So You Think Scientists and Engineers Can't Dance?

Marketing complex products and services to the general public is a huge challenge. Our firm specializes in it, and we struggle with trying to figure out how to connect science, health, education and engineering research and findings with the general public.

In many of these disciplines PR people take what they are given – edit it - and put it back out there in the same language it was handed to them in. That doesn’t help anyone else understand it.

So I thought this marketing story would be useful to everyone. It’s about a contest started by John Bohannon, the Gonzo Scientist http:gonzolabs.org working with AAAS. The point is to challenge graduate students and their professors to dance their PhDs.

PhDs can be endless documents that take exhaustive research, hours to explain and drive both the writer and his or her spouse (I lived through one fortunately, not mine) crazy. Marriages are destroyed over PhDs, friendships ruined, relationships with advisors can be either helpful or hostile. Earning a PhD is a long and painful process that few come out of unscathed.

PhDs start with a germ of an idea – in my ex-husband’s case the role of NGOs in international political negotiations – and watch it blossom around them. He wrote his thesis (Yes there are other kinds of sciences at MIT) at the beginning of the Internet, when the NGOs like Greenpeace, Save the Whales, and the World Wildlife Fund – were just figuring out how to use this new form of mass communication.

It took 900 pages and ten years to complete (including time out for getting a career and family started). The degree was worth it and the dissertation was thrown into a box in the attic where it remains today. A classmate destroyed his at a Burn Your PhD party. At 900 pages we weren’t burning anything.

I’m describing this process so you can understand just how hard it is for graduate students to transform their research into something that everyone can understand. In its third year, the Dance Your PhD contest lets graduate students and their professors create short videos that are representative of their PhD theses, acting and dancing them out for all to see. The winners get put up on YouTube, feted at the AAAS annual meeting and see their dance performed by a professional company.

As a marketer I love this idea – and so did the media. The first year, Dance Your PhD was on the network news, featured in the New York Times, on NPR and although it hasn’t happened yet – with a bit more pushing will probably end up viral. Call it what you want – Revenge of the Geeks, Geeks Gone Wild – it’s just plain smart marketing.

This type of effort to connect science with the rest of us in an art form we all can all appreciate is what informal science education is all about. From the thesis titles alone you could fall asleep – but the performances are inspirational. Here are few that really capture the spirit of the competition. You can find them on YouTube but the linking mess that is Blogger has stymied me once again. Just type in Dance Your PhD and the name of the submitter.

"Refitting repasts: a spatial exploration of food processing, cooking, sharing and disposal at the Dunefield Midden campsite, South Africa" (University of Oxford). A caveman like figure chases a deer across the stage in an interpretation of hunting and gathering. It’s set to the music of Herbie Hancock and created by Brian Stewart.

The role of Vitamin D in beta-cell function from graduate student, Sue Lynn Lau. An interpretive dance that takes you from Vitamin D production by the sun all the way through how it helps our bodies.

"The role of folate in epigenetic regulation of colon carcinogenesis.” PhD thesis of Lara Park at Tufts University, this one is performed by the Sarabande Repertory Dance Ensemble dance troupe and reminiscent of modern dance gone a bit wild.

All of the blogger links aren't working so if you want to enter go to Facebook - you can do it all through its Dance Your PhD page.

Not in My Backyard Will Become Not in My Ocean

Will the Gulf of Mexico oil spill and images of oil slicked pelicans and blackened sea life, that our children are sharing on YouTube and Facebook, create a new generation of fanatically environmentalist kids? That’s what I’m betting on.

I’m dating myself, but I still remember the black and white concentration camp films we watched in New York City public elementary schools  in the 1960s. We were very young, but the message was clear. They imprinted the raw footage taken by soldiers of gaunt, hollow-eyed concentration camp survivors on an entire generation of American children, so they would never let it happen again.  


Many parents in my generation are very conservative - about what they allow their kids to watch and the trust they place in them. Some won’t let them watch PG-13 movies, set rigid controls on their computers restricting them to pre-approved Web sites, lock up the liquor and drug cabinets, and review what’s permitted  and what’s not before every play date. 

I don’t agree.  Maintaining the innocence of childhood is wonderful, but turning off major events as they unfold in the world around us - childproofing our children rather than teaching - is doing our kids a disservice. They need to know and understand this environmental disaster, and make their own choices because if they don’t, their friends  will do it for them.

Not only is my 10 year-old daughter furious at BP and the images they are glued to on the endless stream of YouTube, she’s questioning how something like this could happen. The only good that can come of it – and I keep telling her this over and over – is that it will never be allowed happen again and she will be a part of that. Do I believe what I’m telling her? Not really, but what else can you say.

A quick Google search found little written about the lasting effect of disasters on children although I know there's a lot out there. As a marketer and a mother I know the power of even the most positive of images and the messages that accompany them.

When my kids were smaller, they would watch ads on the Disney Channel or Nickelodeon and a persistent drumbeat would start of asking for whatever had caught their attention. Children are relentless when they want something. And that was just toys.

Fast forward and picture today’s elementary school children a decade from now, standing on the west coast of Florida and asking "Mommy where are all the seagulls?" We could lose the gulf of Mexico just as the Europeans lost parts of the Rhine 30 years ago because of chemical dumping. They cleaned up most of it but it took a very long time. Children are very intuitive and even now they are starting to understand how bad a mess their parents have made, and left for them to clean-up.  

I believe the backlash against Big Oil will rival the “Not in My Backyard” movement against nuclear power plants that started after Three Mile Island and was cemented into our global consciousness with Chernobyl.  No nuclear plant has been built on American soil in more than 30 years, and despite the best efforts of the industry, lukewarm presidential support and the industry's PR people, it’s still a giant maybe.

If 1970s apathetic teens could fight the battle against nuclear – our kids should be able to shut down deep sea drilling.

Optimism is a rare commodity these days , but a new generation of environmentalists might just be our best hope yet.  

What Were BP's PR Executives Thinking?

 I was out having a couple of drinks with a friend last night who runs marketing for a consulting firm. He's a bright guy and of course we started talking about BP and the Gulf and what the company and CEO Tony Hayward should and shouldn't be doing from a PR standpoint. A few of the steps it's taken:

• Several weeks of silence during which you could hear the lawyers time clocks going Cha -Ching while they desperately tried to figure out what to do and what  to say.
• Hired a Bush loyalist who worked at DOE as the energy corporations were creating their own regulations or lack thereof. THer next boss was Dick Cheney which I won't even bother to comment on. Suffice it to say that the environment has never been a priority.
• A $50 million ad campaign that has BP's chairman doing too little to late. As the company has finally said it's no longer trying to plug the leak, he's out saying they're sorry and they're working on it.

Every PR expert who doesn't have BP or energy work is going to weigh in on this with some version of a crisis communications plan that fell short of what it should. That's pretty obvious.

What's not obvious and I think unexpected is the rage that ordinary Americans feel against this company and the energy industry. And the incredible similarities that President Obama has finally taken notice of between what happened in the Gulf of Mexico and what happened in the nuclear industry after Three Mile Island and Chernobyl.

Drill baby drill has become Kill baby kill. Not in my backyard is going to become not in my ocean - no way.

It's not just the images of the oil slicked beaches and dying wildlife and people of  New Orleans and other places, lamenting the loss of their way of life. It's the mood of country. Notice how the tea baggers have been very silent since this happened. Keeping their mouths shut is all they've got. Or they'll get dragged into the oil slicked mud right behind BP.

So what should BP have done?

Don't Lie. Lying about the extent of the spill was just plain stupid. It would have been much smarter to say we don't know how bad it is, we're still trying to figure it out. Far better than saying the spill was smaller than BP knew it was. That means rich corporation caught lying to American people - not unusual perhaps, but in this situation a way to build really bad will.

Don't Spend Money that Should Be Used to Help People on Advertising.  This is just idiocy. The CEO of BP blew it already, to put him on paid advertisements just makes it worse. Better he should get himself down to the affected areas - with body guards if he needs them - and talk to the people who live there.

Let the news cover it. Donate money to the fisherman whose world has just been destroyed - create a Foundation to help their families during this time. Demonstrate you care by doing something that matters not making yourself less of a villian. Don't underestimate the intelligence of the American people - even though that's a very popular thing to do these days. Eventually they will get it.

Educate the Public About What Really Happened. BP is going to get stuck paying for the vast majority of this mess anyway. So go out and explain to the best of your knowledge what really happened otherwise it's just rumor which makes it look worse. Many companies were involved - the system failed in multiple points. Mea culpa. We didn't have a contingency plan. This may be the biggest oil spill in the history of this country and it's going to take a long time to fix it. But in the meantime, we have thousands of scientists studying what happened and making sure it will never, ever happen again. Here's what we're learning as we go.

Get Environmentalists To Help You Figure it Out - Why is BP going out and hiring all of the people who worked for the Bush administration and are in part responsible for creating a world where energy companies could operate without any rules? Bring the environmentalists to the table. Get Al Gore to the table. Get the World Wildlife Federation to the table. Just the very act of asking for help of the people who have been predicting this makes it look like BP is doing something.

Most important, BP's  advisors should be people who have demonstrated that they care about the environment we live in. Not those who sold it to the oil companies.


 

Hey Lady Your Web Site's a Dinosaur

(In case you are wondering - I'm the dinosaur playing dead).

I am in love with a man named Jason Rosenberg. Not the kind of love that they write novels about but the love you feel when someone who is really smart and good at what he does helps you figure out what you need to do in business.

In this case, it's how to make my web site look like it's a 2010 instead of a 2008 creation. The online world has gone from the equivalent of the stone age to the iron age in 2.5 years. And my web site, which was designed then, is a pathetic example of what others should be doing.

Translation: If you do what I do and tell others how to market and communicate and your web site doesn't reflect all of your knowledge - why should they hire you?

To be clear, I know my site is way behind the times. A colleague put up an RSS feed to one of my blogs and links to Twitter and LinkedIn for me. He's not a designer and it doesn't look very good. But at least now it says I'm active in the social media world. SEO - Well that's another story.

Jason, who has a company called Neurofury, and helps people figure out what they need to do, offered me an hour's worth of advice from the goodness of his heart. That's why it is love. Between Jason and the designer who works with him, I am spending 1/6 of what a web site developer I work with told me she would charge to design and put up a site. And it's definitely not a case of you get what you pay for. The sites the developer designs may be SEO friendly, but they all look exactly the same.

Here's some of what Jason told me to do:

Use Word Press - It's a free web-based software that will support my site, blogs, Twitter Feed, etc. Even the Web Site for Dummies people can figure out how to use it. Which is the speed at which my brain works when it comes to technology.

SEO - I cannot compete with the big guys. Had already figured out that Google Ad Words is meaningless with the site I have now - my traffic doubled but off of a very small base. He is going to help with organic searching, which means that people who search and are looking for firms like mine, will have better chance of finding us. That's fine for now.

Copyright Old - When you go to my site it says Copyright 2008. Why don't I just up a banner headline that says she has not fixed this site in a long time? Instead, we'll just take it down for now.

Dynamic Site Map - Every site that wants to be found should have a map. Not that hard to do either.

Put up Your Press Releases - Many of them have big company names in them that will search well. It's great to have new content frequently. And I can use their brands to get more traffic to my site.

One Way Links are Fine - Everyone tells you the best links are when other sites link to yours. But you linking to other sites is good too. And that I can do easily.

Thank you Jason. There's more and we're getting started next month. Stay tuned for the new site announcement and what I learned redoing it.

Guess What Tiger Woods - Poll Says Scandal Won't Hurt Your Brand

That old saying - no news is good news - well evidently scandal is not bad news these days. Even if your damage control is lousy.

Conventional wisdom in the PR business is that scandal must be managed - messages must be created - issues must be mitigated - trouble must be buried.

But an Adweek Media/Harris Poll found out differently. Even though Tiger Woods was a very bad husband - turns out a majority of people could care less.

Perhaps we're just so saturated with celebrity scandals - unless it's something as bad as the head of the Family Research Council taking a Rent-a-Boy to Europe to carry his luggage - oh the late night comedians love this - that most of the time it doesn't affect our impressions of a celebrity.

Here's some interesting tidbits from the survey:

75% of Americans say when a celebrity endorser gets involved in a scandal, how they feel about the brands that the celebrity endorses is not affected.

20% of Americans say they feel worse about the endorsed brands.

5% say they feel better about them.


Who are these people who don't live off of TMZ and Entertainment Tonight?

81% of Americans age 55+ say a scandal has no impact on how they feel about the brand

77% of those age 35-44 said scandals don't change their opinion.

28% of those age 45-54 say they feel worse about the brand.

11% of consumers age 18-34 say they feel better about the brand after a celebrity gets involved in a scandal. (This I just don't get but maybe it's the reality TV phenomenon).

Consumers in the Midwest are most likely to have a negative attitude toward brands after a celebrity scandal.

26% of Midwesterners say they would feel worse about a brand after a scandal.


19% of Easterners say they'd feel worse.

Aimee's First Visit to the White House - Obama Wants Local Companies and Schools to Learn from Each Other

“Fighting a forest fire with 1000 eye droppers.” That’s how David Washington, acting CEO of Change the Equation, a non-profit, described the current effort to improve STEM (science, technology, education and mathematics) education in the United States.

There are hundreds of local and grassroots programs around the country addressing the nation’s need for improving STEM education, by companies and universities and non-profits through federal grants.

But no one knows who they are, or much about each other and as a result, there are no role models. No one wants to reinvent the wheel and without the wheel there are a lot of companies with money to spend and no one to help them. That’s a quandary my company would like to have.

This discussion was part of a larger meeting at the White House yesterday about President Obama’s science education initiative called Educate to Innovate. The Office of Science & Technology Policy (OSTP) talked briefly about the work the president is doing which includes:

Creating a National Discussion about the need for improvement in STEM education by referencing it in his speeches and conversations with industry and other stakeholders.

Making the White House a Science Education Role Model – President Obama held an astronomy night at the White House recently, Michelle Obama attended the finals of DOE’s National Science Bowl this month, science is now part of the annual Easter Egg hunt, and the White House is planning its first ever Science Fair.

Convincing Business and Industry to Get More Involved in educating the next generation of scientists and engineers, both at the grassroots and the state levels.

Providing Support to States so they can Improve Science and Engineering Education through an array of grants and special programs.

Identifying Corporate STEM Education Role Models and sharing what they do right with other organizations who want to help.

A couple of hundred businesses, non-profits, teachers and other STEM stakeholders were invited, including myself as a representative of the USA Science & Engineering Festival.

So all the pieces are in place. Science is Cool again. Our president says so. But how do we translate that into business/education partnerships that change kids’ lives. That raise the next generation of scientists and engineers? As a marketer I can tell you – start here:

Science has a Marketing Problem.

Approximately 30 million children a month watch PBS and other media and they need to be exposed to more science. Many of them don’t think “Science is Cool” and we need to find ways to convince them that it is. We need more science programming. We also need people who kids turn to as role models to tell them that science is cool.

Science needs a Campaign Selling Science

Some companies have already begun to push science with their employees. For instance, Bentley Systems, an international software development company launched a program 18 months ago where it gave every employee $250.00 a year to spend on science education with their local schools. So far about $60,000 has been spent by employees around the world.

Time Warner Cable has pledged to spend $100 million to get more students involved in science and a national Public Service Announcement Campaign is planned to make science cool again. Ford Motor Company is very active in K-12 education and becoming more involved in STEM.

But it’s not enough, and I guarantee you that we’ll never hear about any of them.

Marketing 100 and Then Some

Fellow marketers I can hear you shaking your heads a long with me – Guess what guys you need marketing. You need communications. You need to create a strategic research and communications plan and get out there find out what corporations are doing – what works and what doesn’t – what is paid for by federal government grants and what are companies ponying up.

Say nothing of the fact that someone should have tracked this all along. We’ve got a president who wants to improve science education. There’s a White House mandate.

Grassroots is fabulous but grassroots never gets coverage. I worked all of last year with a wonderful group of people all lovers of science called the Coalition for Public Understanding of Science – hundreds of science projects across the nation.

But when it came to communications the projects were supposed to do it themselves locally and then nationally. And the fact is they didn’t. It was a volunteer army. And volunteers get the job done – they don’t tell the world about it.

Science needs national events. Larry Bock, who is pulling together the first USA Science & Engineering Festival is a visionary. Science needs others like him. And all these businesses who want to do something need to support this work.

One woman put it quite succinctly when she asked: What’s my to-do list after this meeting?

Science needs a plan to make it cool again and an army of advocates out there talking it up. Without that, we’ll just have a lot of dedicated people who want to help and do - but sans the attention it deserves.

Death of PowerPoint is Greatly Exaggerated - Some Alternatives

Posted a question with several LinkedIn groups about how many communicators are still using PowerPoint. Receive about 70 responses across different groups – by far the most came from the International Association of Business Communicators.

I stopped using PowerPoint awhile ago in favor of a one page hand-out and discussion. Am trying to make the conversion to using video but finding it’s harder than I thought it would be even with a simple camera.

A couple of people remarked about how young professionals don’t use PowerPoint and I had to laugh – my fifth grader is a whiz at it and I’ve seen kids as young as second grade using it to make classroom presentations.

Almost all of the respondents still use PowerPoint. Many defended it with a variety of reasons.

Here are a few of the Pros

It’s easy to convert from one operating system to another – eliminating many of the problems especially when presenting at meetings, etc.

When you present or go to a meeting people expect a PowerPoint. If you don’t have a PowerPoint you look unprepared.

PowerPoint is a widely accepted form of presenting.

It offers a lot of flexibility in charts.

It’s inexpensive and comes with Microsoft Office.

When you add in video clips it updates the format and makes it look fresher.


Some of the Cons

Too many bullets – slides too full of gunk.

You’re not using your words – parents of young children will appreciate this.

PowerPoint influences over simplification of complex ideas.

Dated program – architecture is a decade old and hasn’t been updated much.

PowerPoint can take over a speaker’s presentation.

What are communicators using instead of PowerPoint?

Adobe Acrobat

Flash

Prezi

Apple’s Keynote

Mindjet Mindmanager

Brainshark

Flashspring

Links to good PowerPoints and a professor who offers ideas on how to use it best –

Sorry all - You will have to cut and paste - once again bloggers linkages are messed up.


http://www.slideshare.net/happykatie/visual-communication-revisited-for-iabc-houston

http://www.slideshare.net/trib/why-are-we-even-arguing-about-this-presentation

http://www.m62.net/

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/27/world/27powerpoint.html

http://www.brainshark.com/brainshark/vu/view.asp?pi=zHxz154YgUz1rpbz0