you need to communicate them to your
67. 22:11 supporters. Your supporters will not like that because people want simplicity. They don’t want complexity. People want to be able to say here is the demons and here’s the angels. That’s it. So this will not make you popular. But gradually people will realize that you’re wise.
68. 22:31 Now this is something you need to learn and that’s the end of this lecture because Buy is waiting and I have to see him. So here’s something you need to learn. You can either be wise or you can be popular. You cannot be both. I repeat this because of everything that
69. 22:50 I’ve said and all the torture that I inflicted on you today. Perhaps this is the only sentence you can you should remember. You can either be wise or you can be popular. You cannot be both. You have to make this choice. If you are wise, act as a wise man
70. 23:10 regardless of the price. All the wise people in history suffered. They all suffered. All the wise people, the people who created religions and they all suffered. You know, this is the this is the lot. This is the fate. This is the destiny. This is the karma, the
71. 23:27 kismmet of wise people. They have to pay a price for their wisdom. But they are the ones who make change. They are the ones who change the world. They are the ones who make the world better. The popular people benefit. Popular people have everything. They have the
72. 23:44 nice girls and they have the cars and they have the money and they have everything, you know, and yet at the end of the day, they’re like smoke. They’re meaningless. They leave nothing behind. Early on in your career, starting today, you need to ask yourself, what is it
73. 24:01 that I want to be? Do I want to be popular? It’s okay. You know, I’m in politics to make money, to have flashy cars, to travel all over the world. It’s okay. Do I want to be popular or do I want to be wise? If you want to be wise, be wise. Don’t act on impulse. Don’t say stupid
74. 24:20 things. Think before you act. Consider the good and bad in everyone. Open yourself to collaboration. Don’t be arrogant. Don’t put yourself in the center. This is the selfie culture. What do you want to become? A selfie or a politician. That’s another dichotomy. If you’re a
75. 24:39 famous selfie, you’re not a politician. If you’re a politician, you should never be a selfie. Don’t confuse fantasy with reality because the role of the politician is to lead the people from fantasy to reality. This is the main role of the politician.