Articles

In early scholarship on radicalization, sociologists and psychologists considered environmental issues such as poverty or oppression as motivating factors. This research posits an alternative view. Though background factors, such as economics, religiosity, and religious training, as well as issues that are of an emotional nature, were important, none showed significant influence in radicalization. But when the populations were evaluated on Webster & Kruglanski’s (1994) “need for closure” metrics, the two populations showed distinct differences. In other words, psychology and personality interacted with endogenous factors to motivate or “pull” someone to seek information to resolve cognitive consternation and are thus radicalized.

Recently I had dinner with the author of book Hooked. The premise of Hooked is people can be addicted to media and thus can become a source of riches for new dotcom entrepreneurs who have some cool idea.

In the persona article I mentioned shamed based media strategy. Recently I was in a couple of meetings where people asked me to unpack this a bit more.

Recently I was reading an article in a journal about terrorism that referenced research that reported that one in three ISIS and Al Qaeda members is a technologist. While I was in conversations with researchers with Homeland Security, they observed that Al Qaeda is best understood as a media driven ideological movement.

In the article on measuring intention, I introduced the idea of Stages, Steps and Processes in a media strategy. This is not unique to me; communications experts like Engel (Engel scale), Soggard, and others have developed models that highlight stages of conversion.

Recently I was meeting with a troubleshooter for one of the top financial institutions in the world. I’ll call him Bill. Bill’s job is to go into departments that were in “in trouble” and to help them sort out the issues that led to their demise. In the course of the conversation, Bill revealed an insight that I think is useful for us.

This article I want to pick up from our discussion about people who are in the conversion process who are gradually shifting from passive to active seekers.

We discussed the last article about information processing and conversion pathways of seekers. Over the next couple of articles we will build toward an understanding of lead scoring, and I felt it would be good to summarize the conversation that I had with the North Africa team.

Earlier we discussed that true conversion involves identity change. When people just “add Jesus” to their current belief system, then it is questionable as to whether conversion really occurred.

Since media is often consumed in a group setting (the third Little W – context), over the next couple of articles I would like to discuss groups more in-depth. People watch YouTube in groups, listen to the radio in groups, and they discuss with others information they have heard or read about.

Recently, a media ministry leader was telling me about a project that his group did where they used a persona that was related to dreams and visions. I was familiar with the project since I conducted the training with the team on how to use persona and key words in a strategy. Essentially he felt this persona approach did not yield a measurable increase in respondents to their media initiative. I would agree with him that that the “dreams” persona may have not been as a fruitful approach as it could have been, but my understanding of the team’s goal was to start somewhere and then learn from the outcome.

Over the last week I have been in meetings with team members who are involved in a media strategy in Southeast Asia. One of the meetings was with a media partner who are seeking to develop their persona grid that would help them in strategic planning. They started with four descriptors of persona: spiritual, relationships, finance, and lifestyle. Next they identified two categories of these descriptors: unfriendly and interested. This gave them a Persona grid of eight possibilities. Then they brainstormed on key words that related to the descriptors and categories.