You’ve heard that content is king when it comes to improving traffic to your website and generating leads or ‘converting’ visitors to paying customers. Relevant content will bring more people to your site through Google searches, and by engaging them they’re more likely to become customers. That’s great, how do life science companies find the time and material to add to their websites? As we’ve discussed before, life science companies have been generating great content for years, but it’s not always web-friendly. In this post, we list five great ways to add lead-generating content to your life science website. Having a blog is a great ‘catch all’ for this content, but you may find a way to work some of these items into your website without one.

1. Webinars. As we’ve discussed, webinars are a great way to give leads useful information while at the same time introducing them to your capabilities. While you don’t want to give away the secrets to your success, your company has expertise that can be shared, resulting in a useful presentation which may lead some viewers to buy your products or hire you for services.
2. Publication reviews. Many researchers are getting squeezed in different ways these days, two of the biggest are time and money. Reviewing an important publication in your field saves them both of these precious resources, and also shows them that you know the field well. Also, the reviews will be full of words relevant to your products and customer needs, improving search engine optimization (SEO) and bringing new leads to your website.
3. Application notes. These are nothing new to life science companies, application notes show an example of a product being used in an experiment. Here’s an example from GE Healthcare, and note it’s in PDF form, resulting in another step to download it. Think of the researcher looking for information on their smart phone in the cold room–will they take the time to download and view? Make application notes more accessible by converting them to html, and benefit from better SEO, as html is indexed by search engines more readily than PDFs.
4. FAQs. Think about the questions your technical service team answers over and over again, and how many people are also typing the same query into Google. Kill two birds with one stone by putting these online—you’ll answer your customers’ questions as well as bring new leads to your site. A quick Google search shows GE Healthcare’s on top of this as well.
5. Researcher profiles. Looking at independent science blogs can provide ideas for company blogs, and here’s a nice example of a researcher profile from the Protein Wrangler, a biochemist in Texas who we met on Twitter. The podcast he’s created might not be as friendly for SEO and generating leads, but a text transcript could be added. It’s a great way to show your connection to research thought leaders and to help the scientists out as well by highlighting their work.

While we’ve listed what we think are ‘easy’ ways to add content to your life science website, it will still require effort. However, the benefits of improved SEO and lead generation are worth it. When updating your website, make sure that you’ve integrated methods to capture the leads wherever possible, but don’t force people to sign up before they can view the content. Additionally, by making your website more informative and web-friendly, you’ll find your sales, technical service, and other teams will appreciate and utilize it as well.

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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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Comprendia is dedicated to improving communication in life science and biotechnology, and towards that end we are big proponents of social media. Our Social Media for Life Science and Biotechnology Workshop 2: The 4 B’s of First Party Applications interactive webinar will take place July 28th from 8 a.m.-12 p.m. Pacific Time. During this four hour workshop, you’ll learn how to build web 2.0 applications including blogs, forums, wikis, and how to generate meaningful content for life scientists. For each strategy or application, you’ll learn the 4 B’s crucial to attracting scientists and achieving a good ROI: the Basics, Benefits, Best Practices, and Biotech Examples. Register here or contact us if you’re interested in a private or customized version of the workshop.

We also offer training for social media applications such as Twitter, WordPress, LinkedIn, and Facebook, check out our Social Media Training and Workshops page for more information. We can also customize the training for your business, contact us for more information.

We think it’s great that we can count 33 life science company blogs on our list, and we applaud those companies who are leveraging this flavor of social media. You may know that we are blog aficionados, however, and that we are very…ahem…opinionated as to how corporate blogs should be designed, both strategically and tactically. While I’m hesitant to specifically call out blogs that need improvement, I’ll provide my top five ‘wishes’ for them below to help life science companies succeed.

Use WordPress.org. There are several ways in which you can implement a blog ranging from 3rd party sites (e.g., WordPress.com, TypePad) which will host the site for you, to software that is installed on your web server (e.g., WordPress.org). Installing WordPress.org may take a bit longer at the very beginning, but it offers much more flexibility, and the benefits far outweigh any initial delays (which really should be minimal because the software is constantly becoming easier to install and use). WordPress.org is more versatile because there is much more control over the interface and functionality of your blog. WordPress.org installations allow access to hundreds of modules called themes and plugins, giving unlimited interface and branding options. We see several life science companies who’ve produced a blog that looks nothing like their website and has very limited functionality, likely because they’re using 3rd party software with fewer options. As we’ll discuss in the next item, this flexibility allows you to extend the brand of your website. As we explained in an earlier post describing our STIR Social Media system, engaging scientists and maximizing return on investment (ROI) requires creating applications with very specific attributes, so having maximal flexibility is important. (Note: WordPress.com and WordPress.org utilize the same software, the only difference is in where it is installed.)

Think carefully about branding. Everything about your blog should meet the high standards you have for your website. This includes all the hard work you’ve put into your main website interface and ensuring that your brand is represented accurately. We would like to see more life science companies remembering the importance of branding, as many of the blogs have little resemblance to their corporate site. As pointed out by social media guru Chris Brogan in his book Trust Agents, a big part of success in social media comes from garnering trust from your audience. Think about it, would you trust a blog from a company which had no resemblance to the branding you’ve come to expect from them? The MO BIO Laboratories blog is perhaps the best example of a well branded, integrated blog.

Choose a unifying content theme. Alleviating customer ‘pains’ is a good strategy for engaging scientists and achieving a good ROI with social media, something we discuss often. Learn about the biggest issues customers have in your product area, and develop a blog theme which addresses it. Stay focused on this theme, so that scientists know where to turn to with a problem. We see some life science companies having difficulties in this area, they blog about diverse topics which may be interesting, but don’t meet customer needs. A great example of a company that does it well is Accelrys–their blog is targeted and seems to fill a niche for scientists who have questions about their informatics products.

Don’t reinvent the wheel. Along the same lines as extending your brand and having a consistent theme, is to rely on the same resources your company has been using for years to engage customers. We strongly believe that life science companies have been using social media-like strategies and tactics for years, by supplying useful newsletters, posters, and online applications. Why not breathe some fresh life into these resources, providing updates and more web-friendly versions of newsletters, application notes, etc. on your blog? Taking a look at what has worked well in the past will also point you towards a unifying theme for your blog.

Think outside the blog. Some companies who decide they need a blog forget about the the ‘social’ component of ‘social media.’ Personal bloggers start blogs for the love of their subject matter, and naturally seek out other bloggers, interacting with them by leaving comments on their blogs, etc. This is a major part of the reason blogs do so well with search engines–fellow bloggers link to each other, providing the inbound links that show search engines that a website’s content is highly regarded and worth a high search rank. This may sound like just an algorithm, but experience and common sense points to the conclusion that those who engage with the community are more knowledgeable and trustworthy. We’ve seen many life science company blogs set up as silos–independent of their corporate website, and with few noticeable ties to other blogs, twitter/microblogging, etc. (we may be wrong, correct us below!). An example is the Accelrys blog–no blogroll and a link to a twitter account that is inconsistently updated and mostly non-interactive (sorry, had to throw one criticism in!). Those of us who employ many facets of social media know that a synergistic strategy is crucial to success for many reasons, including achieving more engagement, benefiting from the community, and getting more leads. We want life science companies to be successful with social media, and would love to see you engaging with the community more.

We’ll be talking more in depth about first party social media applications such as blogging at our June 22nd Social Media for Life Science and Biotechnology Workshop in San Diego. We’d also be happy to give you training or a free consultation to help you get the most out of social media. Contact us for more information, and be sure to subscribe to this blog so you’ll get tips like these. Also, why not start engaging more by leaving a comment below?

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Yes, I have a very large social media soap box, which I climb upon often to preach. One of the reasons I’m so passionate about talking about it is that it has many benefits that we reap daily. Also, unless you participate in it, it is difficult to understand why it is so powerful. Blogging is one activity that has clear benefits for a business, and we’ve outlined some of the most important ones below.

Opportunity. Comprendia realized this benefit almost immediately after setting up our blog in June 2008. I was invited to blog for the Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO) at the meeting soon afterward, and was also asked in 2009. From these great opportunities for exposure, to regularly receiving complimentary conference admittance, to having a good reason to talk to everyone from prospective clients to famous scientists, we’ve reaped many rewards from our blog.

Website SEO (Search Engine Optimization). I recently talked to someone at a biotech company who was puzzled by the fact that content on their blog was ranked higher in web searches than their website pages. Why does this happen? Search engines love blogs and tend towards ranking their posts higher than other content. Now, while getting traffic to your website is only part of the equation, continually creating fresh content for your blog and monitoring what posts gain the most traffic help you to understand your customers better.

Education. What’s new in your field, and what are your customers (and competitors) up to? Blogging is a great way to pull your head out of the daily grind and think about these topics, which are obviously very important for your business. We learn a lot not only in researching for our posts, but also in the feedback we receive after we post, and in participating in the blogging community for our field.

Enjoyment. I’ll admit it, I’m addicted to blogging. It allows me to express myself, begin interesting discussions, and learn what is important to others. The scientist in me likes the possibility of analyzing the information, the marketer in me likes finding the ‘perfect’ image for each post. Am I part of a strange new ‘blogging breed?’ No, if you’ve been following this blog, you know that I’m a strong believer that we’ve been moving towards social media naturally for many years. Some have postulated that traits that make people good bloggers are nothing new.

In summary? Try it, you’ll not only like it, but you and your business will benefit from it. You may even be able to add a few items to this list. Also, software such as WordPress makes it easier than ever, check out our guide to get started.

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We’re really big WordPress fans here. It’s free, it’s powerful, and it’s popular, meaning that it is constantly improving. Like any free software, however, it doesn’t come with any formal support or guarantees, so keep that in mind when considering things like security and backups. We recommend using the fully featured version of WordPress that is self-hosted, because there is much more control and flexibility, but you can also set up a blog at wordpress.com if you don’t have the capabilities (note that you won’t be able to add all of the plugins below). We covered the basics of WordPress in an earlier post, and provided some resources to learn.

Below is our list of plugins that we automatically install or activate for our own blogs or our clients. They are all available in the full installation, and the newest versions (2.8+) allow you to search for and add them easily via the ‘Plugins->Add New’ feature on the left menu of the Admin panel. Check them out and contact us if you need more help:

1. Google XML Sitemaps. An important part of your blog is to make sure it has good search engine optimization (SEO). Google appreciates ‘help’ from you in knowing when there is new content on your blog, and this plugin will generate a sitemap and send it to Google periodically. This will help your SEO, so we highly recommend installing and configuring it.
2. All in One SEO Pack. This pack makes sure that your blog content is optimized for SEO. It needs to be configured, as well, and is by no means automatic, read the documentation and do as you are directed to improve your SEO–this may mean adding content to each blog post, but it’s worth it.
3. Redirection. This plugin is handy if you want to make ‘friendly’ or memorable URLs for blog posts that you’d like to promote. For example, for our monthly events with the San Diego Biotechnology Network, we make the URL ‘http://sdbn.org/december’ for the December event, etc. This makes it not only easy for our members, but for me in promoting it on Twitter, etc. If you foresee needing this capability, add this plugin.
4. Akismet. This plugin comes installed as default, and it helps enormously to weed out spam. However, there’s a confusing ‘activation’ that you need to do for this plugin. You need to get an account on wordpress.com to get a key to activate it. If you have a self-hosted blog, you’ll likely not need this account for other purposes, so it’s a bit confusing, but activation of the plugin is worth it, as otherwise your email will soon be flooded with either obscene or vague, flattering comments meant only to promote the person who posted it.
5. WP-DB-Backup. It is very important that you make frequent backups of your blog, and this plugin will do that for you. A few caveats–make sure that you set it up and that the backups are stored outside of your ISP. Also, take the time to do an extra check. Make sure that you know how to restore your blog from these backups, and document a procedure for doing so. If your blog is hacked, or goes down, the last thing you want is to have to figure out how to restore it while you’re stressed out that it’s down. It’s also possible that this backup plugin is not best for your system–if not, check around for others.
6. TweetMeme Button. In order to get your blog more exposure, you want to make it as easy as possible for people to share your content. The TweetMeme button allows people on Twitter to share your posts using the button on the top left of every post (including this one). More sharing means more readers, which is always good, and as we covered in a previous post, making things as easy as possible helps as well.
7. Sociable. Along this same vein, the Sociable plugin allows people to bookmark or share your content in a variety of ways. Configure it with the services you think your readers use, and the options will appear at the bottom of each post (including this one). There are even options for creating PDFs and printer-friendly versions of your blog posts, which can help your posts to have more ‘spreadability.’
8. WordPress Related Posts. You want your readers to stay on your blog and read as much of your content as possible, right? Showing them related posts helps you with this. It’s pretty self-explanatory, check below for an example.
9. Twitter for WordPress. WordPress sites are by default dynamic, changing often, and this is essential for your website to be more ‘web 2.0′ and compete with other sites. A great way to show your readers that you’re active is to display your Twitter feed in your sidebar, as we do here.

That’s our list of essential plugins, and of course we use others depending on the situation, and we encourage you to browse the WordPress Plugins page for more ideas–they show popular plugins, which can help. Also, look at other blogs and pay attention to what ‘attracts’ you as a reader–chances are those features are a good bet on your blog as well.

Which plugins have you found to be ‘essential’? We’d love to hear, leave them below! The great thing about WordPress is sharing ideas and having all benefit from the collective knowledge.

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A common theme, and something that is very satisfying with our work, is that through our actions we show biotech and life science companies how they can use tools such as social media to grow as we have. About six months ago at a San Diego Biotechnology Network event, we gave out CDs with a few of our Biotechnology Marketing 101 presentations. Cynthia Davenport, Ph.D., Founder of TigerTox Pharmaceutical Toxicology Services, received one, and actually looked at them and gave us a call (very cool when things work as intended!).

After meeting with Cynthia, we decided that the best way to get started was with a BioStartup™ Marketing Kit, providing her with a logo, branding, and website in one package. We started by gathering TigerTox’s needs through our online Creative Briefs, a process we utilize to assess high-level objectives, tactical details, and to tease out aspects important for positioning companies and products. The Creative Brief process is a mainstay of traditional marketing, and we have made it more accessible to our clients through our online forms and have also tailored them for new tools such as social media.

We received Cynthia’s Creative Briefs and started with her logo. The process went quickly because she knew what she liked (and didn’t!) and we refined the logo in a few rounds. Communication and setting expectations are key in the process. The TigerTox logo is simple, expressive of her company’s name, versatile, and is part of a larger branding of the company as a whole. What we love about the Creative Brief process is that we can always look to it for guidance and keep on track to be sure objectives are met.

Next, we developed a website and ‘ToxInsights’ blog for TigerTox. We leveraged WordPress, great software which provides a framework for professional, dynamic, and easily administered websites (even high-powered blogs like Johnson & Johnson’s JNJBTW use it). We utilized our programming and design skills to created a branded site which is highly customized, allowing for integration with Twitter, RSS feeds, and search engine optimization (SEO).

We also provided in-depth technical and social media training to TigerTox, allowing Cynthia and her associates to hit the ground running–they’ve already got several blog posts done. We even helped TigerTox to easily find resources to help with blogging and Twitter through a customized RSS feed. Our background in life science as well as social media helps us to anticipate our clients’ needs, as we’ve used the tools firsthand to reach scientists. We also help companies develop a Social Media Charter™ to guide you and ensure that objectives are met, you can learn more on our Social Media Capabilities page.

To summarize, we GREATLY enjoyed working with TigerTox and we love the fact that they looked to us for inspiration. We hope that you’ll in turn be inspired by them to develop your business or products, as they truly ‘get it’ and have a great product for drug development. We plan to give more examples and resources at the upcoming Bootstrapping Biotech event with the San Diego Biotechnology Network October 29th. Not in town? We’re videotaping it and will provide links afterward. Also, contact us for a free consultation, perhaps the best way to become inspired!

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When I started Comprendia little over a year ago, I actually had some doubt as to whether WordPress, a software popular for blogging, could be used to create my entire site. With the knowledge I had of web programming and WordPress, some through my personal usage, I quickly developed a branded, web 2.0 site. Now, it appears to me as if WordPress is taking over. If you look closely, you’ll see many websites are using it. Several nice examples of corporate WordPress sites exist here and here.

Why is WordPress so great? It has a highly customizable front end, with a user friendly back end as well. This translates into professional-looking websites which can be easily edited by non-professionals. This combination creates the potential to make businesses of all sizes more functional on-line and responsive to their customers, even if they choose not to use WordPress blogging feature. It is a stellar example of open source software, meaning that developers literally all over the world have written ‘plugins’ and ‘themes’ for it, making it infinitely customizable. Using it, I created the Comprendia site and the SDBN site quickly. Both are branded sites with many web 2.0 features, and I am able to quickly change content. Additionally, search engines LOVE blogs and WordPress can be configured to dramatically improve your ranking, which I’ve used to quickly reach the first page of results for terms that I think are important.

What does the ‘WordPress Wrevolution’ mean for life science/biotech companies? For small companies, it means you can set up a professional looking website with an integrated blog, and it can be branded and doesn’t have to look like open source software. Interesting scientific news and articles can easily be fed into your site, adding functionality and content. Your site can easily be integrated with and leverage other social media, creating a comprehensive strategy gain exposure and new customers. Mid-size life science companies Accelrys and Promega use WordPress for their blogs, even Johnson & Johnson’s JNJBTW blog uses it! Hopefully, this embracing of WordPress means we’ll see more blogs and interactivity from biotech, life science, and pharma companies in the future. Currently, as we’ve covered, the number of blogs from our industry is very small.

My niece Anne is doing a ‘virtual internship’ with me this summer, and some of this includes learning WordPress so she can update the Comprendia and SDBN sites. Typical of her generation, I asked her to do it, and although she knew little about it to begin with, she told me you ‘just have to figure it out’ and picked it up quickly. We can all learn a lot from her attitude, and realize this ‘just do it’ mentality is all we really need, regardless of whether we ‘grew up’ with Facebook.

How do you get started? Check out the links below to get your feet wet. While we encourage you to try it yourself, we can also help you to create a branded and unique website and blog, or integrate a blog with your existing website. We work with a team of designers and developers, and together with you we’ll create a site that will help you to grow quickly. Contact us for more information, check out our Biotechnology Marketing 101 blog series, and sign up for updates via our RSS feed.

WordPress Resources

Special thanks to Anne Warner, student at Indiana’s Taylor University, for composing this list. You can follow Anne on twitter at @anwarner. This is Anne’s ‘Summer of Social Media.’ ;)