Dear NASA: Half Of Humanity Does Not Do The Halloween Thing
Keith’s note: FWIW the @NASA Twitter account has 64.5 million followers. Other NASA accounts probably double that. While its fun to play with Twitter handles for Halloween etc (NASA Ghoul-dard for @NASAGoddard). Not everyone on Earth “gets it” (see map). Quick math shows the gray area = 3.7 billion out of a total of 7.7 billion people. In other words half of humanity. When you consider the NASA brand’s global reach and overall impact maybe this is not as effective as PR people think. Yes, yes, yes, NASA is an American space agency. But its influence is planetary. Soft power projection does not always happen the way you think it does. But since they are all asleep at NASA OIIR, who cares, I guess. Just a thought. Probably not all that important.
3 responses to “Dear NASA: Half Of Humanity Does Not Do The Halloween Thing”
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And a substantial portion of those who do get Halloween consider such superficial silliness…well, silly and painfully childish (and far from the more noble child-like).
It is certainly a shame that any of PAO’s (or anyone’s at NASA tasked with public connection) time or effort is wasted thusly instead of being put fully toward dynamic & coherent engagement of those outside NASA via effective telling of the authentic and interesting stories actually happening inside NASA.
Having lived for a time in the large country at the upper right of this map, I can say that Halloween is not really celebrated. In fact, it’s very fringe and is looked down upon as being some combination of Western decadence and moral corruption and I suspect that the same is true elsewhere. For a significant part of NASA’s audience, around the world and at home, the ‘Ghoul-dard” stuff is not simply odd, but off-putting and even offensive.
It is an odd move to embrace Halloween yet they have ignored other events that could have been a good use of their soft power. Guess they are trying to stay hip.