I was honored to be featured on Chris Conner’s Life Science Marketing Radio podcast, the episode is titled Social Media Dos and Don’ts for Life Science Marketers, click on the image below to listen.

I was pleasantly surprised recently to see that many life science companies had customized, thoughtful content posted for International Women’s Day, see example below. It really represents the fact that life science marketers are becoming more sophisticated with respect to social media.

Happy #InternationalWomensDay to all the brilliant and hard working women, both inside and outside of @Genomatica #IWD2019 #InternationalWomensDay2019 pic.twitter.com/EV7Q4htxaQ

— Genomatica (@Genomatica) March 8, 2019

These marketers likely use a guide such as this Hubspot calendar, so that they are prepared a month or more before the social media “day.” While this resource is great, we realized there is no specific calendar for life science marketers that also includes disease awareness days/months, STEM days, and other notable events to share on social media. Engagement in social media is key, and the #IWD2019 example above also shows that celebrating these days at your organization, and sharing with your followers, is a win-win-win situation. You’re showing your company’s supportive culture, engaging your employees resulting in a feeling of camaraderie, and showing your support of different groups in the scientific community. Additionally, it gives you a great source of content, and you’ll gain followers by leveraging the event’s hashtag.

we’ve pulled together patient advocacy and STEM awareness days/months, holidays, some fun and some serious days, in our most recent life science marketing calendar. Here is how you can use the calendar:

1. Add the Google calendar to your work/your company’s content calendar.
2. Check quarterly or bimonthly to plan your social media content (we’re assuming you’re also checking it quarterly or yearly for conference planning).
3. Copy important calendar items to your own and/or your company’s content calendar, and add reminders, if the events are far in advance.
4. Plan all content/photoshoots at least a month in advance (the post above likely took more than a month to plan/implement).
5. Check all first-of-the-month posts for a list of monthly awareness events, add relevant ones to your calendar, with reminders.
6. Follow us on Twitter for 14 day ahead reminders for events longer than a day, and for monthly awareness events.

Because no calendar of this sort existed before, we’re still looking for events to add, and thinking of what days should be added! CRISPR day, hug a scientist day… After checking out the calendar, please leave any suggestions in the comments below. Of course, we’re also here to help you with your life science planning and social media needs!

It is finally happening.

Several years ago, I talked about the importance of diversifying your social media portfolio and said somewhat flippantly that you “might wake up one morning and Microsoft may own LinkedIn.” I believe I commented also that Microsoft may diminish LinkedIn into an Outlook add in, to help you manage your business contacts.

Well, that ship set sail in late 2016 as Microsoft acquired LinkedIn, and I started to have a very uneasy dread that my second prediction may come true (also, maybe I should be playing the stock market, with these predictive capabilities?). I am now afraid that I will wake up another morning and LinkedIn groups, which I’ve poured thousands of hours into, might disappear. I mean, why does Microsoft need them? LinkedIn has leveraged communities built by connectors like me to segment users for advertising and to increase visits and engagement on the application. It’s not clear what Microsoft’s end game is, in acquiring LinkedIn, but building communities wouldn’t seem to be one of them.

Based on the title of this post and my tone, you may have just now done a quick check to see if LinkedIn groups still exist. Yes, they still exist, but you also may have noticed that you’re not getting any group email updates, and see only the occasional (if at all) group update in your feed. That’s because LinkedIn changed the groups to “provide a consistent, integrated member experience” and as someone who’s managed many web projects, I agree. However, the way they’ve done it is VERY frustrating for group owners. Our countless hours of building communities seems to be for naught, as we can no longer email our members, and the group updates are barely visible in their feeds.

I should have learned my lesson when LinkedIn acquired SlideShare. Slideshare made it easy to turn PowerPoint presentations into videos, when pairing them with audio. I had several presentations as videos on the platform. When LinkedIn acquired SlideShare, they transferred all the presentations to the LinkedIn platform and did not transfer the audio. So, I lost all of that audio and those videos. Thankfully, I learned that making videos with PowerPoint alone is pretty easy (and I made a howto video). However, finding the audio for the presentations, and pairing them again to the timing of the presentation slides, is a daunting task.

What should I have done, to mitigate the risk involved in storing content on an external platform? I should have instead made freestanding videos and shared them on a platform, or more than one platform. I say more than one platform, because if one platform folds, you may lose all the followers you have there.

Below, I outline steps you can take to salvage your following in a LinkedIn group if you manage one, and the underlying strategy behind this guidance, to diversify your online presence, is useful to any life science company’s digital marketing strategy.

Diversifying Your Social Media Presence: LinkedIn Groups Example

1. Find and/or generate useful content. If you’ve been reading our blog, or have heard me speak, you know that I strongly believe that useful content is the cornerstone of a successful modern digital marketing strategy. Bottom line, is that you will need to have useful content for your LinkedIn group members to read, follow, or subscribe, to migrate them from the platform. For SDBN, we’ve built up infrastructure over 10 years to “automagically” feed our website and social media: news, jobs, and events. The technology behind these feeds also powers our RSS Feeds for life science marketers, and our new social media packages.
2. Build a website. If you haven’t done so already, develop a freestanding website for your community. Most of this post outlines the actions we’ve taken regarding the Linked group for the San Diego Biotechnology Network, (SDBN) and we’ve always had a website. We’re big fans of the WordPress platform, and like everything else, it’s much easier now than you may think.
3. Start a newsletter. Again, we already had this in place for the SDBN, and you do need to have 300-500 email addresses to make it worth your time. If it sounds difficult, don’t be daunted. Applications such as Constant Contact (my favorite) make it easy to put together and send content.
4. Capture website visitor emails. Yes, I sound like a marketer…because I am one! But how else will you get messages out to your community members? They obviously joined the group and stayed a member because you have a shared interest with thm. Create content for download, or simply ask them to subscribe to your newsletter with a popup form. If you’re using WordPress, there are myriad popup plugins, etc., and even the smallest organization can leverage a CRM like Hubspot to capture leads.
5. Host events. If your group is regional, or large enough to have regional meetups, what better time to “cement” the connections. If your group is closely aligned with any conferences, you can also meet up there. You WILL have a hard time reaching your group members, but hopefully with the tips in this blog post, you’ll be able to pull something together.
6. Leverage other LinkedIn features. My career closely aligns with my LinkedIn groups, so there is significant overlap with my personal network, and all are highly relevant and curated over 10 years. Grow your network, and invite your group members to connect with you. Be careful to not invite too many people in one day, as you may be tagged as a spammer. Utilize LinkedIn hashtags, a relatively new feature, to get more visibility for your personal posts. I’ve tested the same content on my groups and personal feed, and my highly unscientific (but reproducible!) estimation is that group posts are 5% as effective, as judged by the number of likes and the potential audience the update can reach. In my experience, the only people who see your LinkedIn group updates, now, are your primary connections who are in the group (a subset of your primary connections), and people who visit the group’s page (also a small number). I used to email my LinkedIn group and get 50-100 clicks in the first hour, and now I have to resort to the methods outlined in this post, and/or hope that my content goes viral.
7. Leverage other social media. As with the above items, we had this going already for the SDBN, but we took a fresh look at it. For example, we started publishing our content to the SDBN company pages, rather than focusing on the group, and the company page is growing followers. We’ve stepped up our presence on social media and even opened some new accounts. Again, any of these social media platforms may fold tomorrow, but utilizing them now and creating more links to your website, and by following the suggestions in this post, you’ll eventually get more subscribers. I like to say that Twitter may not be here forever, but you’ll probably find out first about the next big platform or app, on Twitter.
8. Advertise. I realize that some life science LinkedIn groups are on the order of 100,000 members, and the changes must be devastating to the owners. They went from being able to email everyone in their groups one day, to losing this ability, and to their group notifications being barely visible to their massive membership. You can use LinkedIn in a few ways to target your members with advertising, you can pay for an ad targeting the group (and so can everyone else, by the way). The goal in advertising to them would be for them to sign up for your newsletter, etc., so make sure you have this in place beforehand. I don’t know what the costs would be for large groups, but if the LinkedIn group was considered an asset for your company, it may be worth it.

I should mention a partial caveat (?) to this post. LinkedIn says that they are restoring much of their groups’ functionality, but I belong to 2 LinkedIn moderator groups, and unfortunately we can’t get a timeline for the updates, or any response to our request for updates or features.

The moral of the story is Don’t Put All of Your Social Media Eggs in One Platform™. Of course, this pithy tagline didn’t occur to me until the end of this post (after the graphic was made), so I can’t use it as the title. It’s pending a trademark now, so don’t even think about stealing it!

Since 2008, I have been a champion for life science companies to embrace social media, but I have often felt as though I was metaphorically pushing a rock up a steep hill, against the wind. I?m definitely encouraged by the increased adoption of social media. However, again with the metaphor, I feel like we?ve made progress, but it?s like reaching a plateau along that uphill slog. While many more companies have social media accounts, on the whole they?re not used often, and too many companies use them only for self-serving means. This strategy does not do well in social media, because as the name implies, followers, especially scientists, are looking to engage with your brand socially, not just hear about your latest products or events you?re attending.

We may have vicious cycle on our hands, as we?ll stay on this plateau until companies see traction and ROI on social media. Here, I?ve provided the top 5 reasons your life science brand needs to have a strong social media presence:

1. Demand and Lead Generation. Creating demand for your products is about staying on a potential customer?s radar while introducing themselves to your brand and which problems you could solve for them. Social media is perfect for this, as the best messages will be seen by them unobtrusively during their time on social media. For lead generation, while utilizing social media won?t automatically result in leads, they can be part of campaigns that include lead collections tactics. The great thing about social media is that anyone can create accounts, and use hashtags to extend the reach of each message. For an example, check out Tecan?s #BeARockStarInYourLabcampaign which has been running all year. They used social media combined with conferences, content, and even a rock and roll band to generate demand and leads for their lab instrumentation products (presumably!).
2. Multi- or omni- channel marketing. Everything old is new, you likely have heard the old ad-age (get it?) that someone must see an advertisement 6 times (or more) to react to it. While many factors have changed since this rule was proposed, I?m fairly sure the human brain has not changed that much since the advent of advertising. If anything, with all the advertisements we?re bombarded with these days, we need to see a message more than 6 times. You need to reach scientists more than just via too-frequent email blasts (and your list may have suffered a substantial decrease due to recent GDPR regulations) or hoping they?ll visit your website. These days, there are many factors that lead to scientists using different digital channels throughout their day, based on their age, digital proficiency, and personal preferences, among other factors. The best way to reach them, and to get their eyes on your message multiple times, is to cast a wide net, and have social media profiles on all the major platforms, Google adwords as well as scientific publications and communities. With any luck, you?ll not only reach them, they?ll see your branded messages in more than one place. While it sounds difficult, applications such as Hootsuite and Buffer help you to share content across applications. Complementing organic social media with paid placements, and/or remarketing, is also suggested.
3. Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Using social media to improve your SEO is both a short term and long term tactic. In the short term, there is empirical evidence that social media directly affects SEO. SEO algorithms? dependence on social media is a fluid situation, however, as search engine access to social media data changes often. Over the past 6 months alone, we?ve seen significant social media platform changes due to privacy and possible election tampering issues. Thankfully, you can count on the long term benefits of using social media. By building a following and posting relevant content with social media-savvy scientists and potential partners, you?re much more likely to motivate them to share your website?s resources both on social media and on their website. Even with all of the changes in SEO algorithms, and their tendencies to be a ?black box? to those trying to improve their rankings, backlinks to your website, especially from other websites (as opposed to social media) are STILL SEO gold.
4. Public Relations. These days, anyone can send a press release, which means, everyone sends press releases. While I think there is still merit in using a PR outlet to send a press release, we all know that a significant percentage of these releases go largely unnoticed. And no, the backlinks you receive from posting on sites that pick up every release (e.g., Yahoo News) will not improve your SEO appreciably (if they did, it would be a huge pyramid scheme that would soon collapse). If you?re a small biotech, and you had to send a release with non-earth shattering information (let?s be honest, most press releases aren?t), tomorrow, would you get any coverage? Having a large social media following that cares about your company is the best way to ensure that all of your news gets some coverage. Additionally, just the fact that you HAVE a significant social media following, gets people to pay more attention to whatever you?re sharing?I call it the ?Kim Kardashian? effect.
5. Business Intelligence. If you?re like me, if you watch the nightly news, it?s only to see a recap of the news you?ve been seeing on and off all day on social media. Social media breaks most world events these days, and same goes for biotech news. On the short term, don?t you want to be the first one to know which companies just got funded, and may have the funds to purchase your product? On the long term, you?ll find and follow influencers who see trends before anyone else, helping you to guide your business. Additionally, as part of collecting and curating content for your followers, you?ll get up to speed on your competition and trends. I have developed myriad business intelligence feeds for companies for the dual purpose of serving as business/competitive intelligence for internal use, as well as for social media (competitor information is of course not shared externally). Your entire organization can benefit from internal and external curated feeds.

As an early proponent of social media for life science companies, I am thrilled that biotech companies are embracing it more fully. Now that I?ve hopefully made the case for life science brands to further leverage social media, I will follow up with an article about the best practices. My consultancy Comprendia is available to help with social media strategies and tactical implementation,?fill out the form below to get started.

This article appeared originally on the Biotech Marketing Network.

Asana is a web-based application, which organizes projects with teams, projects, tasks, related files, and a calendar. Asana also has a ?conversations? feature, but I have not seen organizations use it effectively, they usually resort to email or an application such as Slack (will cover this application soon). It?s a shame that conversations aren?t used, as Asana could really be the ?killer app? for organizations.

Here are some of the benefits of using Asana:

1. Traceability. If you?re wondering who?s working on which tasks, what deadlines are approaching, who is assigned to which task, and how long tasks are taking to complete, Asana will help you out, however it needs to be set up with the proper structure and fields to be able to use it for this task.
2. Reproducibility. You can easily search for, and see the history for every task, which resources/files were used, who was involved, and potentially outside contacts. This really helps your marketing program to seamlessly progress even when staff, or consultants/vendors turn over.
3. Project management. See an overview of activities, set priorities, review progress, find bottlenecks, see dependencies, timelines, and even Gantt charts.
4. Resource management. How long DID that piece of content take to finish, and could we have done it with more coordination and affordability?
5. Teamwork. Assigning multiple users to a task helps them see the progress, and the team can help each other find resources, etc.
6. Organization. Spreadsheets and file structures can only go so far. Here, you?ll be able to organize all tasks into teams, projects, tasks, and subtasks, creating an organized, dynamic tactical marketing plan. No more digging through emails or files to find what you need.
7. Backwards compatibility. If your manager STILL wants to see spreadsheets, or you have applications that need them, you can output any project as a spreadsheet, complete with all of the custom fields (see below).
8. Integration. Asana integrates with many apps such as Mailchimp, Salesforce, and Dropbox, see the full list here.
9. Task management. Assign and manage tasks?does your spreadsheet do that?
10. Repurposing. Team visibility of all tasks, and their content, will help to determine which content items can be repurposed. The application can also be set up for repurposing by adding custom fields which can be used for repurposing?for example, short blurbs for social media or e-marketing can be added to all content pieces, allowing for any team member to share the content.
11. Accessibility. With Asana?s web based format, and even it?s mobile app, you can access tasks and files from anywhere.

Below, I?ve summarized the major elements of Asana, and how they can be used to manage marketing communications.

Teams

• Teams are the major sections of Asana, a great way to keep your organization seeing only what they ?need? to see, or to work with outside consultants
• At this level, note that you have a ?Team Calendar? which will show events for all projects.
• Conversations: Not used often, but you can have discussions here.

Projects

• Here you can do most of your strategic organizing of your tasks. To organize marketing communications, consider logical groups of tasks, which would benefit from their own calendar, file area, and custom fields, such as:
  • Strategic Marketing
  • Tactical Marketing
  • Events
  • Email Marketing
  • Content
  • Social Media
• Custom Fields: add items specific to the project?s tasks. For example, in a task for an event, you could add the following custom fields: Event Dates, URL, Cost to Exhibit, etc. These items are likely already columns in your spreadsheets, it?s easy to convert. Another example is for content, where some of the fields could be objective, length, source, due date. If you, or your boss, are ?nervous? about converting to Asana, don?t worry, you can export all of these items into a spreadsheet friendly file!
• Calendar: Each project will have its own calendar, with the due date for the task as the date. One irritating aspect is that you can?t put a range of dates into the calendar, for events.
• Email tasks: You can email a task directly to the project, see this guide for more details.
• Conversations: Again, I haven?t seen these used extensively, but I see power in using them.
• Files: I only use this rarely, when I can?t find a resource, but all uploaded files are here, and you can also open the related task. You can?t upload files to a project, they must come from a task.

Tasks

• Individual items which can be assigned to a user, and ?followed? by any user in the Team (they?ll get updates). Tasks can be simple one off?s, or many-step item. For example, a conference exhibition could be listed as a task, and subtasks can be added for each step.
• Files: You can attach files to each task, or a link to a shared document. There are benefits and drawbacks for each method For uploaded files, they will show up searchable as files in the project, but they?re not able to be co-edited. So, users must re-upload edited files, which can result in confusion. Shared documents (Google, Box, Dropbox) can be shared via integration with Asana, or a simple link, but they are not as easily found outside the task. You?ll want to think carefully about what types of files you want to use for tasks that require many review cycles, such as brochures.
• It?s really easy to email a task to your task list in Asana, see this guide. You can always log in later and categorize the task to a project, if you can?t remember the email address for the project.

Sections

• A perhaps underutilized feature of Asana, is to create sections for tasks, to organize them. A section heading is any task which ends with a ?:?, Asana will bold it. You can treat the section heading as a task as well, adding text or files and assigning to someone.
• Sections can be seen as a way to organize tasks in a more obvious manner than by using Subtasks (people don?t have to drill down into a task to see the subtasks), but beware that using sections may result in more confusion with complex projects. Other users may, for example, move the tasks erroneously between sections, or complete the section task, taking it out of view and the organizational structure (conversely, completed subtasks stay greyed out in the task, making them still visible).

Subtasks

• As described above, subtasks are a nice way to show all the steps needed for a complex task, yet they can sometimes have less visibility as the parent task needs to be opened to see. Subtasks can also be put in multiple projects (see ?Creative Ways to Use Asana?), which can help with their visibility.

Creative Ways to Use Asana

• Dependencies. Every task can have a dependency on another task, making it easier for everyone to visualize what each task is waiting on. Visualization can be via Asana?s timeline, which is available for every project, or by using an?application that creates an (exportable) Gantt chart.
• Put tasks in more than one project. Let?s say you want to write a blog post as part of a campaign, so you?d put it in two projects, the project for the campaign, and as an entry into the content area. What?s cool, is that the custom fields for each project will be additive to the task?in other words, the task will have all the fields for the campaign, as well as for content.
• Integrate forms into Asana tasks. We talked about custom fields for each project, such as for content. You can integrate Asana?with a form application such as Wufoo?and create forms so that your stakeholders can request content in an organized way, an online creative brief.

This article originally appeared on the Biotech Marketing Network.

As life science marketers, we?ve all been tempted, asked, or even instructed to purchase lists, even though we know it?s not a good idea. Here are our top 5 reasons to not give in:

1. Getting blacklisted.?We?ve all had important emails get lost in spam. This filtering happens with most email applications, and they rely on many factors in choosing which emails to mark as spam. One quality is whether your email domain is blacklisted, in other words marked as a spammer. The more emails you send to people you don?t have a relationship, the more you?ll get marked as a spammer, and you?ll have a higher chance to get on these lists. You DO NOT want to be blacklisted, your whole business will be negatively affected, and it can be difficult to remove your company from them. Also, Mailchimp, Constant Contact, and other reputable email service providers do not tolerate these practices?Constant Contact, for example, will put a company on notice if they receive more than 1 spam report per 1,000 emails sent.
2. Poor branding.?Related to #1, sending emails to people who didn?t opt in to your emails sends a very poor message. As consumers, we get these types of emails daily, asking ourselves ?how did this company get my email address?? We unsubscribe hastily and make a mental note that the company must not be a good one, if they have to resort to buying lists. The same thought process happens when your company?s first interaction with a customer is through such an email, and it?s horrible for your brand.
3. List quality.?For every major conference, every year we all get at least one email from a company we?ve never heard of, selling the list of attendees. Where do these lists come from? The true list is owned by the conference organizers, I?m sure they?re not letting anyone get the official list for free. Who knows what?s in the list, it?s likely poster abstract presenters, or emails scraped from Pubmed, which will be mostly academics (no offense, but it?s not where the money is). Additionally, any names on the list have likely been sold to many other people, and the people on that list are likely super sensitive to getting more spam! At any rate, you have no idea of the list quality.
4. Waste of resources.?Thinking again as a consumer?how many of the random emails that you get per day, from companies you don?t have a relationship with, do you open, much less click on??Mailchimp has done the research?and shows that for a purchased list, clickthroughs are around 0.2%. I recently saw a conference email list with 20,000 email addresses for sale for $2000. Doing the math, that?s $50 per clickthrough, and if you refer to the Mailchimp study, you?d get about 60 ?complaints,? putting you way over ESP?s spam report limits. Wouldn?t you love to spend that $2000 on Google Adwords instead, and target people looking for your content, and lead them directly to your website? You can get 10-20 times as many people to your website for $2.50-$5.00 per clickthrough with the same funds, and get tons of data from what they?re searching for, and also remarket to them. It?s simply a waste of money and time to e-blast to people you have no connection with, even with the best content. If you really do have the best content, go through a reputable e-blast partner and give it the exposure it deserves.
5. It can be illegal. In the US, the CAN SPAM act of 2003 is by all accounts outdated, as it does not require prior permission to email recipients. With the proliferation of spam messaging available through email, robocalls, and texts, it?s likely that the US will follow suit with stronger email laws in the near future. At the current time, GDPR/the EU and Canada?DO?require permission. For that email list you?re considering buying, how do you know what country?s laws you need to abide by? Do you really trust that this vendor will break the list down for you, when you don?t know how they obtained it? Your company doesn?t get a ?pass? for sending the list through the company, either, you?re legally responsible.

This article originally appeared on the Biotech Marketing Network.

• Who : Marketers who want to track the number of clickthroughs they are receiving to a page by campaign, source, medium, content or search term, and ultimately return on investment (ROI).
• What : Text strings placed at the end of your website URLs, with a specified structure which is best generated by the Google Analytics Campaign URL Builder (but after you use this a few times, you may get good at generating them yourself).
• Why : When combined with Google Analytics and a website set up properly, you can track clickthroughs and ROI of campaigns, social media applications, etc.
• How : Use the Google Analytics Campaign URL Builder to create a link tagged with the appropriate UTM codes, see the image in this section for details and examples. I?ve created the following link for the e-blast we?ll do through LinkedIn for this newsletter, and the long URL is:
  https://biotechmarketing.org/2018/02/18/february-2018-newsletter/?utm_source=linkedin&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=february_newsletter&utm_content=text_link
  For links that are visible, use the shortened link Google gives you, or use a link shortener (see last bullet). You?ll then be able to view the data in Google Analytics. Be sure to have a strategy for which UTM codes to use throughout your team/company, so you?ll get consistent data.

• When : Use when you have Google Analytics set up on your website and have straightforward access to your data. Larger companies will likely have a system set up for tracking which may or may not involve Google Analytics, so check to see what the syntax and options are before using. You don?t need to use UTM codes in Google Adwords, as Google will track the links automatically.
• Fun Fact : UTM stands for ?Urchin Tracking Module?, as a company called Urchin Software pioneered this method and was acquired by Google in 2005.
• Bonus Fact : Google will generate a short URL for you to share, and you can also plug the long URL into applications such as bit.ly to get a short link which you can customize if needed, for free. The clickthrough rate on bit.ly links can be tracked publicly by adding a ?+? at the end of the URL, which can be good for viewing data without IT?s help, but it will also be available to your competitors. Cutting and pasting the above UTM coded link for this page into bit.ly, and creating a ?friendly? shortened URL bit.ly/BMNFeb18 which can be tracked at bit.ly/BMNFeb18+ (check out our stats for our first newsletter LinkedIn email!). This gives you duplicate data, but you never know when you might need metrics quickly from the bit.ly link. There are also companies cropping up which offer to create and track short URLs for you, for a fee.

This post was originally published on the Biotech Marketing Network.

1. 1. Published reports . There are many existing reports for which summaries are free (sometimes you need to request a sample), or which are completely free. Trade associations often review employment and technology trends. Always consider the sources when viewing free reports, as some organizations may skew data in their favor depending on their goals. See the table below for sources for free reports or summaries.

   Sources for DIY Market Research

   Source	Link
   Biocom	California Trade Organization: Economic Impact Reports
   BioInformatics LLC	Specialized to life science tools & some clinical leaning reports
   Biotechnology Innovation Organization (BIO)	Biotechnology Trade Organization: Clinical/biopharma leaning
   CLSA	California Trade Organization: Various Reports
   Decibio	Specialized to life science tools and diagnostics
   Ernst & Young	Yearly Beyond Borders report
   Frost & Sullivan	Various life science/clinical reports
   Markets & Markets	A clearinghouse of market research reports, some outdated
   Mass Bio	Massachusetts Trade Organization: Industry Snapshots
   Percepta	Specialized to life science tools
   Price Waterhouse Cooper	Various (pharma leaning)
   The Scientist	Yearly top 10 Innovations

   2. Do quick polls . Market research doesn’t have to be a daunting task, you can get quick answers to questions your team has with quick polls using email providers such as Constant Contact. You may have even seen that some companies use popups on their website to gauge satisfaction through the Net Promoter Score (NPS) question. Not only will you get information, you’ll be engaging your customers as well as segmenting them. Even with the NPS poll, you’ll be able to find champions for your products as well as those who need some TLC.
   3. Co opt a mailing list . Some life science publications will either let you rent their mailing list, or develop a survey with you. This tactic will likely save you some money, but make sure your survey is designed to elicit both the quality and quantity responses you need. If possible, ask to send to a sample first to ensure success.
   4. Focus group your next event . Are you hosting a workshop, social event, or exhibiting at a conference? Use the opportunity to query attendees or leads about their needs. For free events, registrants will likely answer a few questions while filling out the form. Get creative at events and stimulate discussion about your products with games and giveaways.
   5. Leverage your mailing list . Depending on the size and quality of your mailing list, you can perform surveys on your own with a simple e-blast and software such as SurveyMonkey. Experiment with messaging and giveaways until you get a statistically significant number of responses, which is usually starts at between 50 and ideally 100 for online surveys. Some market research firms will publish the questions they ask in surveys, so look for these to get a head start on your survey. Additionally, be sure to ask questions that will help you to segment your database as well so that you can send more targeted communications in the future.
   6. Ask for cheaper options . Life science market research firms have specialized and also benefited from survey technology and available data, and they may be able to offer more affordable options. I remember 10+ years ago we hired a big name market research provider and we wrote all the questions for them and they still charged $30K! Surely they could not get away with that these days. BioInformatics, LLC provides a reasonably priced “rate my product” option. You can also let the smaller and more specialized market research firms what type of a report you’re looking for, and they may be able to include the data in one of their upcoming off the shelf reports.
   7. Hire scientist interviewers . Scientists are often eager to get exposure to industry, and they of course are very knowledgeable about the latest technologies. If you are looking for phone interviews, hire a PhD scientist to interview customers or leads. Of course, be very clear with the guidelines, questions, and deliverables you expect from them, as they may not be used to working in a corporate environment.
   8. Look internally. Your company has data on what customers want through web and google analytics. What search terms are they using to find your site, are there any surprises? Are they looking for downstream or upstream products which could be product extensions? Are they spending time on certain product pages, but not purchasing them, indicating that the product doesn’t fully meet their needs?
   9. Incentivize your team. There are people at your company who talk to your customers, and potential customers, daily, most notably the technical service and sales teams. Some marketing departments request that the sales team all ask their customers a single question each month, and the sales team can report back in their monthly report. Create a short poll for your sales team to either fill out themselves, or have customers fill out on an iPad, to get a quantitative summary of the results.
   10. Public data & analysis . With some clever data analysis, you can extrapolate to get the numbers you need. Let’s say a free market report summary says that the market for a product is $500 million and growing at 5% per year. You then look at a public company’s SEC filings and listen to their earnings report, and determine that their sales for this product are $100 million, and growing at 10% per year. You then know that they have 20% of the market and are taking market share. It takes some legwork, and luck, but it’s possible. Also don’t underestimate the knowledge of your team. Although confidentiality agreements should be honored, you never know what knowledge your team may have (legal) access to.

   This post originally appeared on the Biotech Marketing Network.

I thoroughly agreed with Julie Wright from Wright On Communications when she wrote about the overuse of the word “excited” in press releases. As she puts it, if you’re “excited” about something, go tell your mom, don’t submit a press release. That got me thinking about other overused words in the titles of life science press releases, ones that point out that the item is not newsworthy. Today, everyone can easily send a press release, and that means that everybody does. We are all for you DIYing your life science public relations, and here we present the top 5 words you should avoid to get your press release noticed by journalists, search engines, and ultimately your audience.

You may know that we founded and manage the San Diego Biotechnology Network, and we offer an automated news feed which appears on the website, Twitter, and email. In order to automate this feed, our tools must filter out press releases that are not newsworthy. To find the overused words, we created a word cloud using the titles of 1300 releases collected over the past 8 months, it is shown below.

Several of the top words used in life science press release titles are understandable and useful, but several are problematic as they represent non-newsworthy items. Below, we share the top overused, generic terms as well as suggestions for replacing or rethinking the content of the press release.

1. Appoints. This word is used to announce an addition to staff, and these releases should be used very sparingly, and with purpose. Focus on what’s newsworthy, and what this person will bring to your organization. Not sure? It’s a good idea to determine the significance, otherwise you don’t have a newsworthy press release. Below is shown an example of how a release title can be changed.
   Original: Biotech XYZ Appoints NCI’s John Doe As Chief Medical Officer
   Better: NCI’s John Doe Will Lead New Cancer Initiative as Biotech XYZ’s Chief Medical Officer
2. Announces or Reports. These terms are just plain redundant. Of course you’re announcing or reporting something in a press release, but what makes it newsworthy? Below we share an example of how you can craft a newsworthy release about information you’re announcing. Also, be sure that your regulatory and legal group are on board with the release well in advance, as FDA and SEC standards must of course be met. If they don’t agree with your positioning of the news, maybe you should hold off on sending the release rather than to send a watered down version. Of course, in some cases, your company is obligated to announce events such as earnings calls, so some “boring” releases may be necessary to comply (and we urge you to even make these releases as informative as possible).
   Original: Biotech XY Announces Positive Results in HIV Drug Trial
   Better: Positive Results of Biotech XYZ’s Lead Compound May Lead To Faster Cures
3. Presents or Conference. Your company is presenting at a conference, congratulations! Many companies that make such an announcement are paying to present, further diluting this “news.” Again, if your company is publicly traded, you may need to announce this event to comply with SEC regulations, but we see many private companies using a conference presentation as an excuse to send a non-newsworthy press release. These types of announcements are more well suited to your website, as people who are interested in investing in your company will likely be following it closely. Those who are already going to the conference will be made aware of your presentation, so there is no need to publicize it. An exception would be if you’re planning to make the presentation available online to those who may have a more casual interest. Even better? Post an update on the conference after the fact, indicating how your presentation was received, along with other important findings from the event.
   Original: Biotech XYZ To Present at Healthcare Investing Conference
   Better: Biotech XYZ Seeks Partners With New Data On Their HIV Drug Candidate At Healthcare Investing Conference

What’s the significance of optimizing your press release title? Besides catching eyes, helping you to craft a newsworthy release, and helping readers understand your news, you’ll also get better search engine optimization (SEO) with a meaningful title. It will be the only part of your release that the vast majority of your audience will read, the “sound bite” that they will remember. Rather than sending a larger number of generic releases, consider quality over quantity in your life science public relations. While we won’t promise that these commandments are the complete guide to success, we hope that they help you to think differently about press releases, writing them in a way that is more effective in helping you meet your goals.

1. More acceptance from scientists. My esteemed colleague Hamid Ghanadan, who is always blazing trails for life science marketing at The Linus Group, said to me once “life science companies will start using social media once their customers, research scientists, do.” In that statement, he expertly distilled one of the biggest obstacles we face in utilizing social media. Life science companies are not convinced that their customers are using social media, so they believe efforts there are fruitless. I would extend Hamid’s insightful observation to say that the problem extends to the ways researchers are incentivized to participate in social media. Currently, the incentives are either nonexistent or negative, as researchers can be led to believe that they’ll be “scooped” if they share their data online. However, we’ve seen some developments which portend a change in this perception both due to the current funding crises and some high profile attention to the problem of scientists communicating in general. Hopefully, a silver lining of this current dark cloud of decreased funding and support will be that more scientists will embrace social media. We have seen an uptick in some activities, such as the number of Twitter status updates shared at conferences (which we noted in 2012, and adoption continues to grow). I would also argue that life science companies could lead the way instead of waiting, showing the utility of social media in many different ways (perhaps a follow up post).
2. Success in the industry. We are often asked to give examples of life science tools companies who have succeeded with social media. We normally point to companies such as Life Technologies (see this clever conference campaign incorporating Twitter hashtags) and IDT DNA (see their use of Pinterest), but the truth is that the number of examples is exceedingly small. We need a really successful campaign or a game changing strategy, as we see in other industries. We also wish companies would realize that by making a splash in social media, that they could be the example that we and others share for years to come.
3. Adoption by related industries. The main impetus for writing this post came this week as DNA testing giant 23andMe announced several collaborations with pharmaceutical companies. If you followed the news closely, you saw that with at least one collaboration, they’ve also announced leveraging their new research portal to study disease. Most biotech and pharma companies, understandably, focus their social media efforts on their customers, the general public. In addition, these marketers are limited by FDA guidelines (or lack thereof) which stunts progress and leads to fewer good examples to share. This shift by 23andMe and their pharma partners, which gets researchers involved, may represent a sea change in how life science tools companies view social media. 23andMe previewed their research portal at the American Society for Human Genetics 2014 meeting in San Diego, and anyone can create an account and look around. When researchers can log in, and benefit from the big data created by social engagement, we’ll hopefully start seeing #1 of this list come to fruition.
4. Exceedingly small returns with traditional marketing. Time and time again we hear life science marketers complain about returns on staid trade show exhibits and other supposedly tried and true marketing strategies and tactics. The world has changed. Exhibit halls were invented before the internet, scientists can now see all of a company’s new products from the comfort of their lab, obviating the need to visit a trade show exhibit. I’m not saying we should abolish them, as face to face interactions are still very important, but we should enhance them. Much like the 3D shark interacted with Marty McFly in Back to the Future Part II, we can use technology to engage and even delight (but not terrify) them. We can only hope (?) that continued disappointment with the status quo, as well as information and examples that we can provide, will effect change.
5. Rebranding and rethinking social media. As we pointed out first in 2009, social media is really just a new flavor of an engagement strategy that life science companies have been using for a very long time. We see that life science marketers have an easier time relating to content marketing, as opposed to social media marketing. Hey, we’ll take acceptance of the concepts however they’ll come! Sometimes, we only bring up later that a solid social media strategy is key to successful content marketing.

We are hoping that these changes are indeed taking place, and the 23andMe announcements this week are indeed a very exciting development. A very interesting corollary to this post is that the self-tying Nike shoes, also predicted in Back To The Future Part II, have been prototyped and used to raise money for Parkinson’s disease through the Michael J. Fox Foundation. Michael J. Fox was diagnosed Parkinson’s disease in 1991, only 2 years after he starred as Marty McFly in Back To The Future Part II. Indeed, the Michael J. Fox Foundation, with its patient and researcher-focused mission to cure Parkinson’s Disease, founded in 2000, was clearly a look at how the future of biomedical research may be funded. It’s no accident that Parkinson’s Disease is one of the top 23andMe research initiatives. Marty, er, Michael, we’ll follow you on your hoverboard into the future, any time!