Arati Mejdal

It’s a great time for statisticians. The International Year of Statistics was last year. This year, the first-ever Women in Statistics Conference took place in North Carolina. Authors such as Nate Silver, Malcolm Gladwell, Steven Levitt, and Stephen Dubner have made quantitative analysis cool and accessible to a wide audience. Plus, everyone knows that statistician is the sexy job, according to Google economist Hal Varian.

So, you brilliant, sexy, cool statisticians: I urge you to get involved in social media (or step up your game). Social media offers an efficient, powerful way to take part in the multitude of conversations already going on about statistics—and an opportunity to boost your career.

Why Social Media Is Worthwhile

Social media is powerful. First, you can gain access to people you would have had difficulty contacting previously. Of course, sometimes, those people have someone else tweeting or posting for them. But in many cases, it’s the actual scientist, actress, politician, author, musician, or activist who is tweeting or blogging. You can tweet to that person or leave a comment on a blog post, and actually reach the right person. That is exciting!

It’s also exciting that the person can reply to you.

You can actually have a conversation, a two-way communication exchange. This is not the experience of visiting a web page and just reading its content, which is largely one-way, though there’s a need for it. Communication with the ability to respond meaningfully—to ask questions, offer suggestions, share your knowledge, explore an idea together—is also important.

Social media can also humanize organizations, such as the software company I work for, SAS, and fields that may be perceived as confusing or scary, such as statistics. People write statistical software. People teach, apply, and develop the field of statistics. When those people reach out and share useful information in an authentic way with a human face and voice, they can dispel myths and build warm connections—and maybe even gain fans and affect change.

Using social media, you can easily take part in the marketplace of ideas—the concept that people are better off when ideas and information are freely available and exchanged because the best ideas will prevail. It used to be much harder to participate in the marketplace of ideas. You had to have access to a broadcast station (and license), printing press, and other such expensive equipment. Or you had to write a book or work for a magazine, newspaper, or the like. But technology has made participation much easier. You can take a picture on your mobile phone and post it with your commentary in mere seconds.

In the marketplace of ideas, statistics is a topic of discussion. People have illustrated concepts like correlation and variance through dance and posted videos of the performances on YouTube. Others have uploaded slide decks outlining the basics of probability to SlideShare. There’s a group devoted to discussions on data mining, statistics, Big Data, and data visualization on LinkedIn. Users have shared pictures of normal curves on Instagram. Pinterest includes pins showing interesting graphs and lessons for teaching statistics hands-on. Twitter is littered with tweets using such hashtags as #statistics, #dataviz, #analytics, and #dataanalysis. The conversations are happening.

Why Statisticians Participate

In preparation for my talk at the conference, I sought out statisticians and others who work in analytics, data analysis, and data visualization who are also active in social media. I interviewed several of them by email and asked them why they use social media and what has worked for them. One of the primary reasons they are involved is to find others with similar interests in statistics.

Melinda Thielbar, a statistician who develops JMP software at my company, has been blogging since 2006 and tweeting since 2009.

“There are people I’ve met through Twitter especially who have turned out to be great friends and colleagues. Seeing what people post on social media and write in their blogs can be a great way to find common interests,” she said. Thielbar advises against worrying about the number of reposts, views, tweets, or retweets you get as you blog and tweet. “Focus on sharing in a way that you’d find appealing, and the right people will find you,” she advised.

Social media is a powerful way to make connections with key people who can help with your projects and career. Emma Pierson, who is a statistician at 23andme, writes a blog called Obsession with Regression. She published a widely read and shared article on FiveThirtyEight.com (Nate Silver’s website that publishes data-driven articles) that analyzed data from online dating sites eHarmony and OKCupid. “Being able to talk to eHarmony and OKCupid scientists helped me a lot with the FiveThirtyEight piece, and I wouldn’t have done that had I not made friends with a New York Times columnist who put me in touch with them,” she said. The article in FiveThirtyEight brought a lot more traffic to her blog.

A third reason is essential self-promotion. Jessica Schillinger tweets on the subject of infographics and data visualization and promotes her work for Pew Research. This also sends visitors to her website, which features her portfolio of designs of infographics, maps, and other data visualizations. It isn’t enough to have a website or blog and hope people will find you or your work.

Similarly, AnnMaria De Mars uses social media to gain attention for The Julia Group, a company that creates online training in statistics and mathematics. A statistician and programmer, she blogs, tweets, posts on Facebook, and maintains a presence on LinkedIn. Her blogging has led to invitations to speak at conferences, which helps her spread the word about some of the grant-supported projects she has completed. She gets 1.3 million visits a year to her blog, simply called AnnMaria’s Blog.

De Mars started her blog as a personal way to help herself remember solutions to statistical and programming problems she had solved and to have access to the solutions as she traveled. It turned out that the information she posted also was helpful to others, who became regular readers. The readers, in turn, helped De Mars when she ran a $20,000 Kickstarter fundraising campaign to support an educational game project. “Over half of the backers came from my blog readers. In part because I was able to demonstrate commercial potential, I received a $450,000 USDA Small Business Innovation Research award. Paying it forward in the community using social media can result in being paid back in unexpected ways,” she said.

Andrew Gelman blogs, in part, because he hopes to influence the field of statistics. Gelman is a professor of statistics and political science at Columbia University who writes a popular blog called Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science. “Blogging is a way for me to spread the word about research that I like: my research and that of others, too. In that way, I hope it helps to steer statistics in a useful way. I like to think of the blog as a source of ‘water cooler conversations,’ as we used to say,” he said.

Gelman said blogging helps him improve his work. “I often learn useful things from blog comments in two ways. First, blog commenters point me to ideas and literature that I had not been aware of. Second, when commenters are confused, I realize that I have not communicated well. It’s good to get feedback from one’s audience,” He explained.

Blogging works for Gelman because he can produce posts and respond to comments on his own schedule, and he is able to reach a wider audience with his ideas. “I used to send people long emails; now I write the equivalent as blogs, and more people read it. Even if your blog or Twitter feed has only 10 regular readers, that’s still more people than would read your emails,” he observed.

Statistician Kaiser Fung enjoys writing, and he started his widely read blog, Junk Charts, nearly 10 years ago to encourage himself to write regularly. “It turned out there is a healthy audience for the kinds of things I write about, and I have continued since. It certainly has helped me build a reputation at very little cost,” he said.

Fung was able to develop some of the topics he explored in his blog for inclusion in his books, Numbersense and Numbers Rule Your World. After publication, he promoted his books via his blog. He tweets to take part in conversations about statistics and data visualization and to help get the word out about his work.

But Fung warned that blogging and tweeting should be driven by solid content. “Anyone can blog or tweet, but only a small group has an audience. Do you have anything interesting to say? And is there an audience for that subject matter?” he queried.

Here are a few tips if you decide to blog:

• Let the tone of your writing be expert, but friendly. It’s not academic writing.
• Allow your voice (or personality) to come through the writing.
• Read similar blogs and comment on them. Understand what others are writing about.
• Post regularly. That’s how you build a following.
• Offer to write a guest blog post for a blogger you know well. Likewise, offer your blog to others you like and trust to write a guest post.
• Post your blog on statistical blog sites like StatsBlogs (statsblogs.com).
• Promote your blog posts via Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Google.
• Try to get your research published on sites like FiveThirtyEight (fivethirtyeight.com) that embrace data-driven storytelling (which will then refer readers to your blog).

One of the best things about social media is you become part of a community that will help you in many ways—by telling friends and colleagues about your blog, supporting fundraising for a project you care about, sharing the results of your research, contacting you about a job, inviting you to speak at a conference, or just helping you learn more so you can do your work better. So, don’t wait. Add your voice. Share your expertise. Find people who care about what you care about. Get a book deal. Steer the field of statistics. Help us understand the world.

Further Reading

Lohr, Steve. 2009. For today’s graduate, just one word: Statistics. The New York Times

Pierson, Emma. 2014. In the end, people may really just want to date themselves. FiveThirtyEight

About the Author

Arati Mejdal is the global social media manager for the JMP division of SAS. She helps raise awareness of JMP statistical discovery software, answers users’ questions, and helps customers improve their JMP skills. She manages the JMP blog and all official social media presences for JMP. She also works with colleagues, helping them make the most of social media use. Mejdal has a PhD from The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She used to be a journalist and professor of mass communication. These days, she spends a lot of time on her mobile devices.

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