#Scio14 : Science is awesome - AND SO ARE THE PEOPLE WHO DO IT

A while back Drs. Holly Bik and Miriam Goldstein had a great idea.  They developed An Introduction to Social Media for Scientists and, using that as a primer, proposed a session at ScienceOnline Together to discuss the difference between "getting noticed and GETTING NOTICED."

Drs. Bik and Goldstein are right - getting noticed in the right way and for the right reasons isn't easy. Everything from your own ego to cultural issues to the size of your professional network play a role in how you can promote your work, advance your career, and strengthen your reputation. It's even harder when you don't have someone like Matt Shipman working with you.

I don't think ScienceOnline could have better presenters on this topic than Drs. Bik and Goldstein because they've done the research, faced the challenges, and experienced success. In fact, they've been so successful that their work prevents them from being at the conference.

So as I mentioned earlier, the conference organizers have asked me to fill in.

I will do my best to stay true to the original intent of the session. Of course, as a PR professional, I come from a very different perspective.  What the original presenters call "promotion" I think of as "positioning" - that is, positioning yourself online and elsewhere as a thought leader or a resource to a particular community.
I will share some tools I've developed for clients that help people think strategically about how they present themselves and their work.  Then I'm going to open it up to the room to discuss the issues and challenges people face.

I expect I'll be doing more listening and learning than anything else.

You can watch the session online live on Thursday at 4pm ET and you can follow the hashtag #scioSelfPR to contribute.

Attention seekers

Salon reports Congressman Michael Turner (R-Ohio) apparently thinks Senator Kirsten Gillibrand is more interested in attention than policy. The Senator continues to advocate for a policy change in how the military handles sexual assault cases. Her proposal was stripped from a larger bill without a vote months ago.  The Congressman says "I think at this point, it’s certainly not an issue of sexual assault, it’s just an issue of the senator wanting to promote her solution that has already lost. I think she’s getting a whole lot of attention for a debate that’s over."

Of course, you might see the Congressman's comments and then wonder what those 40-some-odd votes and government shutdown trying to repeal or defund the Affordable Care Act were all about.  But that's just politics. 

What I'm really concerned about is something we see all too often - a woman stands up for principle and gets labeled as an "attention seeker" or worse as a justification to diminish their work or heap abuse upon her.  It happened to Adria Richards.  It happened to Caroline Criado-Perez. It happens to professional women constantly. It happens even more often when the discussion focuses on gender issues.  It rarely happens to men. 

Senator Gillibrand is not trying to up her Q score here. She's talking about policy and advocating a point of view, she's raising awareness, and she's taking the long approach to changing policy.  That's exactly what Senators do.  

But what I really want to know is this: what's wrong with publicizing your work?  What's wrong with taking credit for your ideas or accomplishments?  Congressman Turner does it all the time, as does every member of Congress. One of the most common jokes inside the beltway is "The most dangerous place in Washington DC is between [insert politician name here] and a TV camera."  It's just part of the job. 

One of the most common reasons I've heard women give for remaining anonymous or not sharing their work online is they don't want to be the next woman to be labeled this way.  But this inability to promote their work places them at a competitive disadvantage in the workplace.  This hurts professional women and everyone else - when good ideas aren't shared, we can't learn from them and we lose an opportunity to improve our own ideas. 

Next week I'll be at ScienceOnline facilitating a discussion about "Healthy Online Promotion" and I hope we can address this issue and discuss some ways to tackle it.  We have to stop framing this as "attention seeking" and start looking at it for what it is - the contribution of ideas to a larger discussion.

Follow the hashtag #scioSelfPR on Twitter to join in.

"Turgid prose." Seriously.

So that's what "turgid" means

New York Times columnist Nick Kristof wants academics to step up their game when it comes to public debates and social media:

A basic challenge is that Ph.D. programs have fostered a culture that glorifies arcane unintelligibility while disdaining impact and audience. This culture of exclusivity is then transmitted to the next generation through the publish-or-perish tenure process...

...the executive council of the prestigious International Studies Association proposed that its publication editors be barred from having personal blogs. The association might as well scream: We want our scholars to be less influential!

...A related problem is that academics seeking tenure must encode their insights into turgid prose.

I think Kristoff's heart is in the right place. To his credit, he cites academics who do mix it up in the public sphere like his colleague Paul Krugman, and he gives a nod to the notion that tenure requires peer-reviewed publications and not op-eds or cable interviews.  Further, on Twitter he's linking to some of the many responses and criticisms he's received on blogs and social media from academics. I'm partial to the responses by Drs. Paige Brown, Janet Stemwedel, Laura Tanenbaum, and Amy Freid and Luisa S. Deprez.

Kristof spends a lot of time criticizing the density of peer-reviewed journal articles as inaccessible to the community of people whose idea of a big word is "delicatessen."  But Kristof should know better. Academics are writing to their audience just as Kristof is writing to his.  Most academics use different language when they know their audience is different, just as Kristof does.

I think Kristof misses two important points.  First, Kristof complains about the aloofness of academia but works in an industry (i.e., punditry) that too often rewards stupidity. Let's face it - our most "popular" pundits say incredibly stupid things on a regular basis. If there's anything worse than anti-intellectualism, it may be pseudo-intellectualism.

It's not entirely their fault.  Smart people may go months without having anything really smart and original to say. Of course, if you have to file your column or go on one of the cable talks tomorrow, you just say what comes to mind.

Honestly, Kristof might want to spend less time criticizing academics he doesn't know and more time convincing the pundits he does know to stop talking long enough to have an original thought.

Second and more importantly, promoting academic or scientific work to a "lay" audience is really, really hard. It's a full-time job. Engaging elite members of the media to reach their audience is even harder at times.  I'd like to know how many emails and phone calls Kristof didn't respond to today.

Kristof hasn't shared much on how we solve that problem, but I'm going to give it a try at ScienceOnline 2014. I'm facilitating a discussion called "Healthy Online Promotion" and I'll be in a room full of academics who want to participate in public debates and share their work with people outside of academia.  I hope Kristof and anyone interested will follow the #scioSelfPR hashtag during the session on Thursday, February 27 between 4pm and 5pm ET and offer their thoughts.

ZOMG ROBOTS - and a lot more

A while back Sheril Kirshenbaum introduced me to the communications team for FIRST, a great organization that encourages kids to consider STEM careers.  They organize competitions where school kids  form teams to build robots out of Lego bricks and other things.

I got a chance to interview one of the teams - the "Minds In Gear" team from Coatesville, PA.  My conversation helped me understand a bit about how valuable the organization is and how much promise our young people really have.  The organization has built up a decent following and they also encourage companies to get their employees to serve as mentors.

Check it out.