Comments on: Calculating ROI for Social Media in Life Science

By: Kristy Meyer

Kristy Meyer — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 23:15:36 +0000

The blog is great. This is all something we are developing at Sigma. Our entire organization is excited by the possibilities that social media opens up for us in communicating with scientists.

Thanks to Isaac for taking a look at the Sigma Aldrich Facebook fan page and using it as an example. In this, we have established a presence on Facebook…but we also have more targeted activities. (check out our Facebook app at http://apps.facebook.com/yourfavoritegene
Note: It does notify all your friends when you add, but that will be fixed in about a week).

We are working through tests, and having success and finding scientists receptive in the social environment as long as we abide by the appropriate codes of conduct.

Scientists are highly discerning customers, so we are working slowly to ensure our social media communications don’t become something else to ignore and filter out as noise. :-).

Feel free to talk with me more directly one Twitter @kristy3m.

By: Isaac Mehl

Isaac Mehl — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 19:38:58 +0000

Probably one of the reasons social media has such a bad rap is that the analytics are so good. This allows a casual observer (not to mention your boss) to ask hard questions.

For example, how much did Agilent spend on this video for their 2100 bioanalyzer:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bu4bGb85SGI
and received only 219 views. How many of those views turned to leads and how many of those leads turned to sales?

Or we can look at something like a facebook fan-page from Sigma Aldrich. They put out this news feed on 011310 about their mobile website:
http://bit.ly/info/4xnvNL
This produced 49 “clicks”. On average their facebook wall posts produce between 20-50 clicks a month. Is this generating targeted leads? Is it contributing to branding? Is it leading to more frequent customer reach and reducing costs?

Finally, let’s examine a public forum by a local San Diego company:
http://www.stemgent.com/forum/list.php?3
They have 4 subjects with 9 posts total over 2 years. Is this leading to better SEO??

Are these all just examples of biotech doing social media badly? Are there some good case studies of social media being implemented effectively in the life sciences?

By: Mary Canady

Mary Canady — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 15:43:29 +0000

I would say these items are no less ‘soft’ than the intangible benefits that companies get from traditional marketing activities such as exhibiting conferences or running print ads, which both contribute to their branding. If you ask a company what the ROI on their last marketing tactic was, they’ll likely not know. They do them because they understand them and don’t need to analyze all the metrics. Right now, there is, I think, a somewhat unreasonable ‘microscope’ being placed on ROI for social media because it is seen as being new.

So, to answer your question, these soft returns are hard to measure and categorize, but I don’t think companies should be so preoccupied with doing so, especially since social media gives them so many more ways to quantitate and understand customers. For example, a customer who leaves a comment on a blog gives them much more information than a customer who visits their old ’1.0′ website.

The key is to ensure that social media campaigns are designed and aligned to meet the companies’ objectives, so that the metrics are meaningful. For example, having 1000 twitter followers who are following you because you’re talking about celebrities is obviously no good. Several life science companies are starting to leverage social media, examples can be seen at http://sdbn.org/sms

By: Adeline

Adeline — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 00:58:30 +0000

What are your thoughts on Hard Returns vs Soft Returns in ROI measurements of social media tools, esp blogs? Do you think there is a clear classification as to what falls in the hard and soft categories? Eg. Measuring ‘engagement’ (as a soft return) – how do you measure something as intangible as that? Surely through say, # of comments, or readers subscribed to the blog (which falls in ‘hard returns’)…. How do you reason that?