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?

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

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

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

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

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

Are you a life scientist or marketer planning for 2011? Below, we list resources for you, including a Google calendar which you can add to yours with reminders for major conferences and their due dates for abstracts, etc. We’ve also included editorial calendars and media kits for traditional publications. We’d also like to help marketers learn how to support ’2.0′ publications like blogs and wikis, and we’re working on that, stay tuned!

Life Science Conferences

Here is our list of life science media kits and editorial calendars. Marketers use them to plan their tactical schedules.

Life Science Media Kits, Editorial Calendars & Contacts

To share this post easily cut and paste: Everything You Need For 2011 Life Science Planning http://bit.ly/lifesciplanning

Life Technologies Social Media Word Cloud made using the RSS Feed and Tagxedo (click to enlarge)

Word or tag clouds are visualizations which help us to understand the meaning of an aggregate of text by correlating the size of the words with their prevalence in it. As the title suggests, the picture shown here describes the concept best. While the depictions are often correlated with blogs, twitter streams, and other social media, their utility extends beyond this area. In this post, we list several ways that life science companies can use word clouds to understand customers’ needs and adapt marketing and communication strategies to meet them.

1. Analyzing Social Media Sentiment. For the life science marketer, comments made by life scientists on social media applications represent an ‘amorphous’ form of market research. Instead of direct questions being asked and answered, researchers give candid opinions about research areas, products, events, or anything else they want to talk about. As an example, check out the word cloud made from the Society for Neuroscience 2010 meeting tweets. From this cloud, you can see that important topics at the meeting were Glenn Close‘s talk, an article about spooky coloured auras (from a non-American author), and that the exhibit hall booths were well represented. The raw data must be aggregated and analyzed, these associations may not be clear just from the word cloud. However, it concisely shows the ‘buzz’ at the meeting without having to read a single tweet. As such, word clouds can be used effectively understand and communicate the sentiment from conferences, tweet streams, forums, blogs, etc.
2. Market Research. Although traditional surveys produce data that is more structured than social media sentiment, we’ve found that word clouds can be used to effectively capture important take home messages in market research. As an example, for our client 89 North we surveyed fluorescence researchers to determine the requirements for the fluorXchange, a web 2.0 resource for scientists. We got excellent answers to our open ended questions, and made a word cloud from all of the text. From the visualization, we confirmed that a major ‘pain’ for these researchers was related to improving the signal to noise in their experiments. As a result, we chose to include a wiki along with a forum which would allow them to upload experimental images and fully discuss signal to noise issues. For another example, see the word cloud from our poll of San Diego Biotechnology Network members we used to plan the 2010 meetings.
3. Social Media Messaging and Voice. Just as external social media sentiment is amorphous, a company’s collection of posted content, from different individuals and departments, can be nebulous. The image for this post is from all of Life Technologies‘ (LIFE) social media over the past ten weeks. It is comprised of 16 Twitter accounts, two Facebook pages, and their YouTube channel, you can see the RSS feed here and even subscribe to email updates. The archive contained about 1,000 items posted from LIFE representatives. Note that ‘cell’ is the most prevalent word, and terms relating to DNA sequencing are also prominent. Does the makeup of this cloud represent the topics that their customers are interested in? Also, notice that there a few ‘feeling’ words, such as thanks, friends, and love, but that most of the words are about science or events. Is this the proper level of engagement that LIFE should be using? Interestingly, the word ‘market’ is prominent, due to the fact that they have tweeted about the ‘market size’ of an area in several instances–are life scientists interested in this topic? Also, from many accounts LIFE is trying to make strides into human health, is that reflected in their social media? From the outside it is difficult to determine whether the content and voice matches their objectives. If your company don’t yet have enough social media data to analyze, consider using other communications such as tech service logs. Note: Our purpose is not to be critical of LIFE, they are doing a fantastic job as one of the most active life science companies in social media. We’d like to start a dialog in this area and we are grateful that they are ‘blazing a trail.’
4. Internal Motivation. Word clouds based on customer needs can help life science marketing, sales, and technical service groups convey a common message in everyday conversations, marketing materials, and can even help with product development. Help your team to understand by being creative: post or distribute ‘customer clouds’ in sales guides, give easy-to-update framed clouds for desks, or post them in hallways. Do ‘company clouds’ match your intended message? If not, make your own to emphasize words which more closely match your desired voice and post or distribute them. With cool tools like Tagxedo, you can make them artistic and in any shape, as we did with the LIFE logo above.

Other tools to create tag clouds are Wordle (many artistic options) and TagCrowd (fewer artistic options, but word removal available). In addition, several Twitter and Blog tools will generate word clouds. We did this analysis for free, but it did require that we archive the information for 10 weeks, as the free tools rarely allow for this. At our Social Media for Life Science and Biotechnology Workshop 4 we discuss the paid and free tools, and ways to aggregate raw data from life science social media and analyze it.

If you think that this technology seems too simple, consider that the more complex sentiment analysis software designed for larger brands requires much more data. Try word clouds with the data you have in house, you may be surprised with the insights you will gain and the ability to communicate your message internally and externally.

To share this post easily, cut and paste: A Picture is Worth 1K Words: Using Word Clouds for Life Science Marketing and Communication http://bit.ly/lifecloud

Here is our latest collection of links and tips for life science marketing and social media:

1. Life Technologies’ New Look

Someone could write a book about the different branding of Life Technologies throughout the years. To me, they were the first company to really bring a distinctive branding to life science products, and I think following them is important to learn about how companies can deal with the challenges of consolidation. Check out how they’re using the Life Technologies brand as an umbrella for the many company brands they represent. One former Invitrogen employee told me that it is reminiscent of IVGN’s early days. What do you think? It is also interesting in light of CEO Greg Lucier’s comments that the company will expand into the medical area in the next year. Will this new branding be used, or will they require more differentiation for this market?

2. The Social Network.

I just saw this movie about the genesis of Facebook and I’m ‘assigning’ it to anyone who is interested in creating social media applications for life scientists. While the movie tends to focus on the negatives of the early days of Facebook, it also shows how this application, which faced considerable competition from the likes of MySpace and Friendster, differentiated itself and eventually won the race. To me, it underlined the importance of usability and understanding what motivates people to participate in social networks.

3. HIV/AIDS New Media Guide.

This is a great resource from AIDS.gov which gives both a basic overview as well as examples of how new media is being used to engage HIV/AIDS patients and advocates. Even if you’re trying to engage a different audience, it’s a great site to look through and bookmark. As with much of new media, the site itself engages as it educates.

4. The Semantic Web is coming….

As we’ve discussed, the changes happening on the web aren’t just about people interacting or even your ability to engage your customers more. The data structure of the web is changing and you need to take notice as it will change e-commerce, likely sooner rather than later. Here is one article to pique your interest.

All links can be found under the soundbytes tag on Delicious, and sign up for Comprendia blog email updates to get our mix tapes delivered to your inbox.

We’re starting something new here, inspired by our friends Mike Spear and Walter Jessen, who each provide posts with useful links and summaries regularly. Our ‘flavor’ will be focused on life science & biotech marketing and social media, all meant to keep you up to speed on the interesting things we’ve found during the week. We’re documenting all of the links on the bookmark sharing site Delicious under the ‘soundbytes‘ tag, so you can always reference them (and even sign up for RSS updates–look for the orange RSS symbol). You’ll note that there are many bookmarks there now…we’ve had this in the works for a while. Without further ado, here are our first Sound Bytes!

1. Google Announces ‘Caffeine,’ a new ‘as it happens’ search engine feature.

This link’s a bit outdated, but very important, so I’m including it. Google may be feeling pressure from more timely searches available from Twitter, and introduced this new feature which indexes a ‘subsection of the internet’ quickly. What does this mean for you? We talk about in our workshops and training that search engines love dynamic websites, and this new feature turns this affection up to 11. Which ‘subsection of the internet’ do they index quickly? No one outside Google really knows, but I’m guessing blogs and other social media applications are being indexed quickly. For the Comprendia blog, our posts often ‘hit’ the first page of our target Google search engine keywords within minutes of posting. They may fade away depending on their popularity, but we get great ‘Google Juice’ almost immediately. Meaning? Start that blog yesterday, and post often!

2. More fallout from ScienceBlogs’ ‘PepsiGate’: New Wired Science Bloggers and Bora Zivkovic heads to Scientific American.

We covered ‘PepsiGate,’ Seed Media’s unfortunate episode hiring Pepsico bloggers for ScienceBlogs, and how many bloggers left the popular site. Since that time, many players have ‘stepped to the plate’ to offer these bloggers a home, and Wired Science is one of them. Their effort is certainly one to watch, as is the more ‘home grown’ network Scientopia. This week, the highly respected ex-ScienceBlogs blogger Bora Zivcovik announced he’s helping Scientific American launch a new science blogging network. What does this mean for you, the life science marketer? Advertising on these new sites is definitely a possibility, but I’d like you to think beyond this type of broadcast advertising and think about how you could help these sites in a more context-specific manner. It’s very ironic that the addition of Pepsico to the ScienceBlogs roster caused this cascade of events–if Seed Media had instead chosen a life science company-hosted blog, the outcome would have been very different!

3. Creating Social Media Business Guidelines.

We covered this topic in our Social Media for Life Science and Biotechnology Workshop 2, and as things usually go in this fast paced area, a few great resources have come out since then. Check out this post, it’s a gold mine!

4. RSS feed for Life Technologies Social Media.

Interested in seeing how LIFE is doing social media? We’ve aggregated all of their accounts into a single RSS feed, allowing you to view it in an RSS reader or get email updates. We also created a Twitter list so you can follow them easily. They’re the most active company in life science social media, incorporating many brands, you can learn from them by watching what they’re doing.

That’s all for now, folks, we’ll make another life science marketing mix tape for you in about a week, and sign up for email updates so you won’t miss anything! Stay tuned also for Sound Bytes Videos with tips and tricks from our workshops and training.

To share this post easily, cut and paste: Sound Bytes: Tips For Life Science Marketing & Social Media 9/16/2010 http://bit.ly/soundbytes0916

As consultants, we see that some of our life science and biotech clients are interested in learning how to ‘DIY’ (Do-It-Yourself) marketing and public relations items that were traditionally outsourced. We realize this need for smaller businesses who may have more limited budgets. We offer our suggestions below with the caveat that professional public relations (PR) and marketing firms do have a lot to offer as they have the experience and connections, and as we point out below, a sustained PR campaign requires significant effort. Our guidelines for sending a biotech press release are listed in chronological order.

Start with a message and a plan. The purpose of public relations is to help your company realize its objectives by being perceived in a certain way. For an example, a biotech company may want to be perceived as an excellent drug discovery collaborator so that they will be approached by potential partners. Of course, the perception cannot be far from reality. Once this message and its objectives are clear, a plan should be developed to meet this goal, and it will include other aspects of marketing such as conferences and product launches.

Form relationships with the media. It’s important to start this process early, as of course relationships take time. Due to the changes in the media landscape, publications are now more ‘hungry’ for biotech and scientific information, so they may welcome your ideas more readily. Part of your PR plan should include target publications in which editorial coverage (or ‘earned media’) will help you to achieve your goal. You’re likely also advertising in these publications, so ask your salesperson to connect you with the editorial staff. It also helps to review the editorial calendars of these publications, so that you can coordinate your schedule with theirs.

Make the release newsworthy. One of the results of the changes in the media landscape is that now that everyone can send a press release…everyone does, flooding the internet with commercial ‘news.’ Ask yourself before sending the press release, is it news? Putting out a string of press releases does not entail a PR strategy. If you decide your release does count as news, tie it into biotech business trends and life science research news. Send personal emails to your top targets, explaining to them why the story would be good for their publication. Or, better yet, call them; the most sought after journalists get many emails, calling may be a way to stand out. Consider embargoing the press release to your top targets as well, giving them time to cover the story in more depth, although this is not a guarantee you’ll get good coverage.

Use a press release distribution service. We’ve seen life science companies take the ‘DIY’ concept to the extreme, defining a ‘press release’ as a blurb on their website and an email blast. While you may have a terrific network and a great distribution list (which we’ve warned against abusing), for the time being, distribution services such as Marketwire (which is the service we suggest) will get your release in front of many people and also help you with SEO (search engine optimization). The cost will be between $500 and $1000, depending on the length and options you choose. If it sounds too expensive for the number of releases you plan to send, then you may want to consider that you’re sending too many.

Consider SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Is it your company’s goal to be the leading provider of kinase assays? Make sure these keywords appear prominently in your release, and that there are links to your website as well. As with many other marketing activities, we’re big proponents of using Google Analytics/Adwords data to find what your customers or target audience are searching for. This will help you to get the most out of the ‘Google Juice’ you’ll get out of your release, and many of the distribution services also have SEO tools to help you.

Use social media. You knew this suggesting was coming, if you’ve been reading this blog. Build your social media network so that you can send the information to people who care about your company’s news. As always, engage, don’t broadcast, and see our social media training and workshops if you need help. Using social media for PR could be an entire blog post so we’ll keep this short in anticipation of that…

Things will continue to change, and it’s possible that in a year or so we’ll adjust this list, perhaps making ‘social media PR’ #1. One thing that will likely remain the same is the importance of relationships in getting attention for your company’s news. As the ‘DIY PR Pro’ for your company, you should now consider this part of your daily routine!

To share this post easily, cut and paste: How To DIY Your Biotech Press Release http://bit.ly/dk6K7n

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.

We’ve put together a list of life science wikis on the SDBN site. It’s a resource for life scientists, and also a great resource for life science companies to consider, and we found a nice example of a company who is using a wiki well. If you’d like to learn more about using a wiki, come to our June 22nd Social Media for Life Science and Biotechnology Workshop in San Diego, where we’ll cover the Basics, Benefits, Best Practices, and Biotech examples. Earlybird registration ends Wednesday, don’t be late! We’ll also be offering the workshop virtually and perhaps in your area soon, contact us for more details.

It’s hard to believe that just two years ago in June of 2008, I started Comprendia. Colleagues at Stinson Brand Innovation helped me with a logo and branding, and I set up the Comprendia website using the free WordPress platform. Now, in June 2010, we find ourselves as a two year old company with what I consider to be a good reputation and solid experience. Maybe I have too many friends with little kids, but I can’t help but to try to think about what we’ve learned, and what we have yet to learn, from a two year old child’s perspective. Here goes!

Sharing is good. A lot of what we find ourselves doing is providing resources for others, whether they’re scientists in the San Diego Biotechnology Network (SDBN), life science marketing professionals, or any of our network of around 9,000 biotechnology professionals. Are we good people? Sure, but we also see benefits from sharing daily, which gives us a business case to continue. We get new leads, we learn from our peers and our clients, and we get many perks from being connected, such as media access to conferences, etc. In our two years, we’ve definitely learned the benefits from sharing, much as a two year old learns that sharing a toy is the right thing to do.

Learn from your mistakes. I love telling people about the mistakes I made early on, so we can all learn from them. Here is one: I set up a social network for biotech marketers, thinking it would be a great way for us to share experiences and connect. What I didn’t realize in these early days is that many of these free standing networks take a LOT of effort to get going, because they don’t become useful until a minimum number of people join, something called the network effect. So, the group didn’t ever take off, but we did succeed in creating a great group on LinkedIn, where we can take advantage of the fact that so many biotech marketers are already there. We learned from this mistake, and make sure that our clients don’t make them as well. We’ve encapsulated these ideas in our STIR Social Media system to help life science companies create successful campaigns and applications.

You can’t do it all by yourself. We’re lucky to have many great partners who help us to meet our clients’ needs, including Stinson Brand Innovation and WHITECOAT Strategies. We’ve also been very lucky to hire Rebecca Watson-Beattie as Business Development manager, she has brought a wealth of experience and focus to Comprendia. If you’ve met her you know, she’s a great asset and a pleasure to work with. We’ll also be bringing on Julie Mazziotta soon as our WordPress Web and Social Media Manager. Julie’s web, search engine optimization (SEO), and social media experience will help us and our clients to grow. Related to the first point, through our network, we continue to meet exceptional companies and individuals to work with and are very excited about the capabilities we will be able to offer our clients in the months and years to come.

Saying ‘No’ can be empowering. Every small business goes through growing pains–what should our focus be, and which projects should we take on? Like a two year old, we are learning that there are choices we can make that will affect our lives. Sometimes this means saying ‘no’ to some project areas and focusing on where we can have the biggest impact. This strategy benefits everyone, as we prosper, and our clients get the best we have to offer. So, while we don’t say ‘no’ quite as much as a terrible two year old, we hope that by continuing to focus on our strengths, that we’ll be able to help companies focus on theirs as well. If you’ve been reading this blog, hopefully you know, but to clarify, we are a full service marketing firm specializing in web-based tools and social media.

What we can do is quite remarkable. We hope that by building Comprendia and the SDBN from the ground up, you can see what is possible, even for a small outfit. In our Bootstrapping Biotech event with the SDBN last year, we talked about all the cheap or free tools which empower small companies, and our dream is that our success can help yours as well. Like a two year old, we can think about what it was like to crawl, and walk, and now how great it is to now be able to run. Running along with others is perhaps the most fun of all, and our dream is that you’ll all realize how much is possible with today’s tools, and leverage them for your benefit.

It’s a big, wonderful world we live in. These past two years have been nothing short of fantastic. We’ve met so many great people, from famous scientists, to amazing entrepreneurs (latest here), to professionals who are making the best of this bad economy. The number of fantastic life science and biotechnology product and application ideas we’ve heard about over these two years leaves us in awe, and like a two year old we’re anxious to explore and see what’s around the next corner. We sincerely hope that, also like a two year old, we’ve been able to soak up a fraction of your collective knowledge and make sense of it in a way that benefits the community.

Like a two year old, we will grow a lot over the next few years, perhaps in ways we cannot imagine right now. We’ll be unveiling some great client projects over the next year, which we think will open up some new doors in life science marketing. Stay tuned!

To share this post easily, cut and paste: Comprendia Turns Two! What We’ve Learned, and Are Still Learning… http://bit.ly/avg7j6