If you’ve been following Comprendia via our writing or actions, you know that one of our major goals is facilitating communication between life scientists and the companies that serve them. With today’s tools, and the media landscape, more communication and collaboration is not only possible, but necessary. We also hear interest from both sides in working together. What form will this take, and how can you set up your blog or web 2.0 site to help it grow?
We ran two surveys to help bridge the gap between life science companies and researchers and will present the results at the ScienceOnline conference this weekend. We’d like to focus on these questions, and we’ll also be asking you during discussions leading up to the session:
What is your ‘big dream’ for your blog or website, and could you achieve it with help from sponsors?
What other blogs, 2.0 sites, genres (e.g., tech, food) do well with corporate sponsorship, and how can we learn from them?
What missteps can we avoid to prevent situations such as Pepsigate?
How would you feel about adjusting the focus or format of your website to adapt to life science company needs? If so, what types of changes would work best for both?
Would a matchmaking site that would allow bloggers and companies to find each other help, and if so what would it look like?
Per unconference ‘rules’, this session will be light on presentations and heavy on discussion and action after. We’d love to start a dialog that leads to the development of infrastructure that will help you achieve your website’s goals. We’ll have a representative from the bloggers, Brian Krueger (@labspaces), companies Kristy Meyer (@kristy3m) and myself (@comprendia) Sunday at 2 p.m. in session E! If you can’t make it, track us down and/or look for us to post more information on how you can get involved soon, even if you’re not at the conference. If you work at a company, look for us to publish the research report soon or contact us with questions.
Lately I’ve been disturbed, and frankly quite irritated, by a trend in which more individuals, either acting on their own or on behalf of their company, frequently send personal email blasts with no easy way to opt out. These individuals are likely empowered by new tools such as LinkedIn and customer relationship management (CRM) software, which make it easy to send emails to a large set of contacts. However, this practice can be damaging to you and your company, and I’d like to point out the reasons you should think twice before sending personal email blasts.
Violation of your company’s privacy policy. Having been in the marketing departments of large companies, I appreciate that privacy is a serious issue. I heard a story reminiscent of the “Hatfield and McCoys” family feud where someone harassed a neighbor by signing them up online to be mailed hundreds of catalogs. Because it is now so easy to find and abuse personal contact information, the federal government has realized the need for stronger online privacy regulations, you can learn more at the Better Business Bureau Online’s website. In California, every website which collects personal information requires a privacy policy, and if you are using LinkedIn or your CRM to send mass emails, you may be violating your company’s regulations.
Making your contacts’ day harder. There are myriad strategies which help people to clear out their email inbox to help them be more productive. By sending your contacts unwanted emails which they can’t opt out of, you are making their life harder. They need to decide whether to mark you as a spammer, risking missing important emails you send, or determine how to politely decline the emails. Your contacts are one of your most valuable asset, and the absolute last thing you want to is be seen as making their day harder.
You may be crying wolf. I will admit it…I have encountered the decision of either telling one of my contacts to stop sending me unsolicited emails a few times a week…or to mark the person as spam…and I did the latter. I may be missing emails from that person now, which is too bad, but they have my contact information and will call if it is important. Don’t put yourself in this situation, of having people ignoring or tagging your emails as spam because you are sending too many that are unrelated. As we talk about in our social media training and workshops, in this new media age it’s ‘not all about you’ and constantly sending mass, self-serving emails will brand you as someone who has little to offer. It may be more efficacious to build a big network or following and use more ‘soft sell’ methods like status updates to promote yourself.
It’s easy to do it right. It is very easy to send emails including an easy ‘opt out’ using your CRM or email communication applications such as constant contact or mailchimp. We send most of our notifications to our contacts through our email application, always with the option to opt out. I will have to admit that LinkedIn makes it really convenient for us to send email announcements at times, but we don’t feel as though we abuse it. However, who knows, maybe some people are irritated with us (if so, leave a comment below ;). We should migrate LinkedIn contacts to an opt out version of communication (or hopefully LinkedIn and our email application will talk to each other someday soon).
Bottom line? Don’t assume everyone on your contact list wants to hear from you often and indefinitely. Sending large scale personal emails on behalf of your company can negatively affect you both. What’s really dangerous about it is that if you damage your reputation, even on behalf of your company, it will follow you even after you’ve moved on.
To share this post easily, cut and paste: Privacy is the New Black http://bit.ly/akIsJI
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.
A few things have happened over the past weeks that have caused me to reflect on how I ‘ended up’ where I am, in an Outliers sort of way. Also, there are some young scientists who have asked me how I made the transition into marketing, so I thought it might be good to write a post on it. In short, while my current occupation is no accident, I was incredibly fortunate to have mentors and ‘generous strangers’ along the way who guided me to where I am now, and I am very thankful to them.
By sheer dumb luck, I did my first lab rotation at Duke University with Jane Richardson, who was the first to visualize protein structures using so-called ribbon diagrams. She drew the diagrams by hand and they became the standard to help us understand protein structures. The project Dr. Richardson gave me was interesting, as was hanging out in her and her husband David’s lab, complete with comfy couches and crazy protein artwork. I learned about the internet there (1990), using FTP on their VAX to download structures from the protein data bank, and even took pictures of protein structures for a textbook on their Evans & Sutherland computers. In my spare time, I started the department happy hour and sand volleyball league, which last time I checked is still going strong (this will be important later).
In 1994, my Ph.D. work (and desire to move out West) led me to Alex McPherson’s lab at the University of California, he literally ‘wrote the book‘ on crystallizing proteins, and he was a great mentor. Here, I had the great fortune to work out the molecular structure of a plant virus. It wasn’t the sexiest project around, but the structure (to me) was spectacularly beautiful–even the crystals were stunning (luck again) and images of them became part of the marketing materials for crystallography supply company Hampton Research (started by a great entrepreneur Bob Cudney who inspired me). I began to play with great, open source visualization software such as Grasp to communicate the structure.
This love affair with virus structures continued into my postdoc at the Scripps Research Institute, where again I worked on a non-sexy but fascinating and visually interesting virus project. A great colleague, John Tate, and I played around with the then new Linux operating system and great, open source (or inexpensive) software (for a real blast from the past check out the article we wrote). We came up with some great visualizations and animations for showing virus conformational changes (if I could get the animations off of VHS easily, I’d post them…). The visualization at the top was made using Grasp and was on the cover of the Journal of Molecular Biology.
In addition, around this time (1998) I became interested in web design and designed our lab’s website, and learned about creating and manipulating images using a free program called Gimp (which I still use daily). Bench work, and using these tools to communicate my discoveries, were truly a lot of fun for me and I probably stayed in academia a bit too long, but learning the visualization and communication skills helped me in the long run.
After my postdoc I worked at a ‘genomics boom’ startup called GeneFormatics, where I started to learn more about the world of biotech and facets of the industry outside of R&D. In 2002 I joined Invitrogen, and fell in love with marketing. Here, I was lucky enough to lead an early ‘web 2.0′ project called OligoPerfect, which designs custom oligonucleotide primers and is cited in at least 55 peer-reviewed publications. I still remember asking my excellent boss (and still good friend Michael Gonzales) about the basics of marketing, and his support and guidance.
After this, I worked at EMD Chemicals where, among other things, I helped to improve customers’ understanding of signal transduction through interactive signaling pathway maps and other resources. I made animations of protein kinases bound with inhibitors to help customers understand them. I had a great boss and mentor who I’m still good friends with, Karin Hughes. Later, while working at a small company, I took the lead in organizing a drug discovery conference, and realized the power of bringing scientists together to communicate. In my free time, I learned blogging and the power of WordPress, more great open source software.
If you know me, or have poked around this website, hopefully you’ll see how I’ve arrived ‘here.’ This post could all just be a self-aggrandizing walk down memory lane, but I think there is something to be learned. I’ve arrived at my current role, where I specialize in marketing biotechnology and connecting scientists and technologies, often through web-savvy tools, with the help of many great mentors, colleagues, and software developers I didn’t necessarily know.
I also seized opportunities, even used my hobbies, to eventually arrive at a job that I absolutely love. Arriving at your destination involves determination and following the good luck path and ignoring the bad–I’ve had my share of that as well but try not to let it shape my destiny. So in the words of my ‘Twitter friend’ Sally Church, my advice to you is JFDI, or Just…Do it, continue to seek opportunities that will move you towards your goal, and you’ll get there. Give thanks to those who’ve helped you, you can never have too much good karma. Young scientists like Sean Seaver and Michelle Gill, whom I’ve met on Twitter, will likely find their niche more quickly than I did with today’s tools, and I suggest you follow their lead and take up blogging, microblogging or any tools which help you to learn more from others.
This post is dedicated to Warren DeLano, who made a big impact on the world of protein visualization by developing PyMol, one of the great open source software programs that I’ve relied upon on my journey. I thank him wholeheartedly.
When I first made the leap from academia to marketing in the life sciences, branding was a foreign concept to me, and I had a hard time relating it to biotechnology products. Wikipedia defines branding as “a symbolic embodiment of all the information connected to a company, product or service . . . which serves to create associations and expectations among products made by a producer.” Translation? The best example I can think of is from one of the world’s leading brands, Coca Cola. You see a can of Coke, with its red imagery and logo, and you know what to expect when you pop the top and take a drink. Can you imagine if tomorrow Coke cans came in yellow? Would you expect the same refreshing beverage as you placed the can to your mouth? Probably not, and that’s because you have “associations and expectations” with the Coca Cola branding, which you wouldn’t have with a new labeling of the product.
Why should you care? Branding can be used in a lot of different ways at any sized biotech or life science company. Most consider Invitrogen to be the first company that brought formalized marketing and branding to the life sciences, with a distinct “look and feel,” which was incorporated into their product packaging, newsletters, catalog, and clever, consistent Ads. All of these materials work together to evoke an overall opinion of the company in the mind of the customer. When a scientist opens a kit from a well-branded company, s/he already has an expectation as to how the product will work, and normally this is a good association, otherwise it would not have been purchased.
Large companies normally have a branding style guide which directs them on which colors and fonts to use, layouts for Ads and all communications with customers, and sometimes even a “voice” which describes the style of the verbiage used. These style guides are done by trained branding professionals, and can be expensive for smaller companies. However, smaller companies can take advantage of branding without this large expenditure, by keeping a few key concepts in mind.
Start with a web/graphic designer to design your logo, website, and brochures–there is no shortcut for this, and doing it yourself can be disastrous. While you are at it, have them design some key items that you know you’ll need in the next 6 months, which may include product inserts, fax cover page/letter head, business cards, email blast template, and newsletter. Getting these items now will save you time later, and may also give you a “head start” with other materials you’ll need. I once heard that there are three things that are needed for effective branding: consistency, consistency, and consistency. This rule may be even more important for a small company, as potential customers are looking for clues as to your company’s reliability in all of their communications with you. With some forethought, you can portray a consistent branding message to your customers. When consistency is paired with high quality products, researchers will associate your marketing materials and communications with your products, leading to increased loyalty and purchases. Here are some tips to help you to remain consistent:
Consider product packaging and inserts carefully. All should be consistent in content and with the brand.
Utilize a consistent font in all of your advertisements, and communications when it is feasible. This should be part of the package that the designers give you.
Ask employees to include a company-wide, consistent signature in emails, with all contact information.
Make sure the company letterhead and fax coversheet are easily accessible to everyone in the company, and utilized.
Make sure that your voicemail system is user friendly and consistent (you can even suggest a greeting for employees).
Consider a short training for all employees on the importance of company image and consistency of the brand. You’ll likely find that employees are proud of your products, and are eager to keep the branding consistent, once they understand the importance.
Do you want to learn more about how you can leverage effective branding for increasing market share for your biotech and life sciences products or services? Comprendia can help, contact us to schedule a free one-on-one or web-based presentation, and ask about our Marketing 101™ workshop. This post is part of Comprendia’s Marketing 101 Blog Series, designed to help you grow your business by developing marketing strategies and tactics that work for biotechnology.
