What can the science of communications tell us about communicating science?

My talk at the @HarwellCampus last week. 🧵 Scientific communications often go wrong>

The @CDCgov some years ago produced a leaflet intended to debunk popular myths about the flu vaccine in fact *reduced* people's willingness to take it.

Why? Because repeating myths can embed them.

Why does media matter? Does it always matter?

A biotech asked me this the other day. And it's a bit more complicated than it sounds.

There's a good argument that media doesn't matter *except* for four specific reasons:

🧵 The explosion of new media means that a lot of media coverage is pointless. But not all of it.

It’s entirely possible to appear in the media, and for it to have no impact. You can easily waste time. And it can be counter productive.

Putting my neck on the line: The UK will be the first big* country to vaccinate its vulnerable population.

Why?

1. Enough vaccine on hand for first dose today, likely to have enough for second dose in time from Oxford/AZ alone.

https://twitter.com/Samfr/status/1347474258277101571

2. NHS means vast majority of people have a GP (primary care) so relatively few will fall through the net compared to decentralised systems. And follow up for second dose is much easier.

3. Relatively low vaccine hesitancy (vs. say France).

Some very good news on the UK vaccine front in the last day: We have 15-19m doses of Oxford/AZ vaccine produced.

Some/most will need to be fill & finished & pass through regulatory approval, but that should make the late February government target of first shot possible. Caveats: Any delays in fill & finish / regulatory could delay this slightly - but getting people vaccinated once it's ready is the (relatively) easy bit.

Next step: Second dose for this group - in total we'll need about 28m doses - so once you include a few million Pfizer we ...

The @risj_oxford report on news and the 2019 election is, as usual, very helpful.

1. News & views shared by people in social networks was as influential as mainstream media for under 35s. A lot of this originates in mainstream media (e.g political analysis, investigative, clips of TV interviews) and under 35s are cumulatively a much smaller voting group than over 35s.

But this is still a big change - we're more influenced by what our peers think and share.

How does Trump win?

That’s what I tackled in my talk to the Business Insider Trends conference in Warsaw today.

Trump is a horrible person, with many terrible flaws. Yet he won. Partly because some of his communications are very effective. The science of persuasion has taught us a lot about how to persuade people.

But because humans are complicated, it’s not always obvious which trigger works best.

Digital marketers on the other hand have often reverse engineered the same triggers,

Ofcom's Communications Market Report 2019: Highlights:

1.40% of households have paid subscription TV. Eventually this will cause substantial increases in the cost to reach people through TV, though not yet because even these households still watch a lot of traditional TV. 2. 16-34s are watching 43% less live TV than 5 years ago – and the trend is much faster than for older adults.

3. Audience reach (ie how many people use a channel at least once) is falling fast among younger groups. The BBC is down from 71% of 16-24s in 2010 to 48% in 2018.

The Reuters Digital News Report is a must read if you’re interested in how the public is influenced by the media, and how media works.

Some highlights:

1. Facebook is still the dominant social media channel... ...However WhatsApp continues to grow as a news channel, especially in non-Western countries. A big challenge is that encrypted WhatsApp protects privacy & from abusive governments, but eases rumours and disinformation.

Ofcom’s Online Nation, out yesterday, is as useful as their other major reports.

Interesting findings include:

1.Even the over 75s are now mainly online. Only 13% of adults are offline now. 2. As many 3-4 year olds go online as 75+ year olds (52%)

3.There are still plenty of people who have only recently got online. So, for instance, 26% of people who are online don’t use email, 27% don’t browse.