Random musings of Scott McGregor

Recently I’ve been coaching several people recently on how to get a job in this down economy, and I would like to share them with you as well. The people I have been coaching with these techniques include new college grads and non- grads seeking entry level positions, as well as more experienced candidates ranging from early stage careers in technical roles and marketing to mid level and senior management level positions.

My background as an innovation and disruption expert
If you have followed my work, one of the things you know about what I do is that I look for (and coach others on finding) disruptive innovation product strategies that allow a start up to invent important new and fast growing markets that they become the leader of, or disrupt the balance in existing markets so that they become new leader and drive the incumbents out of the market.

Disruption strategy methods can be applied to every kind of business
While most of the companies that I have personally participated in have been applying these product strategy methods to the Internet, Software and Mobile Industries, I have taught these methods to people in all business sectors, consumer and enterprise, high tech and low tech, products and services, and they have found these methods equally valuable in all those settings.

Applying Disruption Strategy approaches to Job Searching
In fact, I think these methods can be applied to any business or market, and today I’m going to talk about a strategy that comes from applying them to an area that you may never have considered as being open to innovation or disruption. Today, I want to talk about what can happen if we turn those same disruption strategy methods to give an individual job seeker a disruptive advantage in the online job market.

Disruption enabled new job candidates beat experienced job candidates, by getting to jobs before they do.
What does a disruptive job search strategy mean? Think of it this way: If you are a job seeker, today there are many other people out their competing to get the jobs you want. If you have a great resume, cover letter, and interview skills, are the most qualified applicant and are always the first person to get a job offer for any job you apply to through a job site like Monster, Career Builder, or Craigslist, you are the current market leader that other job seekers are losing out too. It is these successful people that other less successful applicants need an new approach that will allow them to disrupt the playing field to their advantage — to find jobs the current leaders can’t — because those jobs aren’t yet advertised on Monster, CareerBuilder or Craigslist and to overcome the advantages they may have in qualifications and a great resume, by creating a new path to hiring managers that doesn’t depend on a better resume. Note that such a strategy is disruptive in another way as well — it creates a new way for recruiters to package candidates and get them in front of hiring managers before their competitors, and especially before Monster, CareerBuilder or Craigslist.

Finding the niche market that the current market leaders don’t serve well
To figure out how to disrupt the traditional online job search market we start by looking for the special situation where some customers are ill served by the existing products. That special situation that we’ll focus on is a job market in which there are lots of highly qualified candidates seeking every job that is advertised. And what makes the current system ill suited to hiring managers in such a hiring climate is the large number of resumes that need to be screened and interviews that need to be held to fill a position.

Our task: find alternative ways to reach overburdened hiring managers
In our disruptive approach we’ll look for an alternative way around that hiring manager problem that allows job seekers who use the disruptive approach to bypass the existing job site channels where they are at a disadvantage by using to alternative paths to hiring managers.

SOLUTION: Two alternative ways to reach hiring managers

A bad economy makes hiring managers hang back from announcing jobs
The current economy makes it necessary for job seekers to take a different strategy than what works when the economy is good, and the ways that might be the way most people have found a job in the past. The key thing to realize is that right now most employers have way too many resumes, and feel overwhelmed and don’t want to see more resumes. In fact they want to see fewer resumes, and zero is just about ideal! So many of these overburdened hiring managers don’t even want to post a formal job opening on their own website or on a paid job site or on Craigslist. They’d rather fill that job through an informal process that avoids having to read a ton of resumes.

Busy Hiring Managers May Wait to Post Jobs Until After They Know Who Will Fill Them
When that happens you obviously can’t find these jobs by looking for job postings. And you can’t assume that because a company doesn’t have a your job title posted that they don’t have that job — even if they have lots of other jobs posted. That’s because it isn’t the company that is overwhelmed, it is the hiring manager that the job would report to who is maybe hanging back from filling out a requisition for a job. In fact, at times like these, many hiring managers won’t even fill out a job requisition, that is “create a job”, until they know they have already identified the candidate they know will fill the job. That way, as soon as the job is posted and the resumes start coming in, the manager can hire the identified candidate and skip reading the rest of ton of resumes that inevitably flood in because they have now already filled the job that was just posted.

Entry level jobs yield the most overwhelming stacks of resumes to weed through
The more resumes the hiring manager might get, the more likely the job is actually to be filled like this. And the jobs where the most resumes are likely to come in for will be entry level jobs. So this is very relevant for you and Sean.

More qualified candidates who miss out feel frustrated
Naturally, this is very frustrating for job searchers who think they would have been better job candidates, if they had only known about the job. And some of them probably would have. But each of these job searchers has to make a choice: they can be among the many people who continue to post resumes and wait for companies to search for them, and apply to advertised job openings on website and job search sites — and complain when they miss out on these jobs that aren’t really posted until the person who will be hired is already identified. Or they can be one of the people who deliberately or accidentally stumble into these not yet created job opportunities.

The person who gets hired is the person who solves the current problem first — and the current problem is the huge stack of resumes to review!
If getting a job that’s perfect for you is more important to you, even though other more qualified people may have been ignored, then you there are steps you can go through to deliberately get a job this way. If getting a plum job based on “who you know, and who knows you” even if other more qualified candidates may exist makes you feel guilty, then you might want to stick with posting resumes and applying to blind ads. But keep in mind that doesn’t necessarily mean the best qualified person will get the job, someone else who uses the informal processes that i describe below, with lower qualifications than you, but a willingness to go through the who you know and who knows you network, might get it instead. Because in the end, the best candidate for the job in the hiring manager’s mind is the one that minimizes the manager’s effort in finding and guiding the new hire, and who makes the greatest contributions to solving the hiring managers problems. And right now, problem one is getting some work problem solved without having to read a lot of resumes.

Two ways to find the jobs that have not yet been posted, or even created
When hiring managers are hanging back like this, the way to get the job is to get to the person through an informal process. There are two ways to do that which I know can work.

Strategy 1) YOU find the hiring manager: job networking
The first approach to find jobs that don’t yet exist is often called “job networking”. The trick here is to have a bunch of informal meetings with people. The wrong way to go about informal job networking is to ask people “Do you have a job, or know someone who does?” That won’t find you hidden jobs. It will mostly get you a bunch of “nos“, and you’ll quickly exhaust all those sources of leads. But a slight twist will actually get you more “yeses” and more useful leads.

How to ask for a job networking meeting
Phrase your question this way instead. I’m interested in learning about jobs as a “(your target job title)”. I’d like to talk to someone who does that job now, has done that job in the past, has managed people doing that job, or who has worked with people doing that job. I’d like to speak to them and learn a little bit more about the field, the companies in that field and the typical problems they face in that job as part of my preparation for a job search in this area. Do you know anyone I might speak to about such things?”

Focus on discovering needs, not a job
You don’t want to tell people that the purpose of the meeting is to find out if they have a job or can get you a job — that puts them on the spot if they don’t have one; or even if they do have one, because they don’t know you yet and aren’t prepared to deal with a job discussion until they’ve first screened you. Instead, you tell people that the purpose of the meeting is for you to collect more information about what it is like to work in that field, and what people hiring people in that field currently need. This last word, Need, turns out to be the trick that can make job networking work magic for you. The trick is to focus on understanding individual hiring manager’s needs and offering to help with them.

You aren’t imposing by asking for a meeting — you are offering the person a chance to show off their expertise
Everyone loves to tell people about how they got the job they have, how they succeeded and what they do — it makes them feel important. So when you ask to meet with someone to learn about their experiences in the business, you aren’t wasting their time! People like to have meetings with other people who are interested in hearing all about their successes (and about all the secret booby traps they’ve avoided, or discovered).

Give people the permission to complain about their problems
Everyone also has needs — some of which aren’t being well met at any given time. People like to tell other people who are willing to listen all about these needs too — in hopes that other person will know of a solution they had not heard of. A lot of people are reluctant to talk about their problems because they don’t want to come across as complainers. But when you ask, well that’s a different story! Also, when you speak to someone working in that field, tell them up front that you are happy to share any useful information you might learn from your meetings, or to provide them similar leads if some day they are looking for a new opportunity.

Shifting gears: become a solutions provider
So you want to find out the needs of people who hire for the job you want. You want to find out about those needs from potential hiring managers, or from the other people who work for them. Contrary to what you said when you first started asking for these meetings to prepare your job search, once you have this knowledge, you don’t go into job search mode — you go into solutions provider mode!

That’s what turns out to be the trick to getting these jobs that don’t exist yet. People are reluctant to give you their valuable time if they think you are going to ask them for a job they haven’t created. But they are eager to give you their time if they think you might tell them about solutions to the problems they have.

Don’t ask for a job, let them propose a job in order to capture your solutions skills.
The strange thing is, that in telling them some of the solutions to their problems you are also indirectly telling them that you know how to solve those problems. When they know that you know how to solve these problems, you personally also become a solution for them. Not only would hiring you mean their current problems could be resolved and they could focus on something else, but you could solve similar problems for them in the as well in the future. Once they have that realization, that’s when THEY are suddenly going to think about creating that job just for you, and the ability to skip having to interview other people will be a big plus!

Company problems vs. Hiring Manager Problems and Generic Problems vs. Peculiar problems
Note that you can’t shortcut the previous steps by looking at the job description, or what the job title is. Those are generic problems. They are usually problems that hiring companies have. But companies don’t actually hire — it is the hiring managers inside the companies who actually make the decisions.

The hiring manager that is going to make the decision does have those generic problems, and they might be the first ones they think of when writing a job posting. But they aren’t what the hiring manager is thinking about when they are making a hiring decision. All the candidates whose resumes passed the first screening, and solve those generic problems. What makes the hiring manager choose a specific person out of the set of multiple qualified candidates is their ability to solve the manager’s immediate short term problems that are peculiar to this manager at this moment.

Imagine the job you are seeking is “web designer”. When the hiring manager is describing the job, they may be thinking about someone who already knows JavaScript and has created interactive webpages before — so they can start right to work. So that’s the generic problem or skills the manager puts on their job description.

But what the hiring manager is thinking about when making a hiring decision are the peculiar problems that they have right now. Maybe they lost their previous web designer because the job required the web designer to work without some off shore graphics developers in Malaysia who sometimes don’t seem to follow directions in english that well. The previous web designer found that frustrating and quit. So, the peculiar problem isn’t just getting interactive web pages working, but getting them working with beautiful graphics that having been coming from this offshore group.

There might be many alternative solutions to the peculiar problem.

A web designer who is also a talented graphic designer might do both web design and graphic design well and thereby make the offshore group unnecessary.

Alternatively, A web designer who speaks Malaysian, might communicate more effectively so this problem doesn’t reoccur.

The manager may not be attached to which way the peculiar solution solves the problem, but they sure want to be certain that the peculiar problem will be solved.

Be the solution to the peculiar problem
And if one candidate seems to appreciate that peculiar problem and shows the manager they have a solution, that candidate immediately become the least risky selection for the manager to make. And given that the manager doesn’t want to spend more time reading resumes and interviewing people, the first known solution to the peculiar problem is likely to result in a quick end of the job search and a quick job offer. There is no need to keep searching for candidates with alternative solutions — it is time to implement the first one and get back to productivity now.

Show off your ability to solve their problem
Because the hiring manager hasn’t gone through the formal steps to get a new job requisition filled out, they might not know if they will be able to get the budget for such a new job, or get it approved, if it requires higher level approval. But they probably have the authority to invite you in for a day to see if you can help with a peculiar problem they have. Ask them if they would like you to do that. If they seem concerned about the cost, tell them you appreciate that they took so much time with you, and the opportunity to get to know more about their company, their department and what it is like to work for them. Tell them, that you won’t charge them for the 1 day of work, but that what you ask in exchange is that if at the end of the day they like what you did that they agree to write you a short testimonial and introduce you to other people in the industry who might hire someone like you. It is a rare hiring manager who will say no to that offer. And think about this: when it comes time to make a hiring decision, would you want to do that based on a resume or interview or would you rather make a decision base on observing the person at work for a day? Seeing is Believing!

Ask for a Testimonial and a referral: If this manager can’t hire you now, get them to help you find the manager who will!
At the end of the day, if you’ve made some progress on the hiring manager’s peculiar problem, ask for that testimonial and referral. Tell them that while you understand they don’t have approval to hire a person for this job on a full time basis, that you like them, and that if they want your continued help on an knocking off the peculiar problems that have been troubling them, you are willing to do that on a consulting and part time basis while you look for the full time job. Tell them, that if an opening should be approved while you are searching you would love to consider it, because now you have had the experience of working with them for a day. Now you aren’t a job seeker — you are the problem solver that they are wanting.

Need more help on getting meetings with potential managers using this approach?
Get more information on how to create these problem solver images in the minds of managers, click on the following link to get a copy of Anthony Parinello’s excellent book “Selling To VITO (Very Important Top Officers).”

More jobs are being filled through networking that through job sites.
My friends in the recruiting industry are telling me that 60-80% of all jobs are being filled this way right now — and it is the way I have filled most of my jobs over my career. Often I just have a name of someone I got from a friend of a friend. The purpose of the meeting is very informal, just to find out more about their job, their company in general, and their views about what is happening in the industry.

In asking about their job, I often ask them about what their current problems are. Then I usually say something like this, “I have some ideas about how to solve some of the problems you mentioned, that I would be happy to share with you”. I also ask, “are these kinds of problems widespread in your industry?” and “Do you know other colleagues who might have these problems, because I have skills at solving these problems and might be able to help that colleague.”

Usually, if they really don’t have the budget or can’t hire me now, they will introduce me to other people who have similar problems. They’ll win brownie points with that other person, and may be able to hire me later and would like me to feel they are a great manager. Or if they can swing the budget, they’ll say “Well, I didn’t have an opening when we started the talk, but if you can solve that problem, I might be able to get approval to hire you.”

Ultimately I’ll find myself in front of some colleague who will say to me: “Really? you can solve this particular (and peculiar) problem for me? Can I hire you temporarily as a part time consultant to solve this problem?”

And I say sure. Then I solve their problem, and they get to know me and I get to know about other problems that I can help with. If I like working with them, I’ll tell them about the other things I can help with when i am done with my current project, and if they also like me this has always led to a full time job. If we don’t like each other we found out quickly and cheaply for both of us.

Strategy 2) The hiring manager finds YOU!
That brings me to the second way to get a hiring manager who is hanging back to find YOU! If they are busy, shorthanded and overwhelmed (and avoiding the idea of thinking about being even more overwhelmed by more resumes!) they aren’t going to be searching craigslist or monster to find you. Maybe they should be. But they aren’t going to be.

The manager who isn’t seeking people to do jobs, is searching for HOW TO solve their peculiar and general problems
What the hiring manager is thinking about is how to solve that problem without hiring someone, since going through all the steps to get approved for hiring someone and then doing all the resume reading and interviewing is such a hassle. . And to find solutions, they are likely to likely to do an Internet Search for published advice on how to solve their problem. That’s the hook in this startegy. Since they aren’t looking for your resume, but are looking for a solution, you post a solution for them to find. Then you let them realize that hiring you to solve their problem is even less work than learning HOW TO solve the problem is even less effort on their part than spending their own time (as a busy distracted newbie manager) trying to apply that new knowledge expertly.

Make search engines like Google help managers seeking solutions find yours!
This is where you can make the power of the internet search engines work for you, so that the hiring manager finds YOU and not competing candidates for the job. Since these are hiring mangers who aren’t looking for job candidates, they won’t be searching Craigslist, Monster or Careerbuilder. And they won’t find the people who could compete with you for a job and who might even look more qualified based on the resume on those sites.

Instead, you’ll post your solutions are going to be on the non job sites that Google will find. Places like public blogs (syndicated with RSS), or Audio podcasts on iTunes, or videos on YouTube. Those solutions will also contain a pointer to your web page. And that web page won’t just be a resume, it will be a portfolio site showcasing other How To solutions you have authored, as well as your past successes and testimonials from people you have benefited.

When they find your solution, they have also found you!
Now, when these managers are looking for solutions to their problems, they will also find you in the course of searching for those solutions.

How do you get started, and become findable?

Create How To Tips
The trick is to just start creating content about various generic and peculiar problems that you have solved before and give some simple HOW TO tips on solving them. The form of this content (text, audio, or video) isn’t as important as that your HOW TO solutions are published on the web and found by search engines. You can write these tips in text such as a blog, or facebook page, or email newsletter that you syndicate through RSS. Or you can just talk your way through them in audio in a podcast. Or you create a short animation and save it as a You Tube video. Any way you do that you, you’ll wind up listed in an internet search engine. Now when the hiring manager goes looking to find a SOLUTION to one of their problems, they are likely to find YOUR How To tips.. And through your how to tips, they will discover YOU! And now, while they might not have searched for your resume, they know you are a potential source of solutions for the job they haven’t yet created! (and they still don’t know about, or have the time or interest to discover other candidates resumes on Craigslist, Monster or Career Builder.

Short is can be sweet!
These content pieces don’t have to be long — in fact short and sweet (2-3 paragraphs or 10 steps in text, or 2 minutes of Audio or Video are often preferable. Let people experience several descriptions of simple but common problems, so they see the breadth of what you know. If their problem is deeper, let them ask for consulting help.

If this still sounds complicated and daunting, do not despair. Click on the following link to get David Wood’s book “Get Paid for Who You Are” which does an excellent job of taking you step by step through how to do just this kind of way in a quick and easy way. If you want even more help, David’s Get Paid University site provides a wealth of support.

Sidebar: Why are we getting spammed when we post our resumes on job sites and what to do about it.

Why we post on job sites like Monster, CareerBuilder and Craigslist
We post our resumes on a public job site in order to let all potential employers know that we are looking for a job. This way, we don’t have to know which employers we want to work for; we let them find us. It is very low effort on our part.

When posting on job sites actually generates useful calls from employers
Posting our resume in a general job site mostly only works when there are too few active job seekers for the number of job openings employers want to fill. When that happens, employers must go looking for additional potential employees, and that’s when they are willing to spend time searching for people like us, and when it is cost effective to pay the fees that paid sites like Monster and CareerBuilder charge.

Why employers are responding to our resumes on Monster, CareerBuilder and Craigslist right now.
When there are a great many job candidates applying for each only job opening, like in today’s economy, it isn’t sensible for a company to do such paid searches. Since right now employer sare already getting more resumes than they want to review for each opening — and that’s just counting the resumes that are coming in unsolicited via their company’s own job pages on its own web site. With so many resumes, employers don’t want to spend the time to do an external search for additional potential employees, and they certainly don’t want to pay for information that they can are already getting for free when people apply through their own company website.

Even if cost were not the issue, it is less work to just review and select from the resumes you are already getting through your own web site.

This is why you and I will probably not get very many useful contacts from employers simply by putting our resumes on these sites. Instead, we will have to identify potential employers and apply on their sites.

So, who does want to purchase our information from job sites?
But if employers don’t find it cost effective to pay for contact info from extra potential employees, then who DOES find it cost effective to pay for your contact information — people with jobs that NO ONE wants to apply to, and people who are selling a service– such as a college. These are people who can’t get your information more cheaply another way, and are willing to pay for your information (either in actual dollars on a paid job site, or in time and effort on a free site like Facebook or Craigslist).

Why we are getting spammed when we publish our phone and emails on Job sites
The people who most are most willing to buy your information are people who want to sell you something that you aren’t searching for. That could someone who wants to sell you a college degree, or someone who wants to sell you on a job that NO ONE is applying for. Or it could have nothing to do with jobs at all.

How to avoid getting spammed
To avoid getting spammed like this, the best way is to do our own research to identify prospective employers we want to work for, and apply on their own web sites, rather than wait for them to come to us. Better yet, use networking to find a path directly to the hiring managers (even the ones who don’t at present have a job req) and let them know about your problem solving skills! Since companies don’t want to share your information with competitors, targeted contacts like this usually won’t result in your information being shared with anyone else.

Good luck job seekers!

This post may be freely reproduced in whole or in part for non-commerical purposes when printed with attribution or a link to the www.smcgregor.com/blog website under a creative commons license. For commercial use, please contact the author for permission.

On the Internet and the future of Civil Political Discourse

In today’s blog, I am referring to a number of incident of false information, spread by the Internet, which have achieved wide dissemination and resulted in increased polarization and scapegoating of individuals and groups in our society. This blog is now about these incidents per se, but about the mechanism and effectiveness of this approach and its potential impact on our society. Although the examples show various partisan bents, this is not a partisan post; we are all targets of such disinformation no matter what we believe, and we will all suffer the consequences if civil political discourse is destroyed by these measures, and we will all enjoy the benefits of increased mutual respect and cooperative action if civil political discourse can be encouraged.

Alarm bell 1: “You Lie” outburst

The other night Representative Joe Wilson (Republican, South Carolina) interrupted President Obama’s address to congress and to the nation by shouting “You lie!”. This story is all over the press, and I won’t repeat it because this blog entry is not about that outburst per se,nor the next 3 alarms that follow, but it is inspired by it. While the question of the cost of a national health care program is a real concern, as well as measures for controlling those costs, many hoax letters have been circulating with misinformation about mandatory death panels, guaranteed coverage for illegal aliens, etc. have been circulating widely, with the intent to alarm people not inform them.

Alarm bell 2: Bozeman Montana Townhall letter

Also, a few weeks ago I received an email from a family member that included a forwarded email reporting and commenting on events that supposedly occurred in conjunction with Obama’s recent town meeting in Bozeman,Montana. The sender was outraged by what he read about the wasteful ways and stifling of free expression by the administration as reported in the letter. This letter had passed from friend to friend to friend, and each recipient tacked on their own personal feelings of outrage at the administration after reading it. You may have received a similar letter. Indeed, I think that everyone who reads this letter would agree that the actions of the administration reported in the letter are indeed wasteful, oppressive, and outrageous, and that citizen action is necessary to ensure they don’t continue. The problem is, the events that reported that were true factual news reporting of when and where the event was held, etc., but the alarming parts of the letter, the reported outrages described, didn’t happen. It was a hoax hoax email.

Alarm bell 3: Presidential IQs

These letters aren’t just authored by radical conservatives. Back in 2001 I received an email from an alarmed colleague containing a letter purportedly reporting on IQ tests conducted on the 12 previous presidents, whose spans jointly covered 50 years. The letter reported the Lowenstein Institute as ranking William Clinton the highest, followed by Jimmy Carter and JFK, while Eisenhower, Ford, Reagan, George HW Bush and George W Bush were reportedly all at the bottom. The letter also reported the average IIQ of the 6 Republicans as 115.5 for all Republicans, and 156 for the Democrats. This letter was circulated again in 2007 during the election, from yet another source. This email too was a hoax.

Alarm bell 4: Average citizen IQs by states

It isn’t just politicians who are being smeared to make civil political discourse amongst each other impossible. In 2004, a hoax email reached me that gave out false Average IQs by states. Not surprisingly all the states whose electoral votes were won by the original author’s favorite candidate were in the top half of the list, while those on that went the other way all appear in the lower half of the list.

The consequences of these hoaxes

This is just a small sample of the emails that have been circulated to me through several hands. These were all hoaxes. And they took in many very bright, and normally skeptical people. But the sense of outrage toward the targeted scapegoat groups that resulted from their initial consumption was very real and persists today — making it even easier to believe more outrageous false reports in the future.

Even smart people are taken in

The people who have sent me this letter, and other alarmist letters in the past are not unsophisticated, naive, or unquestioning citizens; they include bankers, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and a former parter in charge of the international offices of one of the 4 accounting firms, and other people whose success is often dependent on retaining a fair amount of skepticism. And if these people can be manipulated in this way, we are all vulnerable to such manipulation.

The internet is not evil (but it can be used effectively for devise purposes)

Don’t get me wrong. I love the Internet. I have been working for 30 years to enable computers and networks to enable better communication among people in distant locations. Among the many products that I have helped to define and bring to market is the first commercially successful Web Conferencing product, today known as Microsoft Live Meeting. And I’m pleased to know that every day over a million people use it to meet with people at a distance, instead of having to hop on planes. I certainly don’t want to shut down that kind of communication.

Why we need civil political discourse

This entry is about the importance of civil political discourse, propaganda, the influence of the Internet and social networks on political discourse and my serious concern that our ability to have a civil political discourse is being undermined. This is a non-partisan concern, as it effects all of us. The importance of political discussion is that many of the benefits and protections we seek from government can only come from mutual action and consent. And mutual action and consent requires mutual respect for the needs and desires of all people who participate in the political discourse, not just those we agree with.

The alternative is temporary stalemate, followed by unilateral action and domination by force, and at its extremes genocide, tribal warfare, civil wars and other conflicts such as the Hutus vs. Tutsis in Rwanda, Catholics vs. Protestants in Northern Ireland, Serbs vs. Croats and Muslims in Bosnia, Sunni vs. Shiite in Iraq, and the Nazis vs. the Jews in Nazi Germany, and lest we forget it can and did happen here in the US between abolitionist and slave states.

These chain letters are not designed to mobilize us to SOLVE problems by finding solutions that will work for everyone — They are designed to make any solution impossible, to push our buttons, not only to foster hate and distrust, but to get us so upset we have to mobilize our friends and enroll them in the campaign of distrust as well. It uses the same kind of social engineering tar computer virus writers use to temp us into infecting our computers and toy spread that infection to our friends. The fabrications are artfully interwoven with well known (and boring, not alarming, facts). The latter give them credibility, the former enrage us, and stir our anger at a class of people that the author wishes to identify as the scapegoat that is causing all the evil in our country.

Which individual or class we are supposed to hate varies with the author and their goal, but we are all likely to be exposed to ever more of these letters, and if they succeed, we’ll all be hating everyone like in Tom Lehrer’s “National Brotherhood Week” parody:

All the white folk

Hate the black folk,

And the black folk

Hate the white folk,

All my folk,

Hate all of your folk

And everyone hates the Jews.

But during National Brotherhood week…

The danger is not in the lie, but in the repeating…

It isn’t the specifics of the lies that upset me so. I don’t feel the need to debunk them all point by point. No, the thing about these letters is the speed and reach with which they are spread. Those perpetrating these hoaxes have learned well the lessons taught by Joseph Goebbels, Reichsminister of Propaganda in Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945:

“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it”

The role of the Internet in rapid reproduction and dissemination of alarmist hoaxes

The internet, which brings us instantaneous friend to friend emails, social networks, and blogs is the greatest tool for rapidly repeating and disseminating lies as any wannabe propagandist could ever want. It is nearly effortless to get your message repeated over and over and over by well meaning people in just a short period of time. And because our social networks overlap so much, we receive the same message (that might seem dubious from one source of unknown credibility) from multiple sources, friends and family and colleagues we trust. Surely they can’t all be deceived — so we become even more convinced of the truth of these lies. But that’s the scary part about which Goebbels spoke of, When we hear it repeated everywhere, we all quickly forget what the original source was, and then we accept it as truth without question.

A Need for Increased Skepticism

We need to wake up. We need to become more skeptical. And we need to put into place automated mechanisms that alert us that these kinds of messages can be hoaxes, just as we have created automated methods to alert us to potential Phishing emails and Spam. If we do not increase our skepticism, and counter the quick spread of such hoaxes, we will surely turn large portions of our scapegoats and solve the problem of having too many of these scapegoats — but not eradicate the evil we claim they caused.

No one is safe, everyone is a target of disinformation

It doesn’t matter who the identified scapegoat is: Now it isn’t just the blacks, whites and Jews that Tom Lehrer parodied. Everyone of us now has a target drawn on our back by some internet propagandists intent on creating hatred and distrust for Democrats, Republicans, Conservatives, Liberals, Right to Lifers, Right to Choose supporters, evangelicals, gays, lesbians and transgenders, illegal aliens, rich white men, blacks, skinheads, politicians, union leaders, central bankers, the CIA, the liberal press, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and everyone else. Every one of these has been identified by some internet propagandist as the source of all the countries ills in these emails I have received, in blogs referenced by other blogs, and in web pages promoted through twitter and repeated in podcasts on YouTube and iTunes.

A lonely planet

No one group above is responsible which evil in our society, but the logic of these propagandists is that if we euthanize or deport all members of all of these groups we don’t like we will probably eradicate all our problems. Sadly if every one of them is successful, they will all be right, for there will beno one left to complain or care.

I am frightened to see how easily educated, well meaning and really caring folks are not only duped by these propagandist artists but actively enlisted in copying and disseminating these lies, and unconsciously supporting these campaigns to spread more hate and fear.

Remember “Never trust anyone over thirty”?

Folks, this has to stop. If it doesn’t, some of us will wind up victims of this hatred. We don’t have to go back to Nazi Germany to see what this kind of division does to a nation of people who hate and fear each other. We don’t need to look at Sunni and Shia violence in Iraq, we don’t even need to look all the way back to the Civil War. We have plenty of other examples closer to home, with millions of people who still remember what it was like. People who. saw what happened in the 60s, at Kent State, at the Democratic convention in Chicago, in Memphis and Missisippi, with the SLA, the KKK, the Weather Underground, Black Panthers, Jack Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and Malcolm X. It was a time when a common phrase in the youth culture was “never trust anyone over 30″. We know what happens when we can’t trust each other. It is not unthinkable that we will face that level of unrest again. Indeed, if we don’t start the hatred and scapegoating it may well be inevitable.

Break the cycle:

Look not for how your neighbor can deprive you, nor how you can deprive your neighbor, but how together you may both prosper.

If we are going to avoid revisiting such times of violence, we need to stop assisting the propagandists who foment fear and distrust and single out groups or individuals as the scapegoats we should blame. We must break with the idea that those who are not with us are against us. Instead we must ask ourselves what common needs and desires do we all have in common as Humans? How can we work together to find ways to increase the ability of all to secure their own needs and achieve their own desires together?

Look, we know the propagandists aren’t going to stop inventing all these alarmist stories, so we can’t expect these to stop at the source. Not if we want to continue to have freedom of speech. We have this same problem with Spam as well. But while we can’t eliminate Spam, we have created effective ways to limit its transmission and effects.

Let’s NOT just pass it on.

Since we can’t stop these hoaxes at their source, minimizing its impact means we have to find ways to stop the spread of propaganda at the earliest point in the distribution. It means we need to take the responsibility for spotting it, and not passing it on — no matter how artfully the authors weave the alarmist lies with the boring truths.

We have to learn to become skeptics and create automated mechanisms that assist us in identifying things we need to be skeptical of.

A FEW STEPS WE CAN ALL TAKE: AN EXAMPLE

Here’s how I try to verify or refute such letters.

First of all, anytime someone sends me a letter that has alarming information in it, which it blames on some political group, or prominent person, I try to check it out — even if it contains parts I already know to be true, or it blames groups or individuals that I currently dislike, fear or distrust. Maybe even ESPECIALLY if it seems perfectly targeted to appeal to my existing biases and beliefs and just make me more alarmed. Because that’s the one I am most vulnerable to. But if I get sucked in, I may burn bridges with the very people I need to enroll for mutual assistance and benefit.

Using snopes.com

If I identify the letter as having alarmist attributes, i immediately check to see if it has been verified or debunked. Most of these letters I see have already been reviewed by Snopes.com, the urban legend verification site.

Usually the way I check on such a letter is just to highlight a paragraph from it and search for that paragraph using Google. I almost always find some place where the veracity of the letter has been verified or refuted.

Using Google search

For instance, the Montana Town hall chain letter is covered in snopes.com at http://www.snopes.com/politics/obama/montana.asp. It was easy to find. I just highlighted a paragraph in the copy I received, copied the selected passage, and pasted it into the search field for the Google search engine. The snopes.com reference was 7th in the hit list. It took me less than 3 second to find the snopes article, and see that it is “mixed truth”. A couple of minutes more and I had read it and find out what was true and what wasn’t. I chose not to pass it on, but instead to write this blog entry.

I hope you will join me, not in hating propagandists, but in refusing to help them spread hatred and civil unrest. I hope you will also join me in a movement for more civil political discourse, and respect for those who disagree with us.