This will be my last call for donations to the “Conservation Communicator Convalescence Fund” As you know, one of my regular readers is quite ill and could really use your moral and financial support to get through this difficult time. A number of you have already pitched in, and I’m super grateful! Even the smallest contribution will warm her heart, and mine. Please give today!
It was an honor to present Water Words That Work to the Chesapeake Advisory Committee on 2/21/2008. I particulary enjoyed the lively Q&A that followed the PowerPoint.
Click here for the PowerPoint.
Click here for the Words That Work and click on the words to see why I have included them in the list.
There’s a point in some of my workshops where I ask participants what they think the #1 most-trafficked website is. Always, always, always you say “Google.” And why not? You Google. And your peers Google. But Yahoo! is the #1 website. This seemingly innocent mistake reveals an unconscious class bias among nature protection and pollution control experts that inhibits our ability to communicate effectively with everyday citizens.
Whether you prefer Google or Yahoo! says something about your class blackground. #2 Google is the Orvis of the online world, serving a more educated and affluent clientele. #1 Yahoo! is the Bass Pro Shops of the online world, serving a more blue collar audience (Source: TechCrunch). The pattern extends to big-name social networking sites. #2 Facebook skews affluent, educated, and white. #1 MySpace skews bluecollar and ethnically diverse (Source: ScienceDaily).
Most nature protection and pollution control people aren’t rich (I’d raise my rates if you were) – but you are highly educated and spend most of your day in the company of others who share this background. The same way you convince yourself that everybody uses Google, you convince yourself that everybody understands your shop talk, like ”watershed.” But in fact…
Able to Guess the Correct Definition of “Watershed” on a Multiple Choice Test
Source: A Survey of Chesapeake Bay Watershed Residents, Virginia Tech, 2002
Bottom line here: You and your peers are fortunate to be part of an educated elite minority. Keep that in mind the next time you are all sitting around a table talking about what everybody else thinks and does.
Man, I thought I was down on traditional media. The editors of Advertising Age are even more pessimistic and they have issued a stunningly blunt recommendation: “Get out of media. Get into marketing.”
It’s good advice for nature protection and pollution control organizations that have long relied on press releases and pitching journalists to get their message out to the public. More than 200,000 traditional media jobs have disappeared this decade, Ad Age reports. That means ever longer odds against your next press release, pitch call, Op Ed, or other old school PR effort.
With traditional public relations and advertising campaigns yielding steadily diminishing returns, the article notes that the commercial sector is working harder than ever to bypass the media and take their message directly to market with “digital initiatives, direct marketing, promotions and events, just to name a few.”
This humble blogger urges you to do the same. The writing is on the wall and couldn’t be plainer.
