If you’ve been reading this blog, you know we’re crazy about word clouds, a way to visualize text data that is mostly associated with social media content such as in blogs. However, they are also being utilized in other areas, and were even featured on a recent cover of Science magazine. As part of our new Social Media Toolbox series, we’ll show you how to use word clouds to understand how your life science company is found and perceived by your customers through search engines.

Why do this? You of course know what your best selling products are. Do the needs or ‘pains’ these products meet align with the top searches that customers, or even non-customers, use to find your website? We did the below exercise with our partner site, the San Diego Biotechnology Network (SDBN), and made some useful observations. Below, we list the steps to create Google Analytics keywords word clouds, and show what can be learned.

1. You will need to install Google Analytics (it’s free) and have at least six months of data to do this.
2. Log in to Google Analytics and choose “Traffic Sources->Keywords” on the left menu.
3. Choose a six month period using the calendar menu at the top right.
4. Using the “Show Rows” menu at the bottom right, choose 250 rows.
5. Go back to the top and click on the “Export” button at the top left (just above the word “Keywords” above the chart). Click on “CSV for Excel” and download.
6. The Excel spreadsheet will contain your keywords (scroll down to see) in the first column, with the number of searches in the second. The first word cloud we’ll make will use the number of searches as a factor to determine the size of the words.
7. In Excel, create a column between 1 and 2 and fill each cell of the top 50 rows with “:”. This will allow us to cut and paste into Wordle with a “:” separating the words and their weight, a format it requires.
8. Open up Wordle in your web browser and choose the “advanced” tab. From Excel, copy rows 1-3 for the 50 top keywords into the top entry blank of wordle. The first few lines of our paste looks like this:

   sdbn    :    700
   san diego biotech companies list    :    477
   biotech companies in san diego    :    391

   The resulting word cloud is below (click to enlarge).
   
   From this cloud, we learned that the directory of San Diego Biotech Companies is one of the major reasons people visit the site. The weighting helps us to understand this well, as most other searches are dwarfed.

9. The above cloud considers the phrases people use to search, and is useful, but we also wanted to dissect the searches further and look at what words people use to search, taking advantage of analyzing the so-called “long tail.” For the next cloud, we did some trial and error and found that using the top 250 search terms worked best. Since we thought ahead and asked you to download these already, go back to your spreadsheet and copy and paste the 250 cells from column 1.
10. We used a program called Tagxedo to create our “long tail” word cloud, as it has more options. Here, you can play around with the maximum number of words in the cloud, and we won’t give you the options we used as it will vary. This is a very subjective process, so feel free to massage the data (it’s OK!) to look for trends. Our long tail word cloud is below (click to enlarge).
    From this cloud, we learned that the word “biotech” is used much more frequently in Google searches than the word “biotechnology,” and that networking is very important. These two insights would have been lost if we hadn’t done the long tail word cloud.

With just a few steps with these free tools, we’ve come up with some strategic and tactical actionable items for the SDBN from the Google Analytics word clouds:

1. Build upon the biotech company directory. Consider ways to get more ROI and/or leads out of this resource.
2. Choose the term “biotech” in web content over “biotechnology,” but include both.
3. Ensure that SDBN events provide plenty of networking.

The SDBN website is relatively simple with few products, so we analyzed the whole site, but Google Analytics has many ways you can slice and dice the data to meet your needs. You can also set up conversions to see which search terms are leading to sales. Do the word clouds for your brand, or product line, match what you expected? Your products may meet a customer ‘pain’ that you did not know about. Of course, the content on your site must provide ‘clues’ to the issues, one of the reasons we promote thinking about customer pain on a broader level. Word clouds are also great for sharing what you’ve learned with your group or the management.

This post is the first in our Social Media Toolbox series, and we also cover Google and other applications in our Workshops and Training. Sign up for email updates so you won’t miss any of our tips and tricks.

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A recent survey of life science marketers found that 52% plan to increase their level of new and social media advertising in 2011. The study, conducted by life science consulting firm Comprendia LLC, was comprised of thirty-three respondents working in the non-FDA regulated sector, dealing with products for research use only. When asked which social media applications were most utilized, Twitter and Facebook were the top results, with 58% and 39% using them daily or one or two times a week, respectively. Respondents indicated that social media monitoring is also prevalent, with more than 60% indicating they track mentions of their brand on social networks. The long term effects of these trends are unclear, but it is possible that increased interaction between these life science companies, their customers, and independent science communicators portends the development of better products and increased progress in biotechnology research.

These results indicate a shift from traditional, broadcast marketing such as print advertisements and even online banners to new, more engaging methods such as social networks and blogs. Are life science marketers fully ready for this drastic change, which involves much more engagement with their scientific customers? When asked how they’d create the additional content needed for new and social media, 67% of life science marketers indicated that their existing staff would allocate time. Anticipating this unreasonable expectation, respondents were also asked about partnering with existing websites such as science blog aggregators. Initial interest in collaborating with existing entities was low, but respondents indicated a willingness to work with web 2.0 sites such as Benchfly, LabSpaces, Science 3.0 and Scientopia, and events such as ScienceOnline.

The results of the survey were presented at the ScienceOnline 2011 conference in January, where several involved in the ‘science 2.0’ movement expressed interest in working with life science companies. These blogs and sites are filling an important niche as scientific content is becoming scarce on traditional sources such as newspapers. Some bloggers expressed concern with corporate content intermingling with their own, an issue that does not exist with traditional media where distinctions between editorial and advertising content are usually clear. However, ideas for creating new boundaries emerged from discussions at the conference, and all of the findings from the meeting and this report can be found at http://comprendia.com/lifesciencesm Support from life science companies could bolster the independent science entities, resulting in more scientific information being disseminated to the general public via these routes. Company representatives, bloggers, or writers who are interested in participating should fill out this form.

Mary Canady, Founder of Comprendia, said “Life science companies appear eager to embrace social media, and it is clear that forming close partnerships with independent science entities such as blogging networks and open science conferences are necessary. New advertising models that will meet the companies’ needs while not sacrificing the integrity of the science communicators will result in a collaborative environment benefiting all involved.”

Comprendia is a California-based LLC which develops social media marketing plans for life science and biotechnology companies. Comprendia is actively implementing related strategies and tactics in a variety of projects and also provides monthly life science social media workshops and customized training. Based on the results of the survey, we’ll begin with a Twitter Workshop March 10th.

Twitter is perhaps the best application for life science companies to use to get started with social media, and based on our 2011 poll of life science marketers it is the application you are most interested in. Join us for this 2.5 hour webinar which will answer the following questions:

• How can I effectively use Twitter to grow my company’s brand?
• How do I find and engage with influencers and life scientists who will help me reach my goals?
• How do I find my company’s messaging and voice, and how can I easily find content that matches?
• Which tools will save me the most time?
• How do I track the return on investment (ROI) for Twitter?
• Why is etiquette so important for the life science community on Twitter, and how do I fit in?

The workshop is offered online March 10th, and will be available for on demand viewing after this date. All participants will received a printed booklet, and registrations must be received by March 4th. Cost is $275 per individual and $500 for groups of 2-4. Contact us for pricing of larger groups and visit our life science social media training page for information about other workshops.

Note: our workshops are intended for marketing and business development professionals in life science and biotechnology who do not manage FDA regulated products.

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Social bookmarking applications allow you to save and share information from the web and their utilization might appear useful for personal, not professional reasons. However, the more we depend on information on websites and social networks for our work, the more these sites have to offer us. Here are eight ways you can use social bookmarking applications to organize and share information for your life science business.

1. Use Delicious to organize bookmarks as a linkable resource.

   If you read this blog or have attended our workshops, you know that we tag links on Delicious, one of the most popular social bookmarking sites, to help our clients and readers learn and refer to web content we think is useful. For example, the ‘soundbytes‘ tag contains links from our blog series of the same name. Similarly, you could save, tag, and provide links to your customers for internal or external content. Beware, however, that links will be visible to others unless you make each private. Most of the tools mentioned here have browser plugins and smart phone applications, making it easy to save, tag, and comment whenever you find a link.

2. Use Diigo to send collections of links to colleagues.

   You can consider Diigo to be a less popular (for now) but more fully featured social bookmarking site compared to Delicious. What I like about Diigo is that it has a better interface for organizing and commenting on bookmarks; I use the Firefox toolbar. You can create a report including a group of links and the comments you’ve stored for each, resulting in a private document you can share discreetly. For example, you could use it to document your competitors for a product, each link containing comments regarding the competing products’ strengths and weaknesses compared to your product. Again, make sure sensitive links and collections are private, and have your IT group double check if you are unsure.

3. Use Delicious to find influencers in your field.

   What Delicious may lack in its user interface, it makes up for in its popularity. With so many users tagging links they deem important, you can find the top websites in life science and thus the influencers. Check out the results for searching for tags ‘genome and blog.’ Unfortunately, due to Delicious’ poor interface, the results aren’t sorted by popularity unless you install this script. Now, general social media guidelines will tell you that you’ll also be able to use Technorati and Digg to find the top sites, but I’ve found them to be less effective for life science, as they ‘force’ content into categories that are too broad for our industry.

4. Submit news items or blog posts to StumbleUpon.

   You can use social bookmarking applications to help your own web content get noticed. Most experts will tell you that these self-created back links won’t do anything for your search engine optimization (SEO). However, anecdotally I’ve heard that StumbleUpon ‘works’ better for SEO than the other social bookmarking sites, and who knows, maybe your content will get noticed and go viral!

5. Keep social media content consistent and documented using Friendfeed.

   When a company embarks on social media, one of the challenges is keeping track of the content that has been created. Besides keeping an eye on the messaging and voice, there is knowledge gained by those who implement it, such as lists of the best resources in your field, top influencers and success with so-called ‘relationship marketing.’ You can use many applications to track social media content, we suggest Friendfeed as an aggregator of your content, but you could also use RSS or even services such as Packratius to capture all of the links you share on Twitter. You could also create an internal Diigo account for the social media team to document top resources you’ve found. One caveat is that nobody knows how stable these companies are, so ask your IT group about backing up the information periodically.

6. Use Springpad to organize trips, receipts, and leads.

   Springpad not only stores links, but images and lists as well. I’ve used it to take pictures of receipts and to organize information for a trip in one place to easily refer to on my Droid. It’s infinitely customizable, which I find daunting, but colleague Sally Church has used this to her advantage and created a nice system for organizing scientific, company, and customer information for her pharma consulting business.

7. Use Storify to show your company’s portfolio.

   Storify allows you to string embedded websites or online activities such as tweets together with captions into a story (hence the name), as we’ve done for the Comprendia online portfolio. Since we have our own blog, we could also do it here, but it would take longer, and hey, everyone likes a cool new tool. Storify is currently in beta by invite only, but if you beg on Twitter like I did (reply to @storify) you may be able to get in.

8. Use Dipity to document your company’s social media timeline.

   Dipity takes the Storify idea to another level, and provides a time line of embedded online activities. Here is a Dipity time line of the Life Technologies Social Media feed. We used the aggregated RSS feed we made for LIFE Social Media, but unfortunately Dipity doesn’t auto-update the time line (they call it a ‘topic’). You could also use Dipity to follow events such as conferences (using the Twitter hashtag) or to make a time line of your company’s history and press releases, for example.

Hopefully we’ve given you some examples you can use to organize and share information or sparked some ideas for new uses for social bookmarking applications for your business. These concepts are a part of the increasing ‘plug and play’ nature of the web, or the emergence of a so-called ‘semantic web,’ where websites interact well, perhaps obviating the need for companies to have freestanding applications such as blogs. How have you used social bookmarking applications for your life science business? Please share them below.

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