It’s December and 2010 is within reach! We thought we’d provide some resources for life scientists and marketers. We’ve listed conferences on our calendar, be sure to bookmark it. Are we missing your favorite conference? Let us know and we’ll add it. Also, we’ve listed some uber life science event calendars, including the Cell Press calendar where you can let them know you’re attending and connect with others who’ll be there! Great idea. Below that, we’ve got listings for media kits for life science marketers. Again, let us know if we’re missing any information, and have fun planning for 2010!

Life Science Conferences

Here is our list of life science media kits. Marketers use them to plan their tactical schedules. Unfortunately, many are 2009 versions, and don’t list prices, but we’ve included contacts for you to get the most up to date information.

Life Science Media Kits & Contacts

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Once again inspired by Sally Church, I decided to look at the Comprendia Tweet Cloud. What is that, you ask? It is similar to a tag cloud, a visual representation of words used to ‘tag’ or describe a set of entries. For example, if you save bookmarks application Delicious, you tag each with a set of words (you could use ’social media, biotech, twitter’ for this link), and a tag cloud is representative of all of your bookmarks.

A Tweet Cloud looks at all of a user’s updates on Twitter and depicts the words used most frequently, the largest being shown in the largest font. Since a picture is worth a thousand words (pun intended) look at the image to the right (your eyes are probably already there, aren’t they?).

You can see what topics dominate my tweets, giving you a snapshot of my theme or ‘voice’ on Twitter. Why is this important? If you’re using social media for business, you need to have a clear objective and ensure that your tactics align. It’s OK to add some ‘personality’ to your accounts, and talk about other things from time to time, as this helps to engage your community (and is much more fun ;). You should use these types of analysis tools on your accounts from time to time to make sure you’re saying what you need to say.

Staying true to your objectives and brand are one part of what we call a Social Media Charter™ (SMC), a plan which can integrate nicely with your current marketing plans. Like a marketing plan, an SMC uses information gained from your customers, products, and competition to outline strategies and tactics to meet your objectives. A living document, the SMC provides guidance to all who participate in your social media activities, which is needed so that your tactics can be aligned and readjusted as necessary.

Learn more on our Social Media Capabilities page and check out our blog to learn more–you can see from our Tweet Cloud that we talk about these topics quite a bit.

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American Society for Cell Biology 49th Annual Meeting, December 5-9 2009, San Diego, California

Antibody Engineering and Immunotherapeutics for the 21st Century

December 6-10, 2009

Sheraton San Diego Hotel and Marina

San Diego, CA

[[Click here for more information.]]

December 8-10, 2009

Sheraton San Diego Hotel and Marina

San Diego, CA

[[Click here for more information.]]

You know I am one of social media’s biggest cheerleaders, especially for life science and biotech as I see enormous potential. However, when planning a social media (SM) campaign, there are some important things to remember about what it isn’t. This list is meant to help you plan and to sell SM to your organization by understanding ways that it differs from what we might expect.

1. Instant. Social media campaigns take time. If done correctly, the end result can be worth much more than what you’d get out of a traditional marketing campaign, but it’s not like flipping on a switch. Keep this in mind during planning, and and define clear objectives for the growth of your campaign, for example number of twitter followers or increase in web traffic. Of course, your ultimate objectives are likely to increase revenue, but these are good indicators that you’re on the right track.
2. A No Brainer. You don’t have to look far to see social media campaigns that have not gained traction or have reflected badly on the company that implemented them. There are myriad consultancies who will claim that ‘it will be as easy as setting up some accounts,’ but the truth is that there is a lot of planning that needs to go into a campaign. Like traditional marketing, and in order to integrate with your existing strategy and tactics, you must understand the customer, your product’s positioning, the competition, and the tools to succeed.
3. Your Mouthpiece. It is tempting to see a large LinkedIn group or a forum as a place where you can talk about yourself or your products…for free! However, if you are only using these venues for this purpose, it will soon become evident and the group members and moderator will tire (and may banish) you. What’s better? Create your own group and cultivate a community that cares about what you care about. Follow the 90/10 rule: spend 90% of the time helping, 10% promoting yourself–if people appreciate and respect you, they’ll listen to what you say. The absolute worst thing you can do in social media is to be labeled as a spammer or as only caring about yourself.
4. A Free Lunch. Along the same vein as the usage of ‘free’ advertising such as LinkedIn groups, there are some that think that Social Media is their way to market their product for free. Now, I do think there are lots of ways that you can save money using social media, but…you may remember someone telling you that there’s no such thing as a free lunch, and SM is no exception. Your costs will likely shift from print advertising to online, and from paying fees for broadcast-type Ads (banners, etc.) to strategies, tools, and perhaps consulting for building your campaign theme and implementing it correctly.
5. A Panacea. Social media does not defy the rules of marketing or common sense. If you have a product that your customers do not need, no amount of SM will help you. What’s great about it, though, is that you’ll receive more feedback than you have ever had before, and you’ll be able to turn this information into products that your customers need.

Sound complicated? The best way to understand it is to get your feet wet and start participating. If you’d like a free consultation, we can help you better understand how to succeed in the social media landscape that your life science or biotechnology company operates in.

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You may have talked with or met Rebecca Watson-Beattie by now, she’s done a great job reaching out to our clients and partners. With a background in business development, sales, marketing, and science, Rebecca is a perfect addition to our team. She understands the challenges biotechnology and life sciences companies face and shares our passion to help them launch and grow. Rebecca is very organized, focused, and pleasant, and we chose her because we think she’ll really help those who work with us to thrive. Check out Rebecca’s Bio for more information, and feel free to reach out to her.

Throughout my career I’ve had the need to either generate or find images to communicate science, and I actually enjoy it quite a bit. I thought it might be useful to others to provide a summary of resources. Finding and creating expressive images often inspires my blog writing, and it may help you as well. Besides helping you to illustrate your point, images get your posts recognized more easily on Facebook and other third party applications, and some blog themes work best if each post has an image.

Image Sources. Surprisingly, there are several good sources for very affordable (as little as $1), high quality images, see the table below for a listing. The easiest images to use are those which are royalty free which means you just pay one price for the image and can use it indefinitely in accordance with the guidelines provided on the site. Another option is to download images from sites such as Flickr which offer users a Creative Commons (CC) license. This license allows you to use the image for free as long as you credit the account that it came from–here is a nice example using and crediting Flickr images under the CC license. Use the advanced search on Flickr to limit your results to images with CC, and don’t use images that are marked ‘© All Rights Reserved’ as it’s illegal and bad karma.

Modifying Images. You may notice that some of the images I use for blog posts are specific to the subject, and this is done by adding text or other modifications. I’ve been using a free program called Gimp for about 10 years, and even though we have licenses and use Adobe products, I still rely on Gimp daily. It is similar to Adobe Photoshop, allowing you to create and manipulate different layers individually, a very powerful way to make custom images. It does have a steep learning curve, but it’s free and in my opinion the time spent learning it is worth it, especially if you’re on a budget. There are myriad tutorials online, just do a Google search. You should also learn about the different file types to understand how to work with them. Note: you need to save image files in the native format for the program to be able to keep the layers and change later–for Gimp this is the .xcf file.

What types of images should you use? That’s up to you, but it’s a good idea to stay consistent to reinforce the brand of your blog. On the Comprendia blog, we use simple images which have a level of abstractness–a single item or person. If possible, try to be consistent in where you place the images in posts to reinforce branding as well. We’ve summarized the list of resources below, and feel free to give us more ideas and we’ll add them.

Thanks to Holly Barnes of Eton Biosciences for sending me some of the resources for this post.

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I’ve been having some interesting conversations about reaching individuals and groups of people lately. It seems as though psychographics and timing has more of an impact these days as there are so many ways to communicate. With the holidays fast approaching, and the flurry of activity that will likely take place in January, I thought it would be good to start a discussion on the best ways to reach people. Here are some communication tips based on our experiences.

Reaching Individuals. We’ve likely all gotten anecdotal advice from people on reaching a person they know well: “Try emailing him, he’s always online and rarely checks his voicemail.” Of course, if you don’t know the person or anyone who knows them, you might want to try a few different forms of communication and try to make a judgment on how persistent you should be. You can always ask a person shortly after you connect what they prefer, and don’t be afraid to go out of your comfort zone and embrace other ways to connect.

Communicating to Groups. In some ways this is more difficult than before, in some ways it’s easier. Before, if you could get an article published in a major newspaper or magazine, you were good as gold. Today, however, with so many choices, this is still a coup but not necessarily the way to reach your target audience. Today, a more integrated campaign encompassing several different types of media will likely be needed. Also, as we’ve discussed, the best way to reach the thought leaders in your industry is to create a community for them. Once you have this group created, communicating is a breeze, but getting to that point takes time and lots of cultivation, and I suggest you get started soon!

Choosing the Right Timing. This is important to consider for anyone you’re trying to reach. Rebecca, our Business Development Manager, has mentioned that Friday afternoon is a great time to call someone you don’t know as people seem to be more open to talking. For ‘mass’ electronic communication, the rule of thumb is to schedule emails to arrive Tuesday or Wednesday morning, as people have sorted through weekend messages and have time to read new ones. Conversely, media and bloggers are very busy during the early parts of the week, so to reach them you should avoid these times as evidenced by this post describing how to reach Mashable, one of the hottest blogs for social media.

You should also realize that in this ‘brave new world’ of communicating, you need to choose your methods and messages carefully to ensure your communications stand out from the rest. What are the best ways you’ve found to reach people? Please leave a comment below!

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We’re really big WordPress fans here. It’s free, it’s powerful, and it’s popular, meaning that it is constantly improving. Like any free software, however, it doesn’t come with any formal support or guarantees, so keep that in mind when considering things like security and backups. We recommend using the fully featured version of WordPress that is self-hosted, because there is much more control and flexibility, but you can also set up a blog at wordpress.com if you don’t have the capabilities (note that you won’t be able to add all of the plugins below). We covered the basics of WordPress in an earlier post, and provided some resources to learn.

Below is our list of plugins that we automatically install or activate for our own blogs or our clients. They are all available in the full installation, and the newest versions (2.8+) allow you to search for and add them easily via the ‘Plugins->Add New’ feature on the left menu of the Admin panel. Check them out and contact us if you need more help:

1. Google XML Sitemaps. An important part of your blog is to make sure it has good search engine optimization (SEO). Google appreciates ‘help’ from you in knowing when there is new content on your blog, and this plugin will generate a sitemap and send it to Google periodically. This will help your SEO, so we highly recommend installing and configuring it.
2. All in One SEO Pack. This pack makes sure that your blog content is optimized for SEO. It needs to be configured, as well, and is by no means automatic, read the documentation and do as you are directed to improve your SEO–this may mean adding content to each blog post, but it’s worth it.
3. Redirection. This plugin is handy if you want to make ‘friendly’ or memorable URLs for blog posts that you’d like to promote. For example, for our monthly events with the San Diego Biotechnology Network, we make the URL ‘http://sdbn.org/december’ for the December event, etc. This makes it not only easy for our members, but for me in promoting it on Twitter, etc. If you foresee needing this capability, add this plugin.
4. Akismet. This plugin comes installed as default, and it helps enormously to weed out spam. However, there’s a confusing ‘activation’ that you need to do for this plugin. You need to get an account on wordpress.com to get a key to activate it. If you have a self-hosted blog, you’ll likely not need this account for other purposes, so it’s a bit confusing, but activation of the plugin is worth it, as otherwise your email will soon be flooded with either obscene or vague, flattering comments meant only to promote the person who posted it.
5. WP-DB-Backup. It is very important that you make frequent backups of your blog, and this plugin will do that for you. A few caveats–make sure that you set it up and that the backups are stored outside of your ISP. Also, take the time to do an extra check. Make sure that you know how to restore your blog from these backups, and document a procedure for doing so. If your blog is hacked, or goes down, the last thing you want is to have to figure out how to restore it while you’re stressed out that it’s down. It’s also possible that this backup plugin is not best for your system–if not, check around for others.
6. TweetMeme Button. In order to get your blog more exposure, you want to make it as easy as possible for people to share your content. The TweetMeme button allows people on Twitter to share your posts using the button on the top left of every post (including this one). More sharing means more readers, which is always good, and as we covered in a previous post, making things as easy as possible helps as well.
7. Sociable. Along this same vein, the Sociable plugin allows people to bookmark or share your content in a variety of ways. Configure it with the services you think your readers use, and the options will appear at the bottom of each post (including this one). There are even options for creating PDFs and printer-friendly versions of your blog posts, which can help your posts to have more ’spreadability.’
8. WordPress Related Posts. You want your readers to stay on your blog and read as much of your content as possible, right? Showing them related posts helps you with this. It’s pretty self-explanatory, check below for an example.
9. Twitter for WordPress. WordPress sites are by default dynamic, changing often, and this is essential for your website to be more ‘web 2.0′ and compete with other sites. A great way to show your readers that you’re active is to display your Twitter feed in your sidebar, as we do here.

That’s our list of essential plugins, and of course we use others depending on the situation, and we encourage you to browse the WordPress Plugins page for more ideas–they show popular plugins, which can help. Also, look at other blogs and pay attention to what ‘attracts’ you as a reader–chances are those features are a good bet on your blog as well.

Which plugins have you found to be ‘essential’? We’d love to hear, leave them below! The great thing about WordPress is sharing ideas and having all benefit from the collective knowledge.

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