Building Online Communities
Carlton Hoyt
Perhaps inevitable given the popularity of content marketing, the long-established importance of branding in the life sciences, and the growing propensity of companies to look for novel ways to create social marketing-style engagement, online communities are becoming all the more popular. Manufacturers, services provides, and distributors in the life sciences can’t be faulted for finding them all too appealing. They can be easy to create; a savvy web designer can have a branded, albeit basic, forum up and running in a few hours. The rewards are clear, especially to companies who already perform content marketing; an online community can provide a far larger audience for your current content marketing efforts and can build brand value through topic leadership / thought leadership. They’re also potentially great for SEO – lots of content. They can also be very easy to manage; a vibrant online community will grow and monitor itself with little effort from the sponsoring company. With so many benefits, why wouldn’t a life science tools company want to start an online community?
. . . Because it’s difficult at best.
People like to rhetorically benchmark against big, successful brands. All too many people who’ve built an online community want it to be the Facebook of [whatever]. That’s a recipe for failure. There already is a Facebook, it’s pretty darned good at this whole social thing, and just because you have a community that’s branded to target a niche demographic, that doesn’t mean that people will use it. It’s also a bad idea to assume that because some megacorp did it that you can, too. Fortune 500 consumer brands have tens or hundreds of millions of customers – many times more customers than there are life scientists in the entire world. To reach the critical mass necessary to create a vibrant online community they need 0.01% of their customers to use it. As a small or mid-size life science tools company, you probably have well under 100,000 customers. Although you can try to reach out to more than just your customers, the difficulty inherent in doing so will likely render you marginally successful in that effort at best. For your community to be successful, you need a much higher participation rate, and therefore your community has to be that much more compelling.
I hate calling companies out publicly, but to give my point some gravitas I’m going to do it here. If you need any proof that an online community is difficult to build and sustain, look no further than EpiExperts. New England BioLabs, a great company with a reasonably large customer base as far as our industry goes, set it up last year as “a scientific social network for epigenetics experts” with the “hope that [scientists] will use E3 as a communication platform to aid progress in the frontier of epigenetics”. It’s been around for about 10 months now. Aside from an NEB employee and a freelance writer who have the paid job of blogging, the site is pretty much dead. They still get a trickle of new sign-ups coming in, but no one feels compelled to do anything. The forum is effectively unused. People can form groups, but there’s only one created. You can add others as “friends”, but the overwhelming majority haven’t done so. Profiles have walls that people can post to, but almost all are devoid of any posts. The worst part about all this is that when someone goes to a community site and sees that it’s unused, that’s a disincentive for them to use it, so that makes it even harder to turn around the community into a vibrant one.
It’s a shame, really. There’s no reason EpiExperts shouldn’t have been successful, except that there’s no reason that it should have been.
Asking people to join a community is asking them to devote a piece of their life to it. In other words, the community that you create needs to have enough value that scientists are willing to repeatedly spend time on your community’s site rather than doing anything else with their time. In order to do that, your community, just like your products or services, have to be differentiated. In fact, it’s even more important that your community be differentiated on value than a product because an online community can’t be differentiated on price since it’s free. Before you decide you want to build an online community, you need to many similar questions that you would in product development, and more:
- What needs do our scientist-customers have?
- How will this community address those needs?
- Will this community be sufficiently differentiated?
- How will we create continuous value for the users? (so they keep coming back)
So how do we create success when building online communities? Thoroughly answer the above questions and you’ll be pointed squarely in the right direction. This post, however, is already too long so we’ll have to take the topic up more another day. Feel free to use the contact form below if you have any questions or you feel like I left you hanging.
Google Wants You To Plus
Douglas E. Rogers
In what’s probably half designed to make search results more personalized and half an encouragement for people to use Google+, Google implemented changes to its search algorithms recently. Google+ users who are frequently signed in while performing searches have likely already noticed, but Google+ results and pages that have been +1’d or shared by a connection are now given a massive boost in the search, usually to the front page.
Click the image blow for an example. Note the areas that I’ve highlighted in red, green, and blue, which each indicate different Google+ results.
Say your company sells PCR primers. If you mention PCR primers in your Google+ profile or in a post or other content on Google+, and a scientist that you’re connected to on Google+ searches for PCR primers, your post will almost guaranteedly display near the top of the results (assuming the person doesn’t have lots of other connections also talking about PCR primers). Likewise, based on information that Google compiles about a user, it will have “recommended” connections and content from recommended connections get a similarly high-profile
Of course, this type of simplification ignores the difficulty of growing a following on Google+. Unlike Twitter and more similarly to Facebook, Google+ doesn’t let companies follow people who aren’t following them back. Facebook at least partially makes up for it by allowing you to have high customized pages which you can use to incentivize engagement. Google+ has no such capabilities, so building engagement can be somewhat more difficult.
Another thing about the change is that it places a huge premium on social content – posts, links, videos, images, everything. Have pictures of the team from the last conference? Put it on Google+. Was there a news article about your company or products? Put it on Google+. While you’re at it, write search engine optimized descriptions; just keep in mind that people will read them so don’t go overboard.
With that one change, social media marketing for companies with Google+ went from kind of pointless to extremely worthwhile. Just know that like any social media marketing it’s a slow process with long-term rewards, so be patient, provide good content, and do your best to build your network.
Also, expect that Google will continue to try to integrate Google+ into search, so long as they don’t do anything that creates a massivle backlash. The past few days there have been reports of google asking searchers if they’d like to ask their Google+ connections about their search. Not sure if that particular feature will stick, but it’s certainly an indication of the direction Google’s trying to go…
UPDATE: Between the writing of this and its posting, we noticed another change. Google now integrates social results from your Google contacts. This means that if someone in your gmail contacts or from a synced android phone shared something, it will also show up in the new “personal results” section and receive greater visibility, even if you’re not signed up with Google+. Furthermore, if you have a website listed in your Google or Google+ profile, Google’s search well respond as if you’e shared all pages on the site, even if you haven’t actively done so. The screenshot below is taken from a search where I was signed into Google on an account that does not have a Google+ account.
Cause Marketing: Underutilized?
Carlton Hoyt
Corporate social responsibility has been all the rage for years now. Corporations in many fields are almost expected to prove that their interests are one with the common good and that they’re not just money-grubbing, profiteering institutions. Corporate donations have always been popular, and get companies a tax write-off, but that doesn’t really do much good to the company. Performing feats of goodwill that benefit both the cause and the company (and often create more social good in the process) is encompassed in cause marketing.
Being in the life science tools industry I was surprised when I read a recent Harvard Business Review article that referenced some numbers on the prevalence of cause marketing from a 2010 a PRWeek/Barkely PR cause marketing survey. As of 2010, two-thirds of all companies reported engaging in cause marketing, and 97% of marketing executives believed cause marketing to be a valid business strategy! If you look around the life sciences that certainly doesn’t seem to be the case. Given, simple self-reporting that your company engages in cause marketing is a low target as it doesn’t require that the cause marketing effort be of significant size or visibility.
Regardless of the reasoning for the survey numbers, it lead me to think that cause marketing is indeed under-leveraged in the life sciences. I know of only a handful of such efforts across the industry – the first one that comes to mind is Labnet’s manufacture of Susan G. Komen branded pipettes (which don’t even seem to be available anymore). In a way it does strike me as odd. Certainly there are many charitable or non-profit organizations funding compelling biomedical research that would be great cause marketing partners for life science tools companies. Think about it: How compelling would it be to a life science researcher to be able to purchase a product or buy from a company that supports life science research, maybe even research in their own field? There are certainly many potential opportunities to do just that … but not many laboratory tools companies seem to be making the effort.
While I wouldn’t suggest diving into cause marketing head first because of my admittedly anecdotal musings, it does seem that cause marketing may be an opportunity ripe for the picking by life science tools companies.
Microdata & SEO
Carlton Hoyt
As search engines try to provide ever more relevant results to searchers, they continuously change and update the way their crawlers view data as well as the way their search tools display it. With the advent of HTML5 one of the things that has been implemented is microdata. Microdata are metadata-like snippets of HTML code, hidden to a human viewer, that help computers (most importantly search engines) understand semantics and contextual information on a website or individual page. If you’re not up on your HTML or generally aren’t the most web-savvy individual you may find that a bit confusing. Don’t be. I’ll walk you through an example.
Search for a local theater, performing arts center, or something of that nature in Google. Chances are that it’s showing you show times and upcoming shows, a map, when the box office is open, and some other details about it. If not, search for another until you find one where that info is displayed, or just use the one local to us here in Kingston, NY. All that extra information is there because Google a) could find it, and b) believes it to be relevant to your search. What microdata does is provides information to Google and other search engines in a context that they inherently understand such that the information can then be provided to searchers that are looking for it. You want to make sure that when someone searches for you or your products that not only they do find you, but they are given the information that they are looking for but that as much info on your product is displayed as possible. Why? The same reason that General Mills wants supermarkets to carry all the different kinds of cereal that they make and put them at eye level – visibility.
There is a highly relevant eye-tracking study done by SEOmoz that shows, unsurprisingly, that the more content-rich “enhanced” results that show up get a disproportionately high amount of visibility. The more likely someone is to look at your link, the more likely they are to click on it, plain and simple. As search engines find more ways to serve more relevant data, more results will be enhanced, and microdata is a tool for them to do just that.
Bing, Google, and Yahoo have all gotten together recently and published a collection of microdata-providing HTML tags (which they call “schemas”) which they will all recognize. You can find it at schema.org. If you don’t have microdata implemented across your site, don’t panic. Even Google, the most progressive of the major search engines, doesn’t know how to answer most queries with enhanced results. That said, they are all moving in that direction as the internet progresses towards being a semantic web. Jumping on the microdata bandwagon now will make you an early adopter, especially in the life sciences, but over the next years, or possibly even months, you’ll improve your search visibility, and likely your search rankings as well, by allowing search engines a clearer and more accessible view of your data.
Don’t Just Tell, Show
Carlton Hoyt
In our last post, we discussed differentiating your life science marketing. In large part, we focused on the need to use unique marketing messages and make unique claims in order to convey the value that your products or services offer. Now it’s time to take the next step. Now that you’ve communicated your marketing message you need to validate it.
One great way of validating your marketing message is by actually showing it to your audience. Short of actually getting in front of them for a demonstration, you need to use your existing media channels to provide evidence to back up what you say. There are many creative ways to do this but for now let’s focus on one simple example that is relevant to just about anyone – data.
I’ll use a real example of a juxtaposition of two sequencing instruments (which shall remain anonymous). Now, how compelling is it if I simply tell you that sequencer X had an average predicted quality score of almost double that of sequencer Y over a 125-bp read. That sounds pretty good, but it’s easy to dismiss and I’m not really backing it up with anything – I’m making you take my word for it. On the other hand, I could show you the figure at right. Now you can see the very stark difference between the two. The message becomes more clear and tangible, and in the process become more believable as well. The customer will be more likely to accept, process, and act on this stronger, validated marketing message. (Disclaimer: it would have been better if the company compared actual quality scores rather than predicted quality scores, but it still serves as a useful example.)
One of my favorite examples of marketing claim validation, albeit outside the life sciences, comes from Blendtec. Blendtec is a manufacturer of high-end, high-powered kitchen blenders. They created a website, willitblend.com, where you can see the founder of Blendtec, garbed in a lab coat and safety glasses, blend all kinds of things – iPads, golf balls, and other things that you wouldn’t imagine would blend (nor would you want to find out on your own). This brilliant, highly entertaining form of marketing message validation actually went viral for a while some years back.
When you are making a claim in your marketing, be sure to ask yourself if you have sufficiently validated that claim. If not, figure out what you can do and what you need to do to provide the necessary validation. If you have, then you’re probably well on your way to crafting an effective marketing message.
Differentiate Your Marketing
Carlton Hoyt
Your marketing message is what communicates the benefits of your products and services. It is the tool that life science companies must use to convey value. Just like you must differentiate your products and services to create potential value, you must also differentiate your marketing message in order to communicate and thereby realize that value.
Think about some common claims that are made by life science companies. I’m sure we’re all heard companies claim that their product or service is one or more of the following:
- faster
- better
- an “industry standard”
- high quality
- reliable
- high-value
- more consistent
- “the best _____ available”
You know what all of those claims say? Almost nothing. Those claims are virtually worthless because they’re not differentiated. Are your competitors not going to claim that they’re fast, or high quality, or reliable? In rare situations, maybe not, but otherwise you’re both saying the same thing and you’re gaining no advantage from making similar claims.
So what must you do to differentiate your message? Obviously any life science company has to make claims and convey benefits. What can you say? Well, you can say all of the above things – you just can’t say them in that way.
Let’s take the the first and perhaps the most simple example on that list – “faster”. “Product X is faster” in and of itself means nothing. It gives no indication as to how fast something is. To use it effectively, we need to at least put it into perspective. “X is faster than Y”. Getting better, but we still don’t know how much faster. “X is 50% faster than Y”. 50%? That’s far more impressive. Why didn’t we say that the first time? Let’s keep going… We’ve put things in perspective but I still don’t know how fast X is, at least not in absolute terms. “Product X performs this function in just 1 hour, half the time that it takes using product Y”. Now we’re starting to get fairly compelling. The prospective customer would have a good grasp on how fast the product is and knows how much it outperforms the competition in that regard. Because of this, assuming speed is in fact important to the target market, they’ll be much more likely to take action than if you simply said “Product X is faster”.
Through differentiation of your marketing message, you’ll be able to more clearly and effectively convey the value your products have to offer. The end result will be more leads and more sales.
Trust and Risk
Carlton Hoyt
Trust is extremely important in life science business relationships (and business relationships in general). I don’t have to ask you to take my word for it, though. According to the sentiment of more than 80 life science manufacturers and distributors who took our 2011 life science distribution survey, trust is the most important factor in distribution relationships according to distributors, and the second most important factor according to manufacturers. It’s not difficult to imagine that trust would be attributed similar importance in other types of business partnerships as well. Despite this, so many companies and individuals approach business relationships with distrust.
Companies often lack an appreciation for the fact that in order to build trust you need to give trust, and giving trust involves assuming some business risk. Even some that understand this still approach partnerships with minimization of risk given top priority. Maintaining the example of distribution relationships, many manufacturers will insist that they get paid up-front for the first few orders. Likewise, many distributors worry that the manufacturers are going to take their money and run.
All of this over-sensitivity to risk needs be put aside in order for trust to be built. Companies need to understand that there are unknowns in dealing with companies that they have not dealt with before, and either take steps to mitigate the risk that do not destroy trust (for example, using neutral third parties as references) or at minimum be willing to share the risk and come to reasonable compromises in the interest of developing what are at the time very young business relationships.
Much of the lasting attitude that will permeate the relationship is built in the early formative period when the relationship is still being defined. This attitude can have a definite effect on the success of the relationship, even in the long-term. You don’t want to start in a position of negativity and then have to put in extra effort to establish a good relationship with your business partner (if a company’s culture allows for such distrust initially, they will likely not take the later actions necessary to mend the relationship anyway). Any given person is far more likely to help a friend than an acquaintance. If you start on good terms you can get an early emotional “in” and you’ll already be one step ahead in building a successful business relationship.
One last piece of advice – don’t let your lawyers get in the way.
Your Slogan May Backfire
Carlton Hoyt
An article in the Journal of Consumer Research, recently discussed in the Harvard Business Review, found that while brands have priming effects slogans often have reverse priming effects. In other words, brands often influence consumers as intended but slogans often cause the opposite effect.
Quoting the HBR article…
[pullquote_left]After participants were exposed to brands associated with luxury (such as Tiffany and Neiman Marcus), they decided to spend 26% more, on average, than after they were exposed to neutral brands (such as Publix and Dillardâs). After they were exposed to brands associated with saving money (such as Dollar Store and Kmart), they decided to spend 37% less than after they were exposed to neutral brands. The brands had the intended âprimingâ effect.[/pullquote_left]
[pullquote_right]But when it came to slogans, the same participants exhibited the opposite of the desired behavior. After reading a slogan meant to incite spending (âLuxury, you deserve itâ), they decided to spend 26% less than after reading a neutral slogan (âTime is what you make of itâ). When a slogan invited them to save (âDress for lessâ), they decided to spendâan additional 29%, on average. The slogans had a âreverse primingâ effect.[/pullquote_right]
The research suggests that this is a result of behavioral resistance to perceived attempts at persuasion. While consumers do not view brands as an attempt to persuade, slogans are viewed as an attempt to persuade and therefore exert the opposite effect. This effect, which was measured in general consumers, is most likely heightened amongst a highly rational and critical scientific audience.
Quick note to our readers: do NOT take this result as an indication that you should use reverse psychology in your slogan. Simply be careful in selecting what your slogan will be and don’t be afraid to get creative.
The Sequester & The Life Sciences
Carlton Hoyt
It’s no longer big news – the U.S. congressional “supercommittee” tasked with finding $1.2 trillion in federal spending cuts in the next 10 years has failed. On November 21st, the committee conceded failure and, barring the miraculous passage of any budget legislation over the next year which would meet those deficit objectives, the sequestration plan goes into effect starting Jan 2, 2013, cutting $1.2 trillion across-the-board. As a life science tools company that sells products in the United States, especially if you make a substantial fair amount of your money in the US and have exposure to academic research institutions, this should rightly scare you.
The sequester would cut 7.8% from the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and the Centers for Disease Control. That’s a huge cut that equates to over 2,500 less NIH grants and 1,500 less NSF grants in 2013 compared to 2011. While the sequester isn’t a certainty at this point – details could still be revised and a budget agreement could still be reached – President Obama has stated that he would veto any plan that doesn’t meet the deficit reduction goals, making a deal unlikely.
Consider this – the NIH spends over $31.2 billion on life science and medical research annually. To give this some perspective, PhRMA estimates that in 2009 the ENTIRE PHARMACEUTICAL INDUSTRY spent $65.3 billion on R&D (although reported data from CapIQ would suggest that number is at least 50% higher). As one can surmise from these numbers, the pharmaceutical and biotech industries are highly unlikely to make up for the loss of R&D spending. If the sequester goes through as currently planned, my estimate would be that life science tools companies can expect a 3% to 4% decrease in their US sales, presuming that their current market shares between industry, academia, etc. are proportional to the respective current R&D spending. Obviously companies that sell a disproportionately large amount to academia and other organizations highly dependent on NIH funding will see a greater decrease in sales. Likewise, companies that sell products which make work in the lab more convenient will likely feel the pain somewhat more than essentials.
With governments across the globe having major budget problems, leaner times for life science funding are extremely likely to become a reality. The companies that will be able to succeed in spite of it will be those that understand their exposure to potential reductions in funding and plan accordingly.
What Should We Call Ourselves?
Carlton Hoyt
I’ve heard our “sub-industry” called many things. So many, in fact, that it seems quite obvious that there isn’t a consensus. I think it’s time to end all that.
What should the industry that manufactures and sells products for use in life science research be called?