Who Gets a Seat at the Table?

By Ciku Kimeria, Quartz Africa editor

RECENTLY I CAME ACROSS a very interesting article in The Conversation: Although Rwanda has been written about extensively in top academic journals—especially as it pertains to the 1994 genocide—less than 3% of articles about Rwanda are by Rwandan researchers. In other words, Rwandan researchers are not yet even considered experts on Rwanda, and no, this isn’t for lack of Rwandan researchers.

The case of the missing experts on Rwanda is just the latest iteration of something that’s long been the case: The routine exclusion of minorities of power from global discussions. It cuts across gender, race, sexual orientation, religion, ethnicity and many other layers. (I refer to minorities of power as Black and brown people, women and other marginalized groups, who are not actually minorities by number, but are minorities when it comes to corridors of power.)

This routine exclusion often manifests on highlevel panels where all the experts are men—yes, there’s a word for that, it’s manels—or where there is only one person of color or one woman. This type of bias is increasingly being called out. Some public figures have been vocal about turning down speaking engagements that do not include a diverse range of speakers.

On Africa Day this past week — which coincidentally coincided with the two year anniversary of the horrific murder of George Floyd—I found myself on an all-African panel discussing how Africa can shape the global agenda. In this safe space, one of the major aspects discussed was just how difficult it is for Africans to get included in high-level global discussions, even those pertaining to Africa.

Uzoamaka Madu, the host of the discussion, is a Nigerian communications specialist who is taking concrete steps to change that. After years spent in Belgium, where she frequently found herself the only African panelist on conversations about Africa, she decided she had to do something to change the status quo. For those who claim it’s really too hard to find African experts, she’s building a database of, you guessed it, African experts.

Madu recently put out a call for African experts

e activists Vanessa Nakate, Luisa Neubauer, Greta Thunberg, Isabelle Axelsson and Loukie, from left, arrive for a news conference in Davos. The AP news agency apologized for publishing an image with Nakate cropped out.

across a range of different sectors to create profiles in what will become a “comprehensive, searchable online database of ‘Experts on Africa’ who can speak to health, agriculture, the economy and trade to ease the access to African expertise for international institutions, media and think tanks.” It is currently open to submissions and from September, anyone will be able to search the site for experts.

By 2035, Africa will be the continent with the greatest number of people entering the global workforce. It is important that African voices make their way into global discourse, not just as it relates to the continent, but beyond it, too. Also, African experts should be seen as experts in all sorts of fields, not pigeon-holed to weigh in solely on African issues. You will never see a top microbiologist from Canada or Germany being described as an expert on microbiology in North America or Europe, for example.

Of course, increasing diversity in global discourse is just one part of the challenge. The harder part is making sure that once people are in the room, they are treated as peers.

Consider when the AP cropped out the Ugandan climate activist Vanessa Nakate from a photo including Greta Thunberg and others. Nakate, now 25, is finally recognized as a global leader speaking at forums such as COP26 and Davos, and being recognized on lists of influential people from Time and the Financial Times.

There is also the undeniable burden this puts on those who do make it to the top: Once in the corridors of power, many may feel the weight of representing a whole continent or the race. This is something not felt by majorities of power who have the privilege of being seen as individuals.

Next time you’re speaking at a panel, or you’re seeking an expert, ask yourself, who has been left out and what can I do from my position of power to ensure that these voices are heard? https://qz.com/emails/quartz-at-work/2172053/ workplace-trends-may-2022-who-gets-a-seat-atthe-table Image credit: https://edition.cnn.com/2020/01/25/ world/vanessa-nakate-cropped-intl-scli

Need a TikTok Marketing Strateg Here's How to Get Start

By Jonathan Mar

MORE THAN 755 MILLION monthly users— twice the size of the U.S. population. That’s the forecast from Insider Intelligence on how many people TikTok will reach in 2022. This would make it the third largest social media network, just behind Facebook (2.1 billion) and Instagram (1.3 billion), and slightly ahead of Snapchat and Twitter.

There have been thousands of startups that have successfully unlocked TikTok as an acquisition channel, either organically with their brand profi le content or via paid acquisition. DrainFunnel, a small company that helps eliminate drain clogs, has reached millions of views and a staggering 2.4 million likes on its branded TikTok videos. The founder takes viewers through product demonstrations, gives them a behind-the-scenes look at product photography and even answers viewer questions.

Similarly, Hopper, a discount travel app, has found a way to promote its app while utilizing a native TikTok touch within its videos and boosting them with paid spending.

As TikTok continues to gain steam, it would be a huge miss not to include the platform when building out a growth marketing strategy.

Organic page benefi ts

There’s no crystal ball to reveal whether your startup should explore organic or paid acquisition, but both are important.

The two primary advantages for creating organic content are leveraging free traffi c from videos and building a brand page in the process. Why does producing organic content also impact paid acquisition? When users see your paid acquisition ads and click your brand name, they’ll be directed to your TikTok profi le page. Having content on your profi le adds validity, social proof and inspires engagement from those who land there.

There’s a variety of content to consider adding onto your branded TikTok pages—below are just a few ideas to help you get started: • Founder and staff Q&As • Use case examples • Trend and viral replies/reactions • Product explainers • Answering viewer comments/questions • Behind-the-scenes opportunities

Inspiration and ideas can also be drawn from competitors or other brand profi les. Save time by seeing what already works with other pages and taking pointers from the best.

Channel-specifi c creative

I typically recommend testing the same creative assets across all social channels as a best practice. Time and again, I’ve seen assets made for nonTikTok channels perform poorly on TikTok. This means that ideation, styling and asset production have increasingly needed to be specifi c to TikTok.

It makes sense—TikTok content is structured diff erently from other social channels. Some of those attributes include: • 9:16 ratio and shorter than 20 seconds • Background track • Text overlays to emphasize points • Play to trends • Very lo-fi , not studio quality

If there’s one major takeaway from the bullets above, it’s the fourth one—play to trends. On any given week, there are a handful of trends that take over TikTok, often popularized by larger infl uencers and made widespread by thousands of others performing their take on it. By emphasizing creative direction and focusing on popular trends,

you’ll naturally hit the rest of the attributes, such as creating the video in 9:16 perspective and including a background track.

One major advantage TikTok has against other paid social channels is that the cost per thousand impressions (CPMs) are signifi cantly lower. With that huge upside comes a caveat: Creative will fatigue more rapidly, since the videos are getting served at a faster rate. If you plan to run a successful TikTok campaign, be ready to continuously add new content to the mix.

Leverage infl uencers

What’s TikTok without Charli D’Amelio, Noah Beck and the various other power fi gures raking in millions of views? While that’s hard to imagine when thinking about how to incorporate infl uencers into your TikTok strategy, remember you don’t need a marquee name to be successful.

Instead, leverage TikTok’s Creator Marketplace, which has made it frictionless to discover infl uencers from all types of categories, styles, regions and follower counts. You can typically work with smaller infl uencers (less than 50,000 followers) at a rate of $100-300 per video—oftentimes, that’s all you’ll need.

To double down on infl uencer content, leverage TikTok’s Spark Ads, which allow advertisers to boost infl uencer posts and put media budget behind the organic content. This works particularly well on TikTok because ads then look native to the platform.

Constantly evolving

TikTok is a creative ground for experimentation when it comes to ever-changing campaign formats and features, all being rolled out on a frequent basis. This means you should test everything as it becomes available.

Two of the latest campaign features made available in early 2022 are auto-targeting and App Profi les. With auto-targeting, TikTok removes the complexity and time of having to test a myriad of interest layers. Instead, the campaign set on autotargeting fi nds the best combination of interest settings to target.

This can be paired with App Profi les, which sends users to an App Store-like screen before actually sending them to the App Store. The idea behind this is to increase the signal on the platform, so TikTok can target higher propensity users who will be more likely to download the app after seeing the real App Store page.

Some of the best practices from other major paid social channels still apply to TikTok. Tactics such as broad targeting and lowest cost bidding have been successful for many advertisers. If you see something working on Facebook or Snapchat, don’t shy away from trying it on TikTok.

Bottom line: TikTok isn’t just becoming a huge force in paid acquisition—it’s already there. As you start devising a growth marketing strategy for 2022 and beyond, including TikTok as a part of that longterm plan will have you ahead of the competition.

www.inc.com/rebecca-deczynski/negotiationadvice-for-entrepreneurs-making-dealscompromise.html Image credit: https://1000logos.net/tiktok-logo