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Here’s a presentation I gave at the University of Minnesota about networking, including audio. I got great rapport from the grad students and they are hungry to network! We thought it would be great if companies or organizations sponsored networking events, seems like a win-win for all, and we do it in San Diego successfully. Let us know if you’re interested in holding events in your region!

A recent article from the Huffington Post states that social networks for scientists won’t work because there is no incentive from a career perspective. The piece focuses on ResearchGate and takes a stab at the Economist’s article about the community. Here at Comprendia, we’ve never advocated that Facebook should be recreated for scientists, as there are 700,000+ life science graduates in the US already using the application,* and they are likely already connected there to lab mates and colleagues. Rather, we should broaden our idea of the ‘social network’ to include any online community of scientists, not just those which are similar to Facebook. The value of social networks for scientists lies in faster access to information relevant to their research and the communities that are made more available by new tools. Here are 6 successful examples which can be used to understand scientific social communities.

1. Facebook Pages & LinkedIn Groups. Scientists have used mailing lists and forums for years. Facebook pages and LinkedIn groups are a ’2.0′ version of them with the benefits of centralization and easier access to participants. Life science companies, most notably Life Technologies, have fostered social networks in the form of Facebook pages centered on a topic. We discussed successful life science Facebook pages in the past, and encourage you to visit the Molecular Probes page and NEB’s Engaging Epigenetics Experts page (our client) to see vibrant networks on Facebook centered around a scientific topic. Life Technologies in itself has created a social network of 100K life scientists centered around about 10 product and brand Facebook pages. Additionally, many thriving life science and biotech LinkedIn groups exist, see our list on our partner San Diego Biotechnology Network site. Fantastic LinkedIn groups surrounding topics such as protein and antibody purification exist, but their discussions are closed to those that aren’t in the group (which we hope will change). You can check out the active discussions in this Medicinal Chemistry and Drug Discovery group (which was started by a company).
2. Twitter Hashtags. Scientists use Twitter to share scientific blog posts and news, to find friends and colleagues around a topic or event, and sometimes to vent about their situation. Hashtags, which are text identifiers for status updates on a topic, allow a Twitter social network to form around it, something we’ve covered in depth. Some that are ongoing are #iamscience, #phdchat, and #icanhazpdf, and you can see what conversations they follow by using our guide. Twitter status updates tagged with #scio12, the ScienceOnline2012 conference in January resulted from a ‘community’ of almost 4,500 Twitterers (10 times the attendance) who Tweeted more than 38,000 updates about the conference. Hashtag ‘communities’ can also communicate as a group to the public and affect change (see #5 below).
3. ScienceOnline. Speaking of which. The main conference takes place in January in North Carolina, and is growing by leaps and bounds. Another ScienceOnline event takes place in London in the fall each year, there are related events in New York monthly, and events are planned for the bay area and Seattle/Vancouver as well (Lou Woodley from Nature, personal communication). The IRL (in real life) events are full of hundreds of enthusiastic science communicators who advance the field exponentially, and the conversation takes place year round on Twitter.
4. True Social Networks. As we wrote about a year ago, some of the bona fide social networks have a great following. I’m not sure why Mark Drapeau (the author of the Huffington post article ) is not impressed by ResearchGate’s 1.4 million users, as we know that scientists don’t have time for frivolous endeavors, especially when they’re under the watchful eye of their Principal Investigator. As we noted in our post a year ago, there has to be a value for them to participate, and the successful ones center around research publications. BiomedExperts, CiteULike, ResearchBlogging, and ResearchGate had the highest traffic in our quick study, and they all rely heavily on publications. I like to say that PubMed was the first social network for scientists. Back in ‘my day,’ I learned about collaborators through PubMed, and I got paper copies of their publications when I had time for a trip to the library (yes, I’m old). I usually had to wait for a conference to talk at length with fellow scientists, although we did have email. Today, the conversation can take place all year long, with new connections being made with those who haven’t published in peer reviewed journals yet. These social networks, with access to information and advice from colleagues much more quickly, will have a definite impact on scientists’ careers, contrary to the claims in the Huffington Post article.
5. Publication Sharing/Open Access. Related to the last point is a subject that requires its own mention as it transverses from proper social networks to desktop applications, Twitter, and even a movement to make research publications more accessible. Mendeley is the rock star of the publication sharing/open access genre, boasting 1.77 million users who are sharing 169 million publications. When we speak with life scientists at conferences or client visits, we often hear about the application even from those who are not strong believers in social media. Additionally, these applications have whetted scientists’ appetites for more open access to publications. This thirst for more accessible knowledge was evidenced by the big backlash to the Research Works Act, which limited access to research findings and was brought down by a scientific social network distributed on Twitter (hashtag #RWA) and the blogosphere.
6. Blogs. Colleague William Gunn (at Mendeley) said in a presentation we made together in San Diego a few years ago “blogs were one of the first forms of social media for scientists.” Sometimes these social networks are a bit harder to get a comprehensive understanding of as an outsider, but check out the comments for popular blogs such as ‘In The Pipeline‘ where you’ll see that even drug discovery chemists, stalwarts of hard core life science, participate in blogging communities. A thriving ecosystem of science blogs is visualized in this Google document created by Brian Reid and maintained by the community. Blog aggregators such as ResearchBlogging or ScienceSeeker feature hundreds of blogs and likely a comparable number of communities focused around individual research topics.

The scientist that is described in the Huffington Post article is preoccupied only with the end result of publications, not improving the path towards them. When I was a bench scientist in the 90′s, my limited access to information and colleagues was imposed upon me by the era. I can see that I would have grown into my current career choice much more quickly if given greater access to them. At conferences and networking events today, we are seeing a transition, albeit slowly, to a new breed of scientists who understand the importance of scientific networks. We need to adjust our definition of scientific social networks to understand the next steps towards helping scientists use them to thrive.

What areas do you think the organizations named, or communities themselves should focus on to take scientific social networks to the next level?

*According to the Facebook advertising application.

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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.

Sign up for Comprendia blog email updates to get our demos and how to videos delivered to your inbox, and subscribe to our YouTube channel.

To share this post easily cut and paste: Video Bytes: Demos and ‘How To’ Resources for Life Science Marketing & Social Media 3/27/2011 http://bit.ly/vidbytes0327

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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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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