One fallacy that this parable exposes is the equivalence between marketing and messaging that many people incorrectly assume. Both do start with the letter “M,” to be sure. And there are certainly overlaps in methodology. But the objectives are very different.

Typically, in activism, messaging has one of two flavors. 1) To convince people to believe something they currently don’t believe. Sometimes this means changing people’s minds, other times it means brining people into a way of thinking in an area where they don’t currently have an opinion. This is very difficult and usually unsuccessful on a person-by-person basis. A blindingly successful activist messaging campaign run over a few months changes a couple-few percent of people’s likely behavior (as in voting for a particular candidate or preferring a specific policy). 2) To get those already in your camp to take some action, like a GOTV (get out the vote) campaign, or a petition drive.*

Marketing has a very different goal. Most marketing can assume the target audience is already leaning towards a decision, perhaps to buy a particular product. Marketing is there to get the person to pick your iteration of the project, as opposed to some other company’s version. Maybe the plethora of car ads helps make more members of the general population want to own a car, but the marketing department at Ford Automotive is mainly trying to get the prospective car buyer to pick an F-100 over a Chevy truck.

If marketing methodology were applied to many messaging needs, it might be like trying to get someone who is about to buy an apple to go to the other side of the grocery store, and instead of buying an apple, pick up some milk. Or, instead of buying the amazing, giant, wonderfully colored, flawless Crispois Wunder-Apple just invented at the University of Podunk and that everybody is eating these days, picking up a bag of locally grown, small, less interesting apples because it is better for the planet.

In other words, marketing is usually getting someone who already wants to do a thing to actually do the thing they want to do, with you instead of with some other company. Messaging in the activist community is often getting someone to act either contrary to, or simply not in accord with, their pre-existing prurient tendency.

Internally, methodologically, marketing and messaging share a lot of research, process, etc. But so do civil engineering and mechanical engineering. But you wouldn’t hire a traffic engineer who would be great at configuring a busy intersection, to design a new helicopter. Just as importantly, that engineer would not want that job. This is why the new volunteer who confesses to be in marketing excuses themselves to go to the bathroom and is never seen again…

• I’m assuming your petition is a legal or procedural step towards some goal, and not just some useless on-line petition somebody made up.

I don’t think so. Although I personally am not like some of my fellow secularists in reacting viscerally to any and all stylistic or symbolic references to Judeo-Christian religious themes, I am aware that there are recognizable religious visual or literary elements which, if used as part of a teaching tool, can be easily construed as promotion of a religion. “Promotion” is not standing on a soap box preaching, or telling students that a particular religion is bad while another is good, or giving extra credit points for prayer. Well, it is that. But promotion is also something as simple as a person in authority casually wearing a religious symbol or having such a symbol on a desk or wall in a classroom, or making references to a particular religious metaphor while teaching. These casual representations and references are relatively benign among adults, or in college, or probably even in senior high school, but in grade school they are regarded as promotion and public school teachers must not engage in this behavior.

Which brings us to the Science Marketing’s Boner of the Year award. Which, tongue in cheek, I just made up to draw attention to an interesting development.

You are familiar with Marketing for Scientists, the blog and the effort, as well as Marc Kuchner, science marketing guru. Marc’s thing is that marketing is important because without it you mostly get ignored. He’s right, of course, and I generally support and appreciate his efforts. You’ll remember the discussion a while back of Bill Nye‘s dressing down of creationism. Some people thought that Bill Nye being a meanie was a marketing disaster, and I disagreed. In retrospect, I’m sure I was right, because the controversy over Bill Nye pointing out that creationist parents are doing it wrong led to a widespread discussion of creationism in schools, and that discussion has to happen frequently. Also, Bill was right. Hard to go totally wrong if you’re right.

Marc just sent me a link to the latest post on Marketing for Scientists, which is “The Top Six Science Marketing Hits of 2012.” Number 5 is The Flame Challenge, of which Marc says:

This contest, held by the Center for Communicating Science at Stony Brook University with help from actor Alan Alda, dared scientists and educators to submit videos explaining what a flame is—a subtle concept. What set this contest apart from other science communication contests is that the judges were 11-year old students: some 6000 of them at 130 elementary schools. The results taught us something deep, I think, about how children view scientists.

Here is the video, which is discussed here:

(If you can’t see that for some reason, go to the link.)

I happen to think this video does a great job of explaining the science of the flame. The visuals and the dialog bring the viewer to a question, then address the question in a way that explains it but raises another question, which is then addressed, until the whole thing is explained at a fairly high level. That is a very good technique. The voice over, visuals, music, and overall production are high-value, attractive, attention grabbing, well timed, and all that. In short it is a very nice piece of work.

Unfortunately, the video can’t be used in a public school classroom in the US because it promotes Abrahamic religious themes. Promotes as in uses which is really all you need. The video opens with a man who looks a LOT like Charles Darwin chained to a wall in hell, surrounded by flames. The narrator then goes on to explain to the possibly holocaust-victim evolutionary biologist all he might ever want to know about flames. Satan (or some other high ranking devil) makes an appearance a bit later. He is used in the story to demonstrate incandescence by heating up his pitchfork in the hell-fire. Later, during the wrap-up, Satan plays air guitar with the pitchfork, which is cute.

I know, a lot of people are going to say that I’m being ridiculous, that these themes are just part of culture, that they don’t mean anything, that kids are exposed to this sort of thing anyway, that the science teacher can use the video anyway and then have a lecture on the conflict of science and religion, etc. etc. etc. But all that is wrong, sorry. It is promoting a particular religion with state funds which is a violation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, it is inappropriate and could probably get a teacher in trouble if the right people knew the teacher was showing it. Making a science video and not taking into account the fact that teachers who have not thought about what they are doing could get in trouble is not good marketing. Well, it isn’t bad marketing either, it simply isn’t about marketing. It is about end user safety. This is like making a child’s toy and it is a) very fun, b) very desirable, everybody wants one, c) very well marketed and d) hurts some of the kids. And, no, we casual denizens of the internet don’t get to write off the fact that the negative effects potentially caused by a certain choice could be mitigated against by having an additional set of lectures.

On top of all this, I know there are teachers out there who will see this video and think it a great idea to use in the classroom precisely because it has a Judeo-Christian religious theme, and some will even like it because it depicts Charles Darwin burning in hell. Indeed, this is a physical science video, and there are probably more physical science teachers who happen to be Christian Creationists than life science teachers who are creationists, and the latter number is known to be well above 25%. So, yeah, Ben Ames, the maker of this video, may have produced a product that supports a creationist agenda, in a small but not insignificant way, even though that was presumably not his intention.

There may be a flaw in the process that could easily be fixed. Ben Ames is a communications and journalism guy, not a middle school teacher, or even a middle school education expert (I think … subject to correction). This project in communicating science, which I’m sure is a good one, will continue. I recommend that language be placed in the guiding documents for the project reminding producers that iconography or reference, even seemingly benign, to religious themes would likely disqualify a work from actual use in actual schools and would be best avoided. Also, having a science education expert familiar with the grade level and the legal and socio-cultural aspects of “marketing” science in the mix somewhere would be good. The idea would be to not let developers get beyond concept stage with unusable elements in place, in order to avoid wasting effort. As I say, this little film on flame is outstanding and really does the trick. It is simply unusable in the classrooms for which it intended, and unfortunately, will be used to potentially negative effect, and, here and there, exploited in a negative way. (This whole discussion must be adjusted, of course, for cases outside the US, where the First amendment does not apply, but where there may be similar issues.)

In this case, describing what a flame is, Hell seems like an obvious theme because there would be a lot of flames there. In some future year, perhaps the project will focus on floods … what could go wrong then?

“Harry Smith” puppy-wuppy-doodle-dooo@gmail.com

he was merely this:

puppy-wuppy-doodle-dooo@gmail.com

… which is not helpful and, for that matter, does not provide a very good face for the organization.

More recently, I’ve been doing a fun little project involving ScienceOnline 2012. This is a conference to be held in North Carolina in January for bloggers, science communicators, and science writers. I’ve been going through the list of participants, and where they have provided a URL to the conference, I check the URL to see if it is a blog, and if there is a post on that blog written by that participant, and the post was fairly recent, etc. etc., I put a link to it on Google+ along with a sentence that might read something like “Mary Smith is a participant in Scienceonline 2012” where I use a plus sign before “Mary” and “Scienceonline” so those terms become links.

But there are several problems in doing this. Let me list a few of them:

1) I arrive at the web site and it is for a major corporation, university, or some other whopping big entity that the person is presumably associated with, but there is no reference to that person on the page I’ve arrived at, and no clear way to find one. In this case, the person has used a URL sort of like a business card. They work for ACME Industries Corporation Inc, and the line on their business card that says that is represented as the URL for ACME Industries Corporation Inc. Useful information, but a dead end. If a person who has an actual presence on the Internet (that they wish to share) uses a URL of their home institution this way, they are either messing up or, perhaps, are following some corporate rule that requires them to not be an individual person.

2) I arrive at a multi-authored blog that the person in question may be an author on, but there is no easy way to find that person’s posts. I may even find the person’s name on the “about” page, but unless there is a blog post by the person who supplied the URL on the top page of the multi-authored blog, there is no way to easily find their writing. If I enter their name in the search function, it turns up nothing. There is no link of author’s names that bring up their work.

3) I have a name associated with the URL, say, Professor Jane Ukumbe. I find a person on a multi-authored blog that is called “Doc Uki-Duki” and otherwise there is no one else indicated on that blog with a surname starting with “U” and an advanced degree. I could guess that Jane Ukumbe is Doc Uki-Duki. But it might be bad to get that wrong. My attempt to locate the written work of Professor Ukumbe has been thwarted.

4) I have a name, say, Mary Smith, associated with a URL that leads me to a blog written by “M.S.” with no easily located reference to said “Mary.” In this case, do I write the sentence I mentioned above? Do I say “This is a blog post by Mary Smith, who will be at ScienceOnline 2012”? If I do, I may have just given out the real name of “M.S.” who up until now has been using a pseudonym. Or is M.S. really a pseudonym, or was Mary simply being cute by using her initials? Or what? Having no way to tell, I must not use the person’s name, even though if it is an anonymous pseudonym, it is a rather thinly disguised one.

5) The person’s name really is “Mary Smith” or the equally ubiquitous equivalent, so when I try to use the “+” symbol to bring up a link to Mary on Google+ I get a hundred zillion Mary Smiths and I can’t tell which one is she.

6) Somewhat more subtle and a problem of only intermittent effect, the person’s name is something like “Joe Smith E. Hendrickson” or some other bunch of symbols with spaces between them that is not a simple first and last name, so things like the Facebook @ technology or the Google+ “+” symbol stumble and are unable to find a match, even though there is a match in there somewhere.

7) I click on the URL associated with a person’s name and either arrive at a site that has links out to all of that person’s Internet stuff including a blog, which I then go to, or I end up going straight to the person’s blog and right there is an interesting, recent post that I can snork. This outcome, the one I’m looking for, happens in far fewer than half the cases. If you think this seems like a low percentage, I agree with you. I was surprised at how few people provide URL’s that linked more or less directly to a current blog post. Remember, those links are provide by people in the blogging and interned communication industry. That’s a little like going to a Pharmaceutical Conference and searching everyone’s luggage and finding that only a third of them had free drug samples!

In many cases, I assume that the difficulty that I encounter is simply my problem, and not a tactical mistake on the part of the person whose identity I am engaging. A person wishes to be simply linked to Megacorp Inc, or MRU, and that’s what they’ve done and my effort to find a blog post they’ve written is thwarted because they haven’t written one, or at least, don’t want their blog which is out there somewhere linked to them for the present purposes. This is why, when doing this ScienceOnline 2012 link fest, when I hit the MRU or the Acme Inc web site, I stop looking. I don’t want to barge into someone’s Live Journal or MySpace site and point to photos of that trip to the Yucatan five years ago that they would rather forget but don’t know how to erase from the world wide web. When I encounter ambiguities in name use that might indicate that someone is using either multiple identities or trying to be anonymous, I also cease and desist in linking a name to the item I’m posting because, again, I don’t want to screw up. But in both cases, it is quite possible that the person in question is simply represented on the Internet in a way that is suboptimal.

There are several things you can do if you want to make yourself easier to find, see, link to, and otherwise engage with. Here are a few suggestions. If you look at my online identity, you’ll see right away that I am suggesting here that you do what I say not what I do. I’ve got a few flaws in my identity management. Also, I’m probably missing some important points here, so please chime in; Tell us in the comments about your ideas for identity management.

1) If your name really is Mary Smith, change it immediately to something like Lady Gaga. Only not Lady Gag, there already is one of those. OK, so, in fact, you may not be able to change your name if it is a fairly common one, but have a look at some of the suggestions below to help make your identity more easily engaged by others.

2) Try to make your on line identity two names, if at all possible. First name, last name. If you are E. Howard Hunt, or T.E. Lawrence, or George H.W. bush, the Internet is not ready for you. This is probably only a small problem, and it will probably go away as these technologies improve, so this may not be a big deal. Also, if you are Mary Jane Smith, being something like M. J. Smith or Mary Ja Smith may be a good thing (see number 1 above).

3) Wherever you can, list all of your standard docking points on the Internet, so that no matter where someone encounters you, they have a roadmap to all the other places you are. There is a place for links on your Google + profile, there are places to put these things on facebook. You can have an email signature with these links on it. If you have a blog or two or three, they should be listed. An email address people can use to contact you should be handily available. Your YouTube account, your facebook link and your G+ about page URL, and whatever else you have should be listed somewhere at each of those very locations, in the appropriate place. This is what About pages are all about. Make sure your name (pseudo or otherwise) is on the about pages.

4) Make all those names the same. Don’t be Doc Holiday in one place and Henry Holiday somewhere else and Hank Holiday somewhere else, unless you really are trying to confuse people and keep your identity obscure. If you want people to know “Oh, this person did this AND that, and I met her at this conference, and they gave THAT talk and wrote THIS book and blogged over HERE until moving THERE …” then provide the necessary information.

5) If your presence on the Internet is complex, maybe you should have a domain based on your name at which you have easily identified links out to your other stuff. Many of the individuals I encountered had this sort of thing and I was readily able to find their blog and thus post a link to their latest blog post. One person had a central hub page for their identity but forgot to put the main blog on it! (I’ll have to send that person, a friend and colleague, an email!)

6) Try to have a recognizable consistent icon. In these moments of uncertainty, when someone is trying to link to you in Google+ or on Facebook, and they have typed in your name but several different ones come up and maybe they are not exactly sure if you are Michelle Bachman or Michele Bachmann, and both forms are visible in the list of choices, that little icon sitting there that looks like the icons linked to your identity elsewhere … your avatar … will reduce the uncertainty.

7) Last and maybe least, but still important: Check your email software. When someone gets an email from you, can they tell it is form you?

What am I missing? What do you do to make the process of engagement with colleagues and community work more smoothly?