What’s the news from the biggest healthcare investment conference, JP Morgan, happening this week in San Francisco? We’ve created a Tweet cloud of almost 1800 Twitter status updates tagged with #jpm12. Each word is linked to a Twitter search, and you can also see an archive here. How well do you think the Tweets reflect the news and sentiment at the conference? If you’d like a more in depth analysis, contact us.

To share this post easily, cut and paste: JP Morgan Healthcare Conference Tweet Cloud #jpm12 http://bit.ly/jpmcloud

Yes, in fact, we are obsessed with Twitter hashtags, terms that are added to status updates surrounding a topic, event, or chat. They give insights into the discussions and trends by anyone on Twitter who wants to join in, and allow us to discover new people and ideas. We track all the life science hashtags we’ve found, with a bent towards the research tools area (e.g., non-FDA regulated products). We’ve analyzed the utilization of all hashtags in our compilation and have identified the top 10 in 2011 based on the number of Twitter status updates tagged with them. We’re also enamored with word clouds and have displayed them in a clickable image below linked to a Twitter search of the term, the largest words indicating the top hashtags in 2011 (note Twitter searches go back only 8 days, some links may give no results).

We’ve listed the top ten in the table below. Note that this list is by no means perfect, we’ve tried our best to find all the life science hashtags, but may have missed a few, be sure to comment below if you’d like us to track others. Additionally, some topics may extend outside of life science, such as #phdchat. The top ten indicate the versatility of hashtags to discuss topics, events, or to have a targeted chat. It is interesting also to note the prevalence of open access themes, and the influence of the ‘BlogFather‘ Bora Zivkovic who is heavily involved with three of the top 10: #openaccess, #scio12, and #sciamblogs. It shows how digital influencers can impact the landscape of an ecosystem. Two ‘traditional’ conferences made the list, #sfn11 and #bio2011. There are no life science company hashtags in the list, which is of course a big opportunity. A Twitter user recently started a meme with the hashtag #chemistrythemovie, generating 800 Tweets in a few days, something that should make life science companies drool.

The Top 10 Life Science Twitter Hashtags of 2011

Hashtag	Type	Description
#phdchat	chat	Weekly discussion/forum between aspiring and current PhD/doctoral researchers and supervisors.
#biotech	topic	Biotechnology
#scio12	event	ScienceOnline 2012
#sciamblogs	topic	Scientific American Blogs
#openaccess	topic	Open access for scholarly publications
#biochat	chat	Biofuels focused chat
#singularityu	topic/event	Singularity University
#stemcell	topic	Stem cells
#sfn11	event	Society for Neuroscience 2011 Meeting
#bio2011	topic	Biotechnology Industry Organization 2011 Conference

Outside of hashtags, life science terms can also be tracked to pick up trends and find influencers, let us know if we can help you with a Social Media Compass analysis.

If you’ve been reading this blog, you know we’re crazy about word clouds, a way to visualize text data that is mostly associated with social media content such as in blogs. However, they are also being utilized in other areas, and were even featured on a recent cover of Science magazine. As part of our new Social Media Toolbox series, we’ll show you how to use word clouds to understand how your life science company is found and perceived by your customers through search engines.

Why do this? You of course know what your best selling products are. Do the needs or ‘pains’ these products meet align with the top searches that customers, or even non-customers, use to find your website? We did the below exercise with our partner site, the San Diego Biotechnology Network (SDBN), and made some useful observations. Below, we list the steps to create Google Analytics keywords word clouds, and show what can be learned.

1. You will need to install Google Analytics (it’s free) and have at least six months of data to do this.
2. Log in to Google Analytics and choose “Traffic Sources->Keywords” on the left menu.
3. Choose a six month period using the calendar menu at the top right.
4. Using the “Show Rows” menu at the bottom right, choose 250 rows.
5. Go back to the top and click on the “Export” button at the top left (just above the word “Keywords” above the chart). Click on “CSV for Excel” and download.
6. The Excel spreadsheet will contain your keywords (scroll down to see) in the first column, with the number of searches in the second. The first word cloud we’ll make will use the number of searches as a factor to determine the size of the words.
7. In Excel, create a column between 1 and 2 and fill each cell of the top 50 rows with “:”. This will allow us to cut and paste into Wordle with a “:” separating the words and their weight, a format it requires.
8. Open up Wordle in your web browser and choose the “advanced” tab. From Excel, copy rows 1-3 for the 50 top keywords into the top entry blank of wordle. The first few lines of our paste looks like this:

   sdbn    :    700
   san diego biotech companies list    :    477
   biotech companies in san diego    :    391

   The resulting word cloud is below (click to enlarge).
   
   From this cloud, we learned that the directory of San Diego Biotech Companies is one of the major reasons people visit the site. The weighting helps us to understand this well, as most other searches are dwarfed.

9. The above cloud considers the phrases people use to search, and is useful, but we also wanted to dissect the searches further and look at what words people use to search, taking advantage of analyzing the so-called “long tail.” For the next cloud, we did some trial and error and found that using the top 250 search terms worked best. Since we thought ahead and asked you to download these already, go back to your spreadsheet and copy and paste the 250 cells from column 1.
10. We used a program called Tagxedo to create our “long tail” word cloud, as it has more options. Here, you can play around with the maximum number of words in the cloud, and we won’t give you the options we used as it will vary. This is a very subjective process, so feel free to massage the data (it’s OK!) to look for trends. Our long tail word cloud is below (click to enlarge).
    From this cloud, we learned that the word “biotech” is used much more frequently in Google searches than the word “biotechnology,” and that networking is very important. These two insights would have been lost if we hadn’t done the long tail word cloud.

With just a few steps with these free tools, we’ve come up with some strategic and tactical actionable items for the SDBN from the Google Analytics word clouds:

1. Build upon the biotech company directory. Consider ways to get more ROI and/or leads out of this resource.
2. Choose the term “biotech” in web content over “biotechnology,” but include both.
3. Ensure that SDBN events provide plenty of networking.

The SDBN website is relatively simple with few products, so we analyzed the whole site, but Google Analytics has many ways you can slice and dice the data to meet your needs. You can also set up conversions to see which search terms are leading to sales. Do the word clouds for your brand, or product line, match what you expected? Your products may meet a customer ‘pain’ that you did not know about. Of course, the content on your site must provide ‘clues’ to the issues, one of the reasons we promote thinking about customer pain on a broader level. Word clouds are also great for sharing what you’ve learned with your group or the management.

This post is the first in our Social Media Toolbox series, and we also cover Google and other applications in our Workshops and Training. Sign up for email updates so you won’t miss any of our tips and tricks.

To share this post easily, cut and paste: Using Google Analytics Word Clouds To Analyze Your Life Science Brand http://bit.ly/hC0A6z

Thanks for your support in 2010 and we hope to see more of you in 2011!

Mary Canady & Rebecca Watson-Beattie
Comprendia & San Diego Biotechnology Network

(Image created using Tagxedo and it’s a word cloud from the content of our blog. Clicking on each word searches our website for the term! We love word clouds…)

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