Insights
Swimming in the Blue Ocean
List member David Chapin (CEO of Forma Life Science Marketing) responded to yesterday’s post about the difference between asking great research questions and asking great thought leadership questions with this graphic:
Quoting David’s email to me (with his permission):
… Read MoreWe’re making much the same argument:
Science advances by “Proving” the answers to questions.
Bill Gates & Asking Bigger Questions
The head of a think tank once said to me: “The ability to ask the question that makes a great thought leadership piece is the same ability to ask a great research question. And if you can’t do one, you won’t be able to do the other.”
He was totally wrong, and also right in a smaller sense he didn’t grasp.…
Read MorePut Your Stake in the Ground
The world, it seems, is now calling climate change an emergency. And climate activists are calling for a “World War II-style mobilization” to combat it. So are candidates for US president. Working papers have been published about using the WWII economic mobilization as a model for a climate-emergency economy.…
Read MoreAnecdotes Often Beat Stories. Beat the Snot Out of Them.
We’re told that anecdotes (brief retellings of incidents) are impoverished forms of communication, and stories (longer narratives with peaks and valleys and telling details and surprising twists and moments of reflection and insight) are the highest form of communication.
SMH.
In a recent “The Undercover Economist” — economist and journalist Tim Harford’s reported column for the FT designed to answer questions based on the best available research — Harford asks the question “Should we take a few long holidays, or lots of short ones?”
But instead of diving into the research immediately, though, Harford begins with a humble anecdote.…
Read MoreThe ‘New’ Publication Model
Whenever I’m in an unreasonably cheerful mood, I go onto #scicomm Twitter. Its combination of hey-kids-let’s-put-on-a-show optimism and black-cloud despair never fails to deflate my balloon:
To be clear: there’s nothing awful about “the new publication model” being advanced here. Lots of contemporary process boxes being ticked, as well as Twitter-as-the-new-truffle-oil school of #scicomm.…
Read MoreRedressing the Researcher-Communicator Imbalance
In certain classes of research-driven organizations (e.g., smaller think tanks, some NGOs, university-based research centers), it’s often researchers and research directors who call the communications shots. Their comfort level dictates:
- The way individual pieces of content look and feel;
- Where, how and how often the content gets promoted and to whom;
- Which content is deemed priority for the research vertical and/or organization;
- The content marketing strategy for the research vertical and/or organization (and whether there is a content strategy or not).
Why You Can’t Review a Reporter’s Story
Two reasons, says science communicator (and former reporter) Matt Shipman: 1) it’s unfair to the other sources, and 2) the changes you request after your review might make the story “certainly more obfuscatory.”
Let me translate #2 for you: your review and suggestions are going to make the story worse.…
Read MoreTTLT: Making Research Easy
If you’re going to write a research report in 2019, please don’t make us read the whole damn thing to get the point.
Like Brookings does.
Or Cato.
Or CAP. (Yes, we get a short overview, but then it’s Scrollville.)
At least give us an executive summary, like the Manhattan Institute.…
Read MoreIs Your Thinking Hydroponic?
The economist Thomas Piketty has a new book (Capital and Ideology) coming out next March in the United States. His last book — 2013’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century, a broadside against the structural excesses of late capitalism — seemed at the time an unlikely international sensation.…
Read MorePardon Me, You Have Four Visitors
Research-driven organizations often see their digital channels as billboards, and their audiences as highway drivers of extreme leisure and curiosity.
In reality, your drive-by audience has extreme urgency — and not to find a rest stop. They have urgent questions. If you can provide them answers — if you can own the answers for their questions — you can begin to own a relationship with them.…
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