I just visited the SLAS2012 conference and reconnected with some great reps from life science media companies. They reminded me that sometimes there is such a thing as a free lunch, in the form of items you can have published for free to promote your company. Here is the list of our top five freebies for life science marketers, or for anyone who is looking to get exposure.

1. Application notes. Short articles showing your products being used in experiments are a great way to show scientists their real life application. They can be produced quickly and can help with search engine optimization (SEO) on your site. Also, Nature Methods allows you to upload application notes for free! You can also promote them reasonably (see the Nature Sales reps page for more details).
2. Product launches. Several publications have a space where they list new products for free, check on their website or print version. Genetic Engineering News (GEN) has a nice new product section, see their editorial guidelines (PDF) for the details. Of course, be sure to include an image, it helps with visibility, and we’ve also found it makes a difference in life scientist purchase decisions.
3. Press releases. Almost every media rep I talked to indicated that we should send them our press releases for them to forward to their editors. Although the release itself might not be free, several publications will also promote them online for free, often automatically if you use a service like BusinessWire or PR Newswire. You can also upload yours to BioSpace for free and they’ll create a free company profile for you. If your press release includes a personnel change, collect head shots of the employees, write a blurb for each, and submit it to publications like GEN and Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN) too.
4. Posters. Scientific posters at conferences have always been the ‘marketer’s little secret’ for getting mileage out of a conference with a small budget. Did you know, though, that you can publish your posters online as well? BioTechniques publishes posters digitally for free, and there are also other ways of publishing them online that are cropping up. Remember to post them on your website as well for your customers’ reference and added SEO.
5. Great content. It was clear from talking to the media that they were VERY interested in those who can write articles for them. GEN has long featured ‘Tutorials’ which are usually articles written by industry folks who put a plug in about their products. The media reps almost universally perked up their ears when blogs were mentioned, as bloggers are not only a source of content, but may have a following which might benefit the publications. In these times of media volatility, great content is appreciated more than ever. Consider the experts you have at your company and reviews they could write that are related to your products, even those that may not feature them explicitly. Exposure for your company through a byline of a well written article is arguably more valuable than a full page print advertisement.

Thanks to George Lui of Nature, Tamlyn Oliver of GEN, and James Secretario of BioTechniques for getting me up to speed on what life science media has to offer us. The best relationships are a give and take however, I hope this post will give their publications some exposure and we hope to be able to spend some money with them this year.

What are your favorite freebies for life science marketing?

You’ve heard that content is king when it comes to improving traffic to your website and generating leads or ‘converting’ visitors to paying customers. Relevant content will bring more people to your site through Google searches, and by engaging them they’re more likely to become customers. That’s great, how do life science companies find the time and material to add to their websites? As we’ve discussed before, life science companies have been generating great content for years, but it’s not always web-friendly. In this post, we list five great ways to add lead-generating content to your life science website. Having a blog is a great ‘catch all’ for this content, but you may find a way to work some of these items into your website without one.

1. Webinars. As we’ve discussed, webinars are a great way to give leads useful information while at the same time introducing them to your capabilities. While you don’t want to give away the secrets to your success, your company has expertise that can be shared, resulting in a useful presentation which may lead some viewers to buy your products or hire you for services.
2. Publication reviews. Many researchers are getting squeezed in different ways these days, two of the biggest are time and money. Reviewing an important publication in your field saves them both of these precious resources, and also shows them that you know the field well. Also, the reviews will be full of words relevant to your products and customer needs, improving search engine optimization (SEO) and bringing new leads to your website.
3. Application notes. These are nothing new to life science companies, application notes show an example of a product being used in an experiment. Here’s an example from GE Healthcare, and note it’s in PDF form, resulting in another step to download it. Think of the researcher looking for information on their smart phone in the cold room–will they take the time to download and view? Make application notes more accessible by converting them to html, and benefit from better SEO, as html is indexed by search engines more readily than PDFs.
4. FAQs. Think about the questions your technical service team answers over and over again, and how many people are also typing the same query into Google. Kill two birds with one stone by putting these online—you’ll answer your customers’ questions as well as bring new leads to your site. A quick Google search shows GE Healthcare’s on top of this as well.
5. Researcher profiles. Looking at independent science blogs can provide ideas for company blogs, and here’s a nice example of a researcher profile from the Protein Wrangler, a biochemist in Texas who we met on Twitter. The podcast he’s created might not be as friendly for SEO and generating leads, but a text transcript could be added. It’s a great way to show your connection to research thought leaders and to help the scientists out as well by highlighting their work.

While we’ve listed what we think are ‘easy’ ways to add content to your life science website, it will still require effort. However, the benefits of improved SEO and lead generation are worth it. When updating your website, make sure that you’ve integrated methods to capture the leads wherever possible, but don’t force people to sign up before they can view the content. Additionally, by making your website more informative and web-friendly, you’ll find your sales, technical service, and other teams will appreciate and utilize it as well.

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Here’s a great video from Imperial College in which several life scientists discuss their interest in social media.

Blogs, Twitter, Wikis and other on-line tools from John Conway on Vimeo.

How can life science companies participate? Join us June 9th for our Social Media for Life Science and Biotechnology Workshop 2: The 4 B’s of First Party Applications and find out!

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We’re very excited about our recent beta launch of a new web 2.0 resource for life science researchers at the American Association for Cancer Research Meeting (AACR) this week. Engaging Epigenetics Experts (E3) is being developed with New England Biolabs (NEB), leading provider of molecular biology solutions. We built the application using our STIR Social Media™ system to ensure that it will meet the needs of life science researchers and thus be adopted by them and grow. Epigenetics is a fast-growing, interdisciplinary field studying the way environment changes genetic information, and we created a Social Media Charter™ for NEB, working closely with them and benefiting from their knowledge of their customers and the science.

In meeting the needs of epigenetics researchers, NEB will better be better positioned in this competitive market, and they’ll also gain from getting product development feedback from the researchers. We applaud NEB for having a long-range view of these new applications, and know that they will pay off soon. Our Social Media for Life Science and Biotechnology Workshop April 14th will describe the STIR Social Media system in detail, helping you to learn how to leverage these new tools effectively.

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Recently, science blogging’s clear leader, ScienceBlogs, with up to 1.2 million unique monthly visitors (estimate, April, Compete.com) lost several top science bloggers due to their initial decision to allow Pepsico, Inc. to host a blog called Food Frontiers on the site (it has since been taken off the site). Although the blog was intended to showcase real Pepsico scientists, several of the bloggers felt the decision to be disingenuous, perhaps due to its ‘corporate speak’ feel and ties between soda drinks and bad health. While it is unfortunate that so many bloggers left, there are important lessons that can be learned by life science companies, who also need to determine how best to leverage social media to realize business objectives.

Transparency is not enough. Much has been written about PepsiGate, I will not get go into detail here, but great reviews can be found by searching Delicious for the PepsiGate or sbfail tags. Basically, ScienceBlogs founders made the assumption that a blog about food from Pepsico, if clearly defined as such, would be acceptable on the site, which had built a reputation of scientific integrity through content from world class bloggers. Our STIR Social Media system describes why this is assumption is in error by defining four qualities which a successful scientific social media campaign must have: Sticky, Transparent, Intuitive, and Resonating. The theme of the Food Frontiers blog, Pepsi-backed information about nutritional science, did not fulfill the last quality, it did not resonate with the science bloggers. A corollary to this fact is that it likely would not have rung true with ScienceBlogs readers. Finding a theme that resonates with life scientists is very important, which is why we do in-depth surveys of them for most of the social media campaigns we launch.

Think strategically, not tactically. We have some great life science company examples we point to during our social media workshops and training. However, we also see a tendency towards thinking tactically, a ‘if we build it they will come’ mentality. In other words, we see marketers that think that by using their brand’s influence they’ll build a successful blog, Facebook page, etc., relying on tactics rather than strategies. By using social media, you will be expecting more from your customers, you will need to motivate them to interact, so you need to understand them better. One of my sayings is ‘There’s a thin line between a successful social media campaign and a pyramid scheme.’ This means that you need to understand what motivates everyone in the campaign, and leverage these needs wisely, otherwise it could all fall like a house of cards. In the case of ScienceBlogs, the bloggers were motivated to write for the blog because it helped them to establish scientific integrity. By seemingly compromising that integrity with the Pepsico blog, the bloggers saw their own scientific integrity being compromised. A strong strategy, and perhaps creating and adhering to a mission statement, would have prevented the ScienceBlogs incident, as they would have realized having a corporate blog on the site would not help them to meet their goals.

ScienceBlogs gets many things right. Read science communication and blogging thought leader Bora Zivcovik’s ‘farewell to ScienceBlogs’ post which also covers the history of the organization and their amazing reach and influence. From international legal action in Libya, to education of the U.S. Senate, to stellar Google search rankings and coverage by mainstream media outlets, ScienceBlogs is by many accounts a huge success. The creators, Seed Media, a NYC-based media and technology company dedicated to advancing science, and publisher of Seed Magazine, a ‘not-your-father’s’ version of Scientific American, clearly understood the infrastructure and marketing needed for success. Unfortunately, when PepsiGate broke, it was this widespread coverage, and the fact that each blogger could speak freely, that made the story’s coverage reach epic proportions. However, the site is the first of its kind and changed scientific communication as we know it, and hopefully they’ll learn from PepsiGate and come out stronger. Their model and progress should continue to be watched by life science companies.

To know, you must do. I was approached about six months ago by Seed Media to blog for an endeavor called ScienceWide which would sell advertising space on smaller science-based sites. I don’t want to get into too many details, but some aspects of their model bothered me, and I didn’t agree to provide novel content for them (but gave them suggestions and free rein to link to my content). I had similar feelings when dealing with San Diego’s now defunct blog-style news website SDNN.com, that they just didn’t ‘get’ some of the innuendos of social media that are crucial for success. As we point out in our workshops and training, a big part of understanding social media is to do it yourself–it can be a personal effort such as a twitter account you keep based on one of your hobbies. I do not know of any of the Seed Media management on Twitter, blogs etc. (I may be wrong) and perhaps if they had been more involved in the life science social media scene they’d have foreseen PepsiGate. I had this ‘aha’ about two years ago as an outsider, and have worked hard to provide value to the life science social media community, gaining much from them in the process as well. I encourage all of the life science marketers to do the same, and think that they will benefit as I do.

Although PepsiGate was unfortunate, it is a great example to learn from, both the good and the bad. What I find truly inspiring is that I see several of the incredibly smart science bloggers have gained enormous influence from the experience and will apply what they’ve learned about media and marketing to endeavors of their own. Science journalist Carl Zimmer has created a list of former ScienceBlogs bloggers whereabouts, so you can keep up with them. Also, while ScienceBlogs may have stumbled, the fact that they’re already established means that they’ll likely be far ahead of new endeavors for some time. Keep that in mind for your company’s strategy…as Ries & Trout’s first law of marketing states, it’s better to be first than it is to be better!

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Almost every life science company we talk to about web 2.0 and social media has the same question: what’s the return on investment (ROI)? We’ve discussed that the ROI equation for social media strategies and tactics is the same, but that the ‘expense’ and ‘payback’ calculations will likely be different. In this post, we’ll discuss two reports which show that web 2.0 sites have increased traffic and engagement, and that customers who are engaged buy more. Together, they present a strong argument that adding web 2.0 features can directly and positively impact a company’s sales.

Web 2.0 sites are dynamic and interactive, and include sites which the user can add content to such as blogs, forums, and wikis. The first report we’ll discuss is titled ‘Traffic metrics and Web 2.0-ness‘ and it was published in Online Information Review from a group in Taiwan. They surveyed the online habits of about 1000 people and correlated metrics such as sites visited, page views per site, and duration per page on site with the degree of ‘Web 2.0-ness’ a website had.

The researchers found a positive correlation between the Web 2.0-ness of a site and users’ understanding of its content and the number of visitors to the site. In other words, adding web 2.0 elements and more content leads to stronger user engagement with the site and a related increased traffic to the site. One interesting corollary they discuss is the ‘double jeopardy’ small companies face: fewer products=fewer pages=less engagement. We definitely see this with smaller life science and biotech companies we talk to, and we have many ideas to help them overcome this issue.

You may be asking yourself, does increased engagement mean more sales? The second report is from Gallup and is titled ‘Customer Engagement–What’s Your Engagement Ratio?’ (Note: the report is a bit of an ‘infomercial’ but has good information). Gallup first looked at what they call ‘World Class’ companies, which rank in their 90th percentile, to determine whether they engage their customers more than the others. The result was shocking–the ratio of ‘Fully Engaged’ to ‘Actively Disengaged’ customers was ten-fold more for the World Class companies compared to the others. So, top performing companies have a higher ‘engagement ratio’–is this directly related to improved sales? Gallup has found through many examples and industries that emotionally engaged customers spend more and are retained more easily. Moreover, they’ve seen that companies can improve their business performance by increasing their engagement ratio. See the report for more details, as some of the details behind the statistics are not given and thus hard to summarize, but Gallup is a highly respected company and I’m sure more can be learned from them if you need more information.

Taken together, these two reports show that adding more web 2.0 features to your life science company website will lead directly to increased sales. What may be more exciting is that life science and biotechnology offers many interesting ways to add content to your site, and we’ve discussed that you may be closer than you think to making these changes.

Want to learn how to get there even faster? Attend our Social Media for Life Science and Biotechnology Workshop 2: The 4 B’s of First Party Applications interactive webinar. We’ll talk about web 2.0, blogs, forums, and wikis, and how to generate engaging content for life scientists. Also, check out our Social Media for Life Science and Biotechnology Training page, we offer training and workshops on almost every topic, contact us if you don’t see what you need!

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We think it’s great that we can count 33 life science company blogs on our list, and we applaud those companies who are leveraging this flavor of social media. You may know that we are blog aficionados, however, and that we are very…ahem…opinionated as to how corporate blogs should be designed, both strategically and tactically. While I’m hesitant to specifically call out blogs that need improvement, I’ll provide my top five ‘wishes’ for them below to help life science companies succeed.

Use WordPress.org. There are several ways in which you can implement a blog ranging from 3rd party sites (e.g., WordPress.com, TypePad) which will host the site for you, to software that is installed on your web server (e.g., WordPress.org). Installing WordPress.org may take a bit longer at the very beginning, but it offers much more flexibility, and the benefits far outweigh any initial delays (which really should be minimal because the software is constantly becoming easier to install and use). WordPress.org is more versatile because there is much more control over the interface and functionality of your blog. WordPress.org installations allow access to hundreds of modules called themes and plugins, giving unlimited interface and branding options. We see several life science companies who’ve produced a blog that looks nothing like their website and has very limited functionality, likely because they’re using 3rd party software with fewer options. As we’ll discuss in the next item, this flexibility allows you to extend the brand of your website. As we explained in an earlier post describing our STIR Social Media system, engaging scientists and maximizing return on investment (ROI) requires creating applications with very specific attributes, so having maximal flexibility is important. (Note: WordPress.com and WordPress.org utilize the same software, the only difference is in where it is installed.)

Think carefully about branding. Everything about your blog should meet the high standards you have for your website. This includes all the hard work you’ve put into your main website interface and ensuring that your brand is represented accurately. We would like to see more life science companies remembering the importance of branding, as many of the blogs have little resemblance to their corporate site. As pointed out by social media guru Chris Brogan in his book Trust Agents, a big part of success in social media comes from garnering trust from your audience. Think about it, would you trust a blog from a company which had no resemblance to the branding you’ve come to expect from them? The MO BIO Laboratories blog is perhaps the best example of a well branded, integrated blog.

Choose a unifying content theme. Alleviating customer ‘pains’ is a good strategy for engaging scientists and achieving a good ROI with social media, something we discuss often. Learn about the biggest issues customers have in your product area, and develop a blog theme which addresses it. Stay focused on this theme, so that scientists know where to turn to with a problem. We see some life science companies having difficulties in this area, they blog about diverse topics which may be interesting, but don’t meet customer needs. A great example of a company that does it well is Accelrys–their blog is targeted and seems to fill a niche for scientists who have questions about their informatics products.

Don’t reinvent the wheel. Along the same lines as extending your brand and having a consistent theme, is to rely on the same resources your company has been using for years to engage customers. We strongly believe that life science companies have been using social media-like strategies and tactics for years, by supplying useful newsletters, posters, and online applications. Why not breathe some fresh life into these resources, providing updates and more web-friendly versions of newsletters, application notes, etc. on your blog? Taking a look at what has worked well in the past will also point you towards a unifying theme for your blog.

Think outside the blog. Some companies who decide they need a blog forget about the the ‘social’ component of ‘social media.’ Personal bloggers start blogs for the love of their subject matter, and naturally seek out other bloggers, interacting with them by leaving comments on their blogs, etc. This is a major part of the reason blogs do so well with search engines–fellow bloggers link to each other, providing the inbound links that show search engines that a website’s content is highly regarded and worth a high search rank. This may sound like just an algorithm, but experience and common sense points to the conclusion that those who engage with the community are more knowledgeable and trustworthy. We’ve seen many life science company blogs set up as silos–independent of their corporate website, and with few noticeable ties to other blogs, twitter/microblogging, etc. (we may be wrong, correct us below!). An example is the Accelrys blog–no blogroll and a link to a twitter account that is inconsistently updated and mostly non-interactive (sorry, had to throw one criticism in!). Those of us who employ many facets of social media know that a synergistic strategy is crucial to success for many reasons, including achieving more engagement, benefiting from the community, and getting more leads. We want life science companies to be successful with social media, and would love to see you engaging with the community more.

We’ll be talking more in depth about first party social media applications such as blogging at our June 22nd Social Media for Life Science and Biotechnology Workshop in San Diego. We’d also be happy to give you training or a free consultation to help you get the most out of social media. Contact us for more information, and be sure to subscribe to this blog so you’ll get tips like these. Also, why not start engaging more by leaving a comment below?

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Our first Social Media for Life Science and Biotechnology Workshop went over well, with IRL (in real life) and virtual sessions full of marketing and business development professionals eager to learn how to attract scientists and improve their return on investment with social media. When polled anonymously, 100% of attendees indicated that they would suggest the workshop to colleagues, and we continue to incorporate your feedback to make the workshops even better. In the first workshop we covered Comprendia’s STIR Social Media™ system which defines the four qualities needed for a successful campaign: Sticky, Transparent, Intuitive, and Resonating.

We discussed in detail how social media is a natural extension of the activities life science companies have been engaged in for years, and that, as with all marketing, strategies must come before tactics. If you missed the IRL and virtual events, don’t despair, you can still order it on demand through the Comprendia website, and we highly suggest it before you attend the second workshop. The Workshop 1 webinar is roughly 3 hours long, and we’ll give you a ‘day pass’ in which you can watch it any time that day, and we’ll send you the printed presentation as a booklet beforehand.

Our second workshop will focus on first party social media, or applications and strategies which are integrated into company websites:

• Web 2.0
• Blogs
• Forums
• Wikis
• Content Generation

We’ll focus on the 4 B’s which will help you create successful first party applications and campaigns, which are the Basics, Benefits, Best Practices, and Biotech Examples. As in the first workshop, we’ll focus on the questions that really matter to you, including strategies that work with scientists, metrics, return on investment, and implementation. We know that seeing real examples helps you to think about applying the ideas your business, so we’ll spend plenty of time on this as well. We’ll have wifi so you can bring your computer, ask lots of questions, and head back to the office ready to get started. Sign up!

Who Should Attend: Business Development and Marketing professionals who provide products or services in a non-regulated environment and are interested in using social media to increase sales, leads, or visibility. Examples: companies who sell research-only products or services to scientists or small to mid-size biotechnology companies that need more visibility. Contact us if you have questions. Completion of Social Media and Life Science Workshop 1 is recommended but not required (details on ordering the Workshop 1 webinar will be given during registration).

As a Participant You Will Receive:

1. Printed workshop materials
2. A highly interactive presentation session from Mary Canady, customized to your needs and using real examples from life science and biotechnology
3. Worksheets designed to help you get social media launched at your company
4. Hands-on, online training and feedback from Comprendia during the session
5. Free follow-on session with Comprendia
1. Review of workshop ‘homework’
2. Guidance for next steps

This is our second in a series of Social Media for Life Science and Biotechnology Workshops. Sign up for updates to our blog and you’ll be the first to hear about our workshops and training. Contact us if you’re interested in having these workshops customized for your company.

Check out our Workshops and Training page to see when this workshop is offered next.

Seth Godin is a true thought leader in social media–he understood it years or maybe even a decade before many. Three of his books have literally changed the way I think about marketing and even the course of progress in many areas. Here is a short review of the books, and they’re all good and short reads, I suggest you pick them all up (each is linked to its Amazon page, and I swear I’m getting no kickbacks!).

Permission Marketing. This book was published in 1999 and truly shows that Godin was ahead of the curve, defining new media marketing strategies and tactics before the term ‘social media’ was even recognized. I call this the ‘newsletter book’ because it espouses getting permission to market to customers and uses newsletters as a prime example. In short, create marketing materials such as newsletters which provide value to your customers outside of your products, and they will give you permission to market to them. Need an example from life science? We worked with San Diego-based specialty chemicals and services provider BioBlocks to help them create a newsletter featuring the research behind their products–see an example here. As a result, they’ve increased their reach and actually gotten many compliments on their newsletter, no doubt improving the BioBlocks brand perception. In this book, Seth introduced us to the concept and benefits of engaging our customers rather than broadcasting to them using traditional marketing strategies such as print advertisements.

Meatball Sundae. In this book published in 2007, Godin expertly continues along the path he began with Permission Marketing and explains the new media world to us. He begins with the description of the impact of mass media in the 50′s and 60′s, where television allowed marketers for the first time to reach a broad audience quickly with messages about their product. He contrasts that with media today, where consumers have so many choices–for example, it is no longer a big ‘coup’ to get an article in Time Magazine, as it reaches a much smaller demographic. He points out the many media choices consumers have these days (e.g., cable, internet, youtube, blogs), and the dearth of time and attention they have. Concomitant with this is the continuing loss of the impact of entities which he calls ‘gatekeepers,’ which control the information the public receives (e.g., the editor at Time Magazine). With less control of information flow, there is a more level playing field for companies and individuals who want to get the word out via their own website, blog, YouTube channel, etc. The book describes how to succeed in this ‘new media world,’ and gives plenty of examples. If you have time only to read one of the three books in this post, choose this one. Relevance for biotech and life science? Small companies such as our client Assay Depot can reach more through tools such as blogs. The drug discovery 2.0 blog we developed with them is now the second result in Google searches for ‘drug discovery blog.’

Tribes. This 2008 book is what I consider to be the last piece of Godin’s social media trifecta, a natural progression from the two earlier books. In it, he describes the consequences of shifting media on a personal level–the full title of the book is ‘Tribes. We Need You to Lead Us.’ He describes that the internet has provided unlimited ways for groups of people to connect and affect change. No longer constrained by gatekeepers, a passionate leader can start a movement, finding others who share interests and who often have a natural affinity for the tribe they create together. He gives Barack Obama’s campaign as an example, where supporters were connected and engaged to help him win the presidential election in 2008. Can companies start tribes? Sure they can, look at Apple. Even before the internet, they created a group of loyal fans centered around their products. If you doubt that they are true fanatics, check out the movie MacHeads on Hulu. Tie in to life science companies? Many brands have special meaning to their customers, and they can be considered fans of them. The assurance of a cabinet stocked with Sigma chemicals. The trust placed in their antibody provider for reagents that will work the first time. The pervasive blue Qiagen boxes that appear in almost every shot of a lab shown on TV. As we’ve pointed out with our list of life science companies using social media, they’ve got a long way to go, but they also have a solid foundation to build upon. We think the possibilities for forming life science and biotech tribes is enormous, and have had much luck with the San Diego Biotechnology Network.

Still skeptical, or don’t feel like you have time to read these books? We’d love to give you a social media primer, and we’ll also include an analysis of your company–sign up for a free consultation. We strive to be the ‘tribe leaders’ of social media for biotech and life sciences, we certainly meet the ‘passionate’ qualification and would love to speak with you.

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I’ve heard buzz for several different flavors of social networks (or more broadly, applications) for life scientists, and I’ve been curious as to which of them, if any, are gaining traction. I made a list of the ones that seem most popular and did a ‘quick and dirty’ calculation of the number of unique visitors to these sites. The results show that some sites are indeed gaining traction, and that they provide value based on primary and secondary scientific content, both traditional and online, to their visitors.

I measured the traffic from each social application using Compete.com data from September to December of 2009. The data from this site may be inaccurate, and traffic to some sites may be low because they are newer, or the number of visitors may be calculated differently. I excluded scienceblogs.com because they are known to be very popular already, and they cover more than just life science (which several of the others do, below, but I just wanted to get an idea.) I also did tag searches on Delicious to find which sites researchers are bookmarking, to be as inclusive as possible. Sites I have excluded in the graph likely had little traffic or did not meet my criteria (e.g., NextBio has good traffic, but isn’t a social application). Also missing are social applications which are not web-based, such as Mendeley. Please be sure to comment below if I missed any that you feel fit the criteria.

I tracked whether the sites required a login to obtain what I considered to be a reasonably ‘browsable’ amount of information. Most sites feature some sort of login, but offer information through, for example, forum browsing without requiring a login (e.g. network.nature.com), while others have virtually no information available until you log in (e.g. researchgate.net). I thought this might make a difference in the traffic, but it turned out not to have as much of an effect as I initially thought. I also recorded what I thought to be the key features of the site. Note that many of the sites offer more features than I’ve listed, but my quick overview deemed the other features to be secondary (for example, scientistsolutions.com offers a social network and blogs, but I think mostly it is used for the forums).

Summary of Scientific Social Media Traffic (click to see larger)

As I mentioned, this is a quick analysis, and I invite others to copy the data and add to it (here’s the Google Spreadsheet), but a clear trend emerged from this short study. The top site, biomedexperts.com, which has an estimated 128,000 visitors per month, utilizes scientific publications to connect and segment scientists based on interests or regions. The second most popular site, citeulike.org, is a social bookmarking site with about 100,000 visitors per month who use it to search for, store, and browse related peer-reviewed publications. What’s interesting is that these sites are based on completely different formats, but they both rely on scientific publications.

Is it surprising that scientific publications are the ‘glue’ that is connecting and attracting scientists? Not really–when I think back to my days in the 90′s as a bench scientist, PubMed and my many folders of papers were what helped me to connect with other scientists and learn who the thought leaders of my field were. In a sense, PubMed was scientists’ first ‘social network.’

Also, it is not surprising that scientists seemingly need to find immediate and differentiating value in order to sign up for a social web application, as evidenced by the clear leaders. Scientists can easily socialize with colleagues on Facebook, so this utility is superfluous for applications designed just for them.

Biomedexperts.com is powered by Collexis, a company that was founded in the 90′s based on a European research project centered around creating a network of health experts. The company presumably has impressive software and databases which provided an instant remedy to the ‘network effect‘ suffered by most social networks. They simply utilized the ‘network’ that already existed, buried in years of life science publications. Brilliant. In addition, the interface for Biomedexperts.com is excellent, which likely leads to quicker adoption. Some of the other applications offer similar functionality (e.g., SciLink) with less intuitive interfaces or higher barriers to entry (e.g., having to add publications manually).

I also find it very encouraging that researchblogging.org is in third place, as it is a ‘blogger-powered’ resource which does not rely solely on traditional peer-reviewed content. It does cover more than just life science, but the numbers are impressive, with 91,000 visits per month. To me, this signals that both the acceptance and desire to publish online scientific content is increasing. Most of the posts here represent reviews of literature published traditionally, or conference summaries, but likely more primary research will appear, if the popularity of the open access Public Library of Science (PLOS) is any indication.

It will be interesting to see how the NIH’s $15M project to connect researchers will overcome the network effect and attract scientists to participate. Cameron Neylon has published his criteria for social software for scientists, it is a very thoughtful list on the ‘stickiness’ and utility of such applications. He also plans to evaluate the top sites, which will be of interest vis a vis these results on the popularity of the sites. Popular doesn’t always mean better, but the first law of marketing is ‘it’s better to be first than it is to be better,’ which means that the sites getting the most visitors now will likely be the leaders for some time.

What also interests me is the world beyond scientific publications. Biotech professionals could benefit greatly from being able to search for and license technologies seamlessly. We’re thinking along these lines for connecting scientists in San Diego Biotechnology Network, stay tuned.

These results are also of interest to those of you trying to reach scientists, or creating a resource for them. Purchases of banner Ads, etc. on these sites are obviously more impactful on the larger sites. Supporting sites with less traffic is certainly OK, but consider their potential for ‘stickiness’ before committing to a long contract. This study surprised me in that hype definitely did not translate to web traffic. Compete.com is a good tool, in general, for planning online advertising placements.

Note: Apologies to those who are digging out on the East coast after another round of Snowmageddon, for the image. At least it’s something you can relate to!

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