Want to know what life science marketers are doing about social media and how you can keep up? Take our short survey and be the first to get the report in a few weeks:

http://bit.ly/lifescismsurvey

Note that it is intended for people involved in the marketing and sales of non-FDA regulated products (e.g., products sold to the research market).

Contact us with any questions and feel free to distribute to your marketing, BD, management or sales colleagues (functions vary due to size of company).

Recently there were rumors that the social bookmarking site Delicious, owned by Yahoo!, was being shuttered, the final story is not in but the latest post from Mashable indicates it will go under. It made me think about something I’ve been wanting to do for a long time. We’ve built Comprendia and the San Diego Biotechnology Network with the help of some great free or cheap tools. Here we list the best software and services and will, where appropriate, make contributions to them as we think it’s a good strategy to support them to ensure that they’re around for our business.

1. WordPress. If we didn’t care so much about style, we’d put this item in font 48, and we can because our website is built on this powerful, versatile, and free platform. In 2008 creating a company website solely from WordPress was a bit of a novelty, but we went for it and there’s no looking back, and we created the SDBN and OCBN sites using this content management system (CMS). WordPress is a frequent topic here on our site and we hope that the posts are helpful. WordPress is completely open source and you can donate to the WordPress foundation to help with development and education.
2. Gimp. I’ve been using Gimp, a free image editing program, for more than 10 years. It has many of the features of Adobe Photoshop that a non-professional needs and runs on most operating systems. There is a bit of a learning curve, but as with most free software there is excellent documentation and ‘howtos’ on the web. It’s definitely worth taking the time to learn. We make all of the images for the blog and the biotech networks using it, check out our guide for finding and adapting your own. Learn how to contribute to gimp here.
3. LinkedIn. We’re a big fan of LinkedIn for many reasons, you can read our past posts which may be helpful to you. We’ve created networks which connect thousands of biotech professionals and are used to effectively communicate events which strengthen relationships. Of course, LinkedIn is a business, and much of it is free, but we’ll support it in 2011 by having a Pro account. We are also in continual discussions with their product management team regarding group features, etc. which we hope will help their business model.
4. Google. By most accounts Google doesn’t need donations or PR from us, but we think it is worth a mention as a great tool for small businesses. You name it, they’ve got it: web analytics and advertising, shared documents, calendars, and sites, and corporate email. They’re not going anywhere anytime soon, so we think they’re a safe bet for your business–check out all their applications here.

5. WordPress Plugins. We’ve given you our list of essential WordPress plugins, which extend the functionality of our websites greatly, and there are a few we will donate to because they’ve helped us so much. One is cforms, which power all of our forms on the websites, from registration for events to questionnaires. It’s easy to use and you can even run your own polls. Another great plugin that we use, mostly on the biotech networks, is FeedWordPress. We use it to pull news from sites and feed it to both the blogs and Twitter (with help from an app called TwitterFeed, but they are not taking donations). Another great plugin is Redirection, which helps us make the ‘friendly’ or simplified URLs we can promote easily (and we use Bitly sometimes as well, which is external to WordPress).
6. Yahoo! We would be remiss to not mention Yahoo, the purportedly struggling company that is the inspiration for this post. It is of course a business, and perhaps you could argue that being charitable towards a business does not help them. However, the alternative is to continually replace these services with startups that come and go–you decide what’s best for your business. From the mail I use personally to Yahoo Pipes for RSS feed filtering to Site Explorer which helps with SEO to Delicious bookmarks for sharing and research to Flickr which we use for image storing and search, Yahoo has many applications which deserve our support.

Several of the free applications we mentioned here are made possible by the GNU Public License, a project which supports software developers and end users, accounting for more than 60% of the free software on popular download sites. You can contribute to GNU and the Free Software Foundation’s high priority projects if you want to help (and it’s cool to see what’s there).

We are thankful to these developers and communities who have helped us grow our business, and I actually became aware of them when I was working as an X-ray crystallographer many moons ago. Coincidentally while writing this post I got a message from Michael Chelen, a bioinformatician who wants to help me with some RSS manipulation–we continue to communicate with developers and help them when we can. The timing is good for monetary donations to your favorite tools, as you can write them off for your 2010 taxes.

Which free software applications would you deem worthy of donations and why?

To share this post cut and paste: Paying It Forward: Supporting The Best Free Small Business Tools We’ve Found http://bit.ly/f6kfsS

Are you a life scientist or marketer planning for 2011? Below, we list resources for you, including a Google calendar which you can add to yours with reminders for major conferences and their due dates for abstracts, etc. We’ve also included editorial calendars and media kits for traditional publications. We’d also like to help marketers learn how to support ’2.0′ publications like blogs and wikis, and we’re working on that, stay tuned!

Life Science Conferences

Here is our list of life science media kits and editorial calendars. Marketers use them to plan their tactical schedules.

Life Science Media Kits, Editorial Calendars & Contacts

To share this post easily cut and paste: Everything You Need For 2011 Life Science Planning http://bit.ly/lifesciplanning

Thanks for your support in 2010 and we hope to see more of you in 2011!

Mary Canady & Rebecca Watson-Beattie
Comprendia & San Diego Biotechnology Network

(Image created using Tagxedo and it’s a word cloud from the content of our blog. Clicking on each word searches our website for the term! We love word clouds…)

Here is our latest collection of links and tips for life science marketing and social media:

1. Social Media Tools Feed.

   Our 4th Social Media for Life Science and Biotechnology Workshop went well this week (it will be available as a webinar soon, check out the training page for updates), and we’re ready to start again next year with the series. We’ll also be rolling out some new tools and resources for you soon, to whet your appetite, check out our social media tools RSS feed which you can subscribe to by email. The only constant in social media is change, so keeping apprised of the best tools will help you to keep on top.

2. Holiday Gift Cards Benefiting Science Students.

   Our friends in the Bay area have a great idea–send holiday e-cards that benefit California students! Check it out, it looks easy, or consider making a donation to your favorite charity in lieu of sending printed cards or gifts.

3. On Literature Becoming More Social.

   Several items have surfaced recently about life science research publications becoming more social, such as a review of paper sharing application Mendeley and a new app called Annotatr which allows scientists to comment on papers. I bring these up to life science marketers because they present a great opportunity to learn about trends and to get involved in discussions around their brand (carefully). We’ll continue to stay attuned to the developments and let you know what apps and tools are the most useful.

4. Creating a Social Media Policy For Your Company.

   Short interview with IBM’s VP Harriett Pearson, discussing IBM’s publicly available social media policy in general terms. We know this is a big area of concern for life science marketers, and the document may help you with your 2011 planning.

5. Social Business Forecast: 2011 The Year of Integration.

   Fantastic presentation from Jeremiah Owyang about how companies will plan their social media strategies in 2011, obviously also good for planning your next year.

The soundbytes tag on Delicious contains all links mentioned, as well as others we think are useful. Sign up for Comprendia blog email updates to get our mix tapes delivered to your inbox.
To share this post easily, cut and paste: Sound Bytes: Links and Tips For Life Science Marketing & Social Media 12/10/2010 http://bit.ly/soundbytes1210