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So we’re midway through cybersecurity awareness month.\u00a0 Yay!\u00a0 Are you aware yet?\u00a0 Good for you.<\/p>\nSo we’re midway through cybersecurity awareness month.\u00a0 Yay!\u00a0 Are you aware yet?\u00a0 Good for you.<\/p>\n
This morning, I came across an article on the marketing-focused publication “adage” (see what they did there?\u00a0 It’s clever because it’s both “Ad Age” and also “adage” as in short proverb) entitled “Why CMOs Need to Become Cybersecurity Experts.”\u00a0\u00a0<\/a>I don’t typically read “AdAge” — this one showed up in my feedly filter because of their liberal use of the term “cybersecurity”.<\/p>\n Now, you might sense that I’m winding up to complain about it, having adroitly noticed me crawling forth from my “internet hole” this article in hand.\u00a0 You’re right of course, but let me start with the fact that I don’t hate the content here.\u00a0 It’s basically a thought piece from Carbonite’s chief marketing guru about why Equifax is a wake up call for marketing professionals.\u00a0 It goes on to cite the brand implications of a breach using Equifax as an example, cite the role of crisis management for marketers, and explain why marketing professionals should support security goals for the organizations they work in.\u00a0 For the record, I love that message.\u00a0 And it’s expressed in a lucid, articulate way without relying on FUD.\u00a0 Also fantastic.\u00a0 So gogo that guy.<\/p>\n What irritates me about this is the title.\u00a0 Because “giving a crap” != “expert.”\u00a0 Saying they are equivalent is dangerous.\u00a0 For example, I “give a crap” about climate change; I am not an expert in it.\u00a0 \u00a0I can tell you why I think climate change is important to society generally, and to me specifically (living, as I do, close to the ocean.) Likewise, I have a layman’s understanding of the forces involved in climate change: the trends at work, the general contours of the research, policy considerations, and the like.\u00a0 But am I a “climate change expert”?\u00a0 No.\u00a0 I am not a geologist, meteorologist, hydrodynamics engineer, physicist, etc. etc.\u00a0 I’m likewise not a policy expert.\u00a0 See? Interested, not an expert.<\/p>\n Why does this matter? It’s just a title, right?\u00a0 But stay with me on this.\u00a0 There are a few things here.\u00a0 First, people listen to experts.\u00a0 They listen to them in a way that they don’t to the average Joe.\u00a0 We know (for example, from the Milgram experiment<\/a>) that people are more likely to comply with authority figures.\u00a0 If someone is perceived as an “expert”, others will tend to give them more credence, defer to their judgement, even to the extent that doing so causes injury or harm.\u00a0 Scary, right?\u00a0 I think so too.\u00a0\u00a0To the extent that we reinforce the message that “being an expert” means “caring about the topic”, we set up the situation where some people – maybe intending no harm to others – can cause damage because their definition of expert doesn’t include actually understanding the topic in detail.\u00a0 They can cause that damage because others perceiving them as an expert will tend to defer to their judgement.\u00a0 When the person they are deferring to is someone who is equipped to help, that’s great – when it’s someone who is a specialist in something else (but has decided they really care about the topic but don’t really know anything about it), that’s not so good.<\/p>\n