Welcome to the first in our series of Video Bytes, Demos and ‘How To’ Resources for Life Science Marketing & Social Media. You may be familiar with our Sound Bytes which are links and tips along the same theme, we’re adding videos to help show you how you learn how to use online applications to better reach your goals. Our first video is about the recent changes to the LinkedIn interface, and how to contact users who are in your groups.

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These days there are many ways that a life science company can reach out to researchers, which is great. You likely don’t just have one list of contacts in your CRM, you’ve got employees using LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. With this added flexibility comes new questions regarding how to make contact that is welcomed. We like to use the golden rule, in other words, do unto others as you’d have done to you. Here are some examples of what we consider to be breaking the golden rule, illustrating why it is a simple and effective guideline for many different situations.

1. Unsolicited newsletter opt in. I was recently signed up for a newsletter simply because I’d exchanged an email with someone that had nothing to do with their products. I hear this complaint often from colleagues, that they’ve been signed up for newsletters and resent the sender. Your newsletter recipients should request to be signed up, or you should match their interests closely and monitor unsubscribes closely. Don’t assume a contact is a lead, and remember a newsletter is a regular publication which carries more weight than just sending an email.
2. No ‘unsubscribe’ on mass emails. Related to the last point, you should ALWAYS include an unsubscribe option for all email blasts. Modern CRM software and other tools make it easy to send mass emails, but failing to include the option to unsubscribe can cause resentment towards your brand. In addition, without the option to unsubscribe, your leads may mark your emails as spam, meaning you could be blacklisted and that they will no longer receive your messages.
3. Automated direct messages (DMs) from Twitter. This is one of my personal pet peeves and I can assure you that we NEVER do this and advise our clients against it. Some applications send a DM automatically when you follow an account, and experienced users (i.e., those you want to engage) get very irritated by them. Depending on the user’s settings, it can arrive as a text message, and minimally an email. On Twitter, you may be following 1,000 or more accounts–can you imagine if all of them texted or emailed you regularly? (Note: We’ll cover etiquette in our March 10th Twitter Workshop.)
4. Lack of respect for communities. I think the above Twitter transgression occurs with new users because they don’t understand the etiquette of the community. I see similar missteps with those who join one of our LinkedIn groups and immediately post 3 self-serving items. I guess the golden rule assumes that you can ‘stand in the shoes’ of the other person, but as a newbie it’s difficult. In short, don’t rush into a new application and make assumptions about contacting people. Take your time or find an aficionado who can help you.
5. Too frequent communication. A possible issue with having so many ways to communicate with people is that you could barrage someone with the same message too many times. With broadcast advertising (e.g., print Ads), it was considered a good thing to get your message in front of a potential customer multiple times, with personal communication the rules are different. When planning, determine the maximum number of times a person may see your message in, say, a week’s time. Consider how you’d feel if you received the same message from a company with the same frequency. Also, always remember that your targets may not hold the same affection for your brand as you do, so do the comparison with a company you’re not overly fond of. I like to use the car dealership I bought my car from 6 years ago that still sends me monthly mailers (a personal gripe). Look for tools which will help you marry contact information between applications, for example this Constant Contact plugin for Salesforce .
6. Mixing personal and company connections. We’ve covered this before, but from my personal experience the problem seems to be getting worse so I’m bringing it up again. Building a network is a fantastic way to find and engage prospective leads, but you should be very careful to not assume that your personal contacts don’t feel as though they’ll be automatically entered into your company’s CRM. An example that illustrates this concept well involves LinkedIn contact information. Should you upload your LinkedIn contacts into your company CRM? As a general rule, I’d say no. However, we do manual updates when we see, for example, that emails are bouncing and we know it’s because the person has moved jobs. Usually this means we know the situation fairly well and have followed the above rules as well, so that the person can opt out if needed. You should also think about your personal brand when making these decisions–if your company abuses the contact information now or at a later date, the damage to your reputation could be irreversible.

We hope these examples will help you understand a simple way to determine how your company’s communications will be perceived, so that you can make them as effective as possible. Also, feel free to ask our advice if you’re unsure about a campaign you’re planning, we’re always available for a free consultation.

Personally, have you been irritated by communication missteps, and how do you think could they be avoided by life science companies?

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Recently a cool app for visualizing your primary LinkedIn network has been the talk of Twitter. Mine looks like the ‘hand turkeys’ kids draw around Thanksgiving, what does it mean? I’m not sure how useful it is beyond a curiosity of how your network grows. You can click on users and see who they’re connected to and get a feeling for their expertise, but you likely already know this information. See my insights below the image.

My LinkedIn network visualization is labeled according to companies I’ve worked at or consulted with, and shows me things I was already aware of, and some new insights:

1. Related companies (the middle fingers) are grouped together because, well, they’re related, and there is cross talk between them as far as personnel. All of the work I do or did here represented here is directly related to my training as an X-ray crystallographer (in a galaxy far, far, away).
2. I’ve worked in the more general field of life science, and these companies are represented by the thumb and pinkie. My job at LIFE was in informatics, which is more related to the ‘finger’ companies closest to it, and my job at EMD was in signal transduction, more related to the drug discovery services ‘fingers’ closest to it. I am surprised that the thumb and pinkie aren’t closer together, because both companies have major offices in the San Diego area, and I know many that have worked at both. Hard to say and likely not worth thinking about too much.
3. The palm represents my current connections and business, and it shows I’ve been able to branch out well from the companies I’ve worked at or with. I was not able to find a ‘San Diego’ centric group, which bodes well for how we’re all connecting in this virtual life science economy. Interestingly, I’m able to see a great ‘life line’ in the palm of this diagram, indicating the long life of Comprendia ;).

Will you get actionable information from your LinkedIn Map? I could imagine situations in which you will realize connections to leverage or see gaps in your network which you could remedy as well. Check it out and link to yours below if you’d like, we’ll see how many more networking turkeys there are! William Gunn has posted his, and I’m happy that he considers me as someone who has helped to build his network, and that’s what it’s all about!

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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?

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© bmljenny on Flickr

I was recently looking through my contacts for a specific reason and found many opportunities in other areas, and I also learned more about the status of my network on several levels. Our networks are becoming increasingly important for our professional success, present and future, and they are in a sense ‘living’ so we should tend to them regularly to keep them alive and thriving. I thought about the benefits of tending to my network periodically, say quarterly, and here are my suggestions for the process.

1. Make a list of opportunity areas. Start by identifying all of the areas which you’re looking for opportunities or need growth in. For example, it could be prospecting for your own business or for your clients or colleagues. By now, you know it’s all about karma, so try to think of some ways you could help others. Also think about events that are coming up that you might meet someone at, topics you’d like to learn more about, and areas in which you’d like to improve your network.
2. Make a list of contact lists. If you’re like me, your contacts don’t just exist in one application. Think about places like your personal email application, CRM, LinkedIn, email marketing application, and social media contacts. After you do this you’ll realize these lists are likely fragmented and you’ll need to spend time updating information as you go through the lists. Also, you should look into ways of syncing the information–for example, should you export LinkedIn contacts to update your personal email application? Something to think about as you go through your contacts. If you send a electronic holiday cards like we do, now might be a good time to mark people you’d like to send them to.
3. Look through your contacts. Grab a cup of coffee and take at least an hour to look through all of your contacts. You may be tempted to use search features to narrow down the results for pressing opportunities, but resist this temptation and you’ll soon see the benefits. Hopefully, by browsing, you’ll see things you wouldn’t with a targeted search. Note all contacts relevant to your opportunities, and new ideas may also strike you. Be social and reach out to those who have moved, you’ll likely be surprised at the number of updates. You know we’re big fans of face to face contact–why not plan to spend one day a week or month meeting up with a colleague ‘just because’?
4. Spread a little good karma. Colleague/friend Holly Barnes recently shared a link about how connecting people in your network is a great practice. To me, the article explains a quite lengthy process that I’m not sure I’d have time for on a regular basis, but you get the idea that good karma is something you can never give (and get) enough of. Think of colleagues looking for a job, those that have recently moved, etc.
5. Rinse and repeat. Hopefully you’ve found some great opportunities and learned more than you expected. Growing your network will multiply these benefits, so hopefully this realization will result in more regular growing and tending to your network. It might be a good idea to set calendar reminders to help. It’s also a good time to review your network–is it weak in certain areas? If so, target them and set goals to improve your network in a geographic area, topic, expertise level, etc.

In these days of information overload, we tend to rely on searches for everything, and forget that browsing can result in serendipities that are made more powerful by today’s tools and the simple act of building a good quality network. The image for this post is from another colleague/friend Jenny Reiswig who ‘seeks out serendipity’ in her photography by visiting interesting places like Twentynine Palms. Perhaps it is a very loosely connected metaphor (the photos are gorgeous, I couldn’t resist), but do the work and you never know what you might find.
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You may know that through our work at Comprendia or the San Diego Biotechnology Network that we often need to get in touch with people we don’t know well or at all, whether it’s finding a speaker for the SDBN, or doing business development for a client. We like to think we get pretty good results by following a few simple rules, which are listed below:

• Do your homework. We all get irritating emails every day, from all-out spam to people who clearly don’t understand our business or needs. These people didn’t do their homework, and whether they’re guessing that I need to spice up my love life or to optimize my website, it doesn’t matter, we ignore and are sometimes even offended by these messages. When it comes to ‘cold’ emailing, less is more: better to spend an hour researching a prospect and emailing them a thoughtful and personalized message than to blindly email 10 at a time, something we’ve warned about earlier.
• What’s in it for them? This is where many fail, and it’s funny because it’s so obvious when you’re on the other side. You need to give the person a benefit to the action you are asking them to take. Otherwise, why act? Everyone is busy. Tell them in simple terms how working with you will make their life easier. Not their company, them personally, as our instincts kick in when benefits are expressed in this way. You may need to be creative if what you’re asking has no immediate benefit to them (e.g., obtaining information). Perhaps if they help you now, you can promise to help them later. I sometimes leverage the SDBN or my large network in these situations. I’ve also found that the offer of a free lunch is often irresistible to Ph.D.’s at any age (grad school turns on those genes).
• Don’t be a stranger. Sure, this post is about contacting people you don’t know well…or do you? Any way you can put yourself in context for the person will help, whether it be common LinkedIn connections, interests, or even geography. Of course, the chance of having connections in common is made greater with a larger network, so be sure to grow it as well, both virtually and ‘in real life’ by attending networking events. If you’re lucky enough to get someone to introduce you, that’s even better, just remember the whole karma thing and return the favor (or pay it forward).
• Flattery will get you everywhere. This year I struggled to get a speaker for an SDBN event from a certain company. I sent no less than five emails to people trying to get someone from the senior management to speak. What worked in the end? I contacted a VP myself and indicated how much we wanted them as a speaker. Presumably, the person was flattered that I asked, and even though they were at a high level, they acted on my email when people who were lower on the totem pole were ‘too busy’ for my request.
• Put the ball in YOUR court. One common mistake is to setting yourself up for failure by asking the email recipient to ‘respond if they are interested.’ This works sometimes, but a more foolproof way is to indicate that you will follow up with a phone call. Don’t have their number? Here’s a secret: you can call most companies’ main line and use their directory get to the person you’re interested in. This way, you’re not at a dead end if the person doesn’t reply. Of course, always keep the phone call polite and short if they didn’t reply, as you still may be ‘off the mark’ as to their needs or interests.

We hope these guidelines will help you next time you need to contact someone you don’t know well with a request. As with much of our advice here, rely on feedback to what you’re doing, and if you’re still not getting good results, consider that your product needs improvement (even if that product is you!).

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Facebook is everywhere, from the movie box office, to news about frequent announcements and changes, to your friends and family who are likely interacting there more and more frequently. Facebook’s leveraging its 500 million users to become the gorilla who can sit anywhere it pleases. You may have dismissed it as not being useful for your life science business, but Facebook’s users, and the changes that the company has been making, are affecting many current and future aspects of the web. Below we outline the changes that are most likely to affect life science businesses.

Mark Zuckerberg describes the ‘heart’ of the important changes at the April f8 conference (Facebook’s conference for developers), establishment of an ‘open graph.’ What is it? Zuckerberg explains that before the described changes were made, many different applications were mapping out the connections between people and their interests–for example Yelp maps out restaurant patron experiences shared between friends, and Pandora maps out music interests. At f8 a series of applications were launched which will help to connect much of this information, using Facebook as a hub, to create what he calls the open graph.

Perhaps the most obvious change you’ve noticed as a user is that the ‘Like’ button is showing up everywhere on websites (we even installed one in the sidebar here). This change is made possible with the new applications Facebook has made available, allowing almost any web entity to be ‘liked’ and tracked. In addition, websites can also use a Facebook login rather than an individual one, making it much easier for them to join a website.

I highly suggest listening to Mark Zuckerberg’s f8 keynote speech, as it underlines the broader, optimistic implications for ‘changing the web,’ but it should be pointed out that some see it as a ploy for Facebook to ‘take over’ the web. Somewhat quietly during this time, Facebook forced users to convert all of their interests into ‘Likes’, which served to standardize the information more. For example, my favorite movie is Moonstruck, so I was ‘forced’ to ‘Like’ that page. This is pretty powerful if you think about it–if there is ever a sequel to the movie, Facebook will be THE place to market it, as they can easily market to their exact demographic (not to mention the ability for them to do market research beforehand). In a sense, with this change Facebook made an important step in them ‘owning’ a lot of important real estate on the web.

Some of the other changes Facebook made this year also far reaching and important to note. One is the introduction of ‘Community Pages,’ which pull content from Wikipedia. What does this mean for life science companies? Well, it means that if you have a wikipedia entry, you now have a facebook page which you may have no control over, as wikipedia is crowd sourced (e.g., anybody can edit). For an example, check out Thermo Fisher’s community page.

Also, this week Facebook launched updates to their groups which will allow more interaction, functioning as Yahoo! or Ning groups, but in some ways easier because so many people belong to Facebook. Because this announcement is so new, it’s hard to say how it will affect life science companies. For now, we still recommend that a Facebook Page be made for brands, and you can check out early reactions to the announcement as well.

You may still be wondering what this has to do with your life science business. Consider this: Facebook’s inclusion of wikipedia entries means that there is now a MAP Kinase page. Consider my movie example above–because of Facebook’s reach, they may ‘own’ this on the web, giving them some control, but also allowing you to tap into MAPK aficionados. Now, take it one step further and imagine that all of the products you have related to MAPK could be linked to this entry. Wow. Are you starting to see how powerful these changes are? It’s all part of what’s called the semantic web, and its being thought of from both the life science side and the commerce side–see the Linked Open Data and the Linked Open Commerce websites.

What should you be doing now? I suggest scheduling a meeting with your IT/Web group to discuss the implications for your product catalog. Are there Facebook applications which will help you to engage and learn about your customers more? Check Facebook for community pages related to your company, and replace them with ‘real’ pages which you’ll have more control over. Is Facebook starting to ‘own’ a piece of the web that you are interested in, and if so what should you do about it? As always, contact us with any questions you have, or check out our Social Media for Life Science and Biotechnology Workshop 3 which covers third party applications such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube.

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Comprendia has been invited to present a social media workshop for the chemical industry by Informex, the leading meeting place for buyers and sellers of high-value chemistry for a broad range of applications. Learn more from Informex’s press release about the social media webinar for the chemicals industry, and register here. If you’re interested in hiring Comprendia to train your group, see our life science social media training and workshop opportunities.

You’ve put together your overall life science social media strategy (if not, see Workshop 1 and our other social media training) and it includes third party applications such as Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and YouTube. How do you use these applications to reach out to your customers effectively? The applications are all different, requiring individual strategies, tactics, and methods for determining metrics. Join us August 31st in San Diego or via the web to learn the ‘Rule of 3′s’ for third party social media, and you’ll start reaching out to your customers like never before (almost like a 3D movie, you could say).

In this four hour interactive workshop, offered in San Diego and via webinar, you will learn everything you need to know to implement campaigns on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and YouTube, including:

• Strategies
  • What strategies and themes work with life scientists?
  • Which third party social media applications are my customers using, and how do I target them there?
  • How do I fulfill corporate goals and provide value at the same time?
• Tactics
  • How can I get the most out of my time spent on 3rd party social media?
  • What are the best tips and tools for each application?
  • Where can I find the content I need?
  • How do I get direct leads from 3rd party applications?
  • How can I quickly understand the etiquette for each application?
• Metrics & ROI
  • How do I measure success using external and internal metrics?
  • My management still doesn’t understand the value of third party social media applications–how can I convince them?

As always, we’ll give you plenty of examples specific to life science to help you see things in context. 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 workshop is now available as an on demand webinar lasting 3.5 hours, see the workshops and training page for more details. Printed materials will be mailed to you, so there may be up to a one week waiting period. Register here and contact us with any 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.

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