Want more tips? Attend our Google Tools Workshop Webinar.

To share this post easily cut and paste: Video Bytes 6.24.11: Monitor Life Science Topics on the Web In Real Time Using Google Alerts http://bit.ly/kIqfXr

We’ve announced our Google Tools workshop webinar July 7th, and Workshop 2 is now available as a recording. Check out our workshops and training page for other offerings.

A quick post to let you know that we’ve announced our Social Media for Life Science and Biotechnology Workshop 2: The 4 B’s of First Party Applications webinar, which will take place June 9th. Also, our Facebook workshop webinar is now available for you to order and view at your convenience, along with others on our workshops and training page. As always, contact us if you have questions, and hope to ‘see’ you at a workshop soon!

To share this post easily cut and paste: Comprendia’s Social Media Workshop 2 June 9th & Facebook Webinar Available http://bit.ly/jyhqM4

Up to 95% of your life science customers are using Facebook, are you leveraging it yet? Attend our workshop webinar May 12th and you’ll receive training and the materials you need to get started quickly.

Just a quick note to let you know that our Social Media for Life Science and Biotechnology Workshop series is starting again with a Workshop 1 interactive webinar April 14th. Also our Twitter Workshop is now available on demand. We hope to help you meet your goals in 2011 with social media workshops specific for life science and biotechnology, contact us if you want more information or require customized training.

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.

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Twitter is perhaps the best application for life science companies to use to get started with social media, and based on our 2011 poll of life science marketers it is the application you are most interested in. Join us for this 2.5 hour webinar which will answer the following questions:

• How can I effectively use Twitter to grow my company’s brand?
• How do I find and engage with influencers and life scientists who will help me reach my goals?
• How do I find my company’s messaging and voice, and how can I easily find content that matches?
• Which tools will save me the most time?
• How do I track the return on investment (ROI) for Twitter?
• Why is etiquette so important for the life science community on Twitter, and how do I fit in?

The workshop is offered online March 10th, and will be available for on demand viewing after this date. All participants will received a printed booklet, and registrations must be received by March 4th. Cost is $275 per individual and $500 for groups of 2-4. Contact us for pricing of larger groups and visit our life science social media training page for information about other workshops.

Note: our workshops are intended for marketing and business development professionals in life science and biotechnology who do not manage FDA regulated products.

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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

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.

Twitter is not just for breakfast any more. Life scientists and companies are using it to learn and share information, and there are likely a few thousand life scientists and more than 100 related companies using it. One of the really great things about twitter is that you can find connections based on the content they are tweeting, and you don’t need to know them to follow and vice versa. Whether you’re in marketing or do research, the value lies in following a good quantity of high quality life scientists, and having them follow you back, and here are some tips and tricks for achieving this goal.

Follow more life science twitterers. We know purists who think that ‘if you tweet, followers will come,’ they want to grow ‘organically.’ However, if you look at the vast majority of twitterers, their number of followers is roughly equal to the number they follow. So, if you want 1000 followers, you’ll likely need to follow 1000 (and I think is the minimum number you need to get any real traction on Twitter). The good news is that there are many great ways to find life science twitterers, including:

• David Bradley’s Scientist Twibe–600 scientists (perhaps not all life scientists). Follow these scientists, add yourself to this list, and browse sites like wefollow and follow people and add yourself to the appropriate list(s).
• Search Twitter for terms you’re interested (e.g., RNAi, epigenetics) and follow twitterers in search results. Some twitter applications like twhirl allow you to add searches to your stream, making it easy to follow as you go.
• Conference hashtags. Tweets from most life science conferences include a ‘hashtag’, e.g. #asmgm for the ASM General Meeting. Search for the hashtags and follow twitterers.
• Find a great life science twitterer and follow who they follow. Their list can be found on their profile page by clicking on the ‘following’ link. Don’t follow their followers, as these lists are usually a lot more noisier than the list they are following.

Note: You shouldn’t follow more than 100 people a day, as Twitter may flag you as a spammer.

Provide good content. Twitter is used to share news and information related to your interests, be they personal or professional. To get people to follow, you need to give people something interesting to look for. We’re big proponents of using RSS for this function, you can even set it up to send yourself a daily email of customized content from across the web. Of course, you can also promote yourself, as long as you follow our 90/10 rule: provide 90% selfless content, and 10% self-promoting content.

Engage. It’s not enough to just follow and tweet good content. You also need to engage with the life science community. It should come naturally, if not you’re not following the right people! Retweet interesting content, reply to twitterers who capture your attention, or just say hi. I think you’ll find that you’ll even make some friends! They don’t call it SOCIAL media for nothing!

Think holistically. Most social media applications work best synergistically with other tools. A twitter account works much better if you also have a blog which you can tweet about, for example. Also, it’s a good idea to get to know the twitterers you follow by leaving comments on their blogs. The general theme is, be a part of the community! You’ll find you know more about your field and the world in general by following Twitter. You may not notice it right away, but you’ll be getting ‘Tweet Cred’ and your number of followers will grow.

Lighten up. There are many brands, life science and otherwise, on Twitter. The most successful ones show they’re human and tweet some personal information. Regardless of your motives, it’s a good idea for many reasons to show you’re human. For one, it makes the experience more enjoyable. It doesn’t have to be anything unprofessional, it can simply be commenting on the weather, for example. As we’ve pointed out, engaging is key, and nobody wants to interact with a robot! You also may find you share hobbies, etc. with other life science twitterers, allowing you meet those you might otherwise would not have.

This list is good to get you going on getting more followers and mastering twitter, and we also offer Twitter training and as part as our Workshop 3: The Rule of 3’s for 3rd Party Applications: Strategies, Tactics, and Metrics. Contact us for more information, and subscribe to our blog so you’ll get this information in your inbox hot off the press.

Note: The Twitter ‘mascot’ is a blue bird, so a blue dodo seemed fitting for life science. Get it?

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