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We Just Got Skyscrapered

Carlton Hoyt 3:44 pm , January 30, 2017

Just yesterday, we got skyscrapered. No, we didn’t get an office in a giant building or fly an ad from one or anything like that, nor is that some weird pop-culture thing that teenagers are putting on YouTube. We were the target of an attempt at “skyscraper marketing” … and I’m talking about it, so I guess it worked in a sense.

I’ll talk more about this particular instance in a moment, but first I wanted to give an intro to skyscraper marketing for anyone who isn’t familiar with it.

The “What” and “Why” of Skyscraper Marketing

Skyscraper marketing was one method which was popularized after Google’s 2013 Hummingbird algorithm update. To summarize the implications of that in brief: there was once a time when you could “trick” Google into thinking that your website was more important than it was by posting links around the internet pointing to your website. Hummingbird was the Google update that put an end to that once and for all and penalized websites that did not comply. From then on, if you wanted to prove your website’s importance (and thereby improve your search ranks), you needed to earn your backlinks organically.

That’s about the time when content marketing became more important. From that point, not only was it the validation that showed prospects you knew what you were talking about, but it was the primary tool at your disposal to influence your search rankings (beyond the basic on-site optimization, such as optimized URLs and title tags, that everyone does and therefore isn’t a real source of competitive advantage). The more shareable the content, the more backlinks it would likely get, and therefore the better it was for SEO.

Thus, Skyscraper Marketing was devised. At its most basic, I can break it down into a three step process:

  1. Find successful content.
  2. Improve upon it.*
  3. Share it with people who would be interested in it and, in turn, share it themselves.

*The necessity for improvement is debatable, but you do have to do something to it. More on that in a moment…

The “How” of Skyscraper Marketing

Skyscraper marketing is, essentially, a type of influencer marketing in that the important part is the last step – getting people with engaged audiences to share it. That being the case, there are two primary approaches (and you don’t have to choose between them – you can do both at the same time).

The first approach is the incremental improvement approach. You find some good content which you have something to add to / make better / pose a counterpoint to / etc., then distribute it to a bunch of people who would find it relevant and potentially want to share it. In this approach, you’re adding something to the general body of knowledge in the hope that your contributed insight is enough to make it a worthwhile share – especially from people who have large audiences themselves. Again, the goal is to get as many backlinks and as many eyeballs as possible (those goals do overlap) so the more people you reach out to the better.

The second approach is the “stroking one’s ego” approach. In this approach, your goal isn’t necessarily to improve upon good pieces of content, but rather to act as an aggregator. You take really good tidbits from the thinking of a number of different influencers, and repackage them into a single, easily digestible, and readily shareable piece of content, being sure to reference and link to the authors / posts whose thinking you aggregated. You then reach back out to those people and let them know that you published something which referenced them. People, being generally inclined towards things that make themselves seem important, will share your article which highlights their own thinking.

BioBM’s Skyscraper Marketing Tips

As with influencer marketing, you want to take care to do it correctly. If you don’t, you’ll not only waste your time and effort, but you’ll also get a reputation among the influencers in your market as a peddler of junk content. If that happens, skyscraper marketing or other forms of influencer marketing will be more difficult for you in the future. Just as poor quality content can reflect badly upon your brand, asking people to share poor quality content will erode your relationships with those influencers.

To not be “that guy,” here are some useful tips:

  • Don’t spam your network. Only send out good content and only send it to people who would find it genuinely relevant.
  • Don’t plagiarize copy … or ideas. If people realize they’ve heard it all before elsewhere, they probably won’t share it.
  • Note that “improved content” does not mean “longer content.” A lot of people have a habit of focusing on expanding upon an idea rather than improving upon it. Improvement is far more important than expansion. If you make something better or take a novel perspective on an idea, that’s far more worthy of sharing than simply adding more of the same.
  • “Improved content” also doesn’t mean that you need to improve on the idea itself. Communicating it more effectively – for instance, using illustration to more clearly demonstrate a complex point – can be just as valuable.
  • Always remember: your content behaves like a product and must be differentiated!
  • If you’re going to take an ego-driven approach, be sure you show that you have taken the time to fully understand and eloquently explain the idea, and give some praise to the original author without coming of as a flatterer.

So to finish the story…

Upon checking our social media dashboards this morning, I saw this tweet:

I’ve been published more than the average person, but that’s still enough to get my attention so I gave it a quick read through. I ended up not sharing it on our @BioBM twitter account (and I don’t use my personal @CHoytPhD twitter anymore) for a few reasons. Primarily, we have very high standards for what BioBM publishes through our channels. We generally require there to be some element of newness, and we didn’t find there to be any particularly fresh thinking. (Sorry, Joe! No offense intended.) Secondarily, it was a really obvious skyscraper attempt, especially since our idea which was shared wasn’t strongly relevant to the body of the article and was simply one of many listed in bullet point format towards the end. On the other hand, Joe did well not to plagiarize the ideas which he referenced, but rather offered a tidbit of them with a link to the source. That was nice of him. (Thanks, Joe!)

That said, it did engage a discussion on twitter and his post did end up being linked to on our blog, so I suppose Joe can claim victory after all. He’s also welcome to follow this shameless promotion for our “Marketing of Life Science Tools & Services” LinkedIn group and post it there as well. 2262 members and counting!

Just for fun, and because who doesn’t love architecture, here’s a few more images of skyscrapers. All images are courtesy of Unsplash, which in an amazing feat of generosity allows their beautiful, high-resolution images to be used for any purpose and without attribution. I find that so awesome that I’m giving them attribution anyway.


"Innovative companies deserve innovative marketing. If you want to leverage the next generation of marketing strategies to not only help you achieve success, but create genuine strategic advantage for your company, contact BioBM. It’s never too early or too late, but the sooner we get started the more of a head start you’ll have."
Blog / Content Marketing / Marketing Communications / Search Marketing 3:44 pm , January 30, 2017

Life Science SMM: Twitter

Carlton Hoyt 7:10 pm , August 10, 2011

Twitter is the most popular platform for life science marketing, and can be a powerful tool when used correctly.This post is the first in a series of primers on various platforms available for life science social media marketing (SMM). Check back for primers on the use of facebook, youtube, and other means of life science social media marketing.

Twitter has undeniably become the social platform of choice for life science marketing. Based upon our in-house research performed on 400 small life science companies (in this case “small companies” is defined as those with 200 employees or less), 39.5% of small life science companies have twitter accounts, however only 31.0% have facebook accounts. Of the life science companies that use twitter, however, only a fraction make optimal use of it. Most commit multiple social media marketing faux-pas, and their marketing efforts are, in whole or in part, wasted as a result.

The first thing to remember about any life science social media marketing, and something that I reiterate over and over again, is that you are effectively on your customer’s “turf”, and you need to play by their rules. They are there for a reason, and that reason may be to network, socialize, follow topics of interest, etc., but you can be relatively certain that they are not there to read a stream of advertisements. If your twitter is effectively just a feed of new product announcements, press releases, sales and promotions, don’t waste your time. Either step up your game or shut your twitter account.

Remember that social media marketing, especially SMM on twitter, is far more about branding as opposed to lead generation. If you’re expecting twitter to be something that’s going to provide a short-term ROI, you’re probably barking up the wrong tree. (there are methods to realize a more near-term ROI, but this should be a small piece of your social media strategy). Think long-term. Think of it as an outlet that will project an image or an expertise. It will be one of the “faces” of your business, and its value will be in helping to shape and control your brand image.

When it comes to social media marketing, it is often good not to think of your target audience as current / potential customers but rather as scientists (or whatever subset of scientists you are looking to target). This will help you get out of the more traditional marketing mindset. Now, what would those scientists be interested in? How can you deliver content that is interesting to them as well as relevant to your business? That line that achieves both interest to your audience and relevance to your business is your sweet spot – stick to that as closely as you can. The source of the content can be external or internal, in fact most sustainable social media strategies by necessity rely more heavily on external content as generating the majority of content internally will either be too much of a burden or leave you posting too infrequently.

This is not to say that some more traditional marketing can’t be worked in, it just has to be communicated in terms of how it would be interesting to your audience. New products can be discussed if they are sufficiently interesting and you can add value to a conversation. Promotions can be announced if they are compelling to your audience. Just try your best to avoid making too many pitches, if any.

The next thing to remember is to engage. You need to promote and create bi-directional communication with your audience. Even if your audience is too large to listen and respond to a significant number of them, reach out to some eventually. Share what they have to say, respond to topics of interest, and talk to them. Just like conversations offline, people like it when what they say is acknowledged. Show your audience that there’s a real person (maybe even one that’s not wearing a tie) behind your twitter avatar. Being human is so much better than being corporate, and will help them foment a positive opinion of your brand and create an emotional attachment.

I’ve heard some prominent life science marketers predict the downfall of twitter as a marketing platform (just as, they say, e-mail has fallen out of favor as a marketing platform). I would go so far as to say they are outright incorrect. Unlike e-mail, where you are not always in control of who is sending you messages, twitter users choose who they want to listen to. If they feel they are being marketed to more than they desire, they’ll simply follow fewer corporate accounts. This can, however, be overcome by using marketing methods that don’t “feel” like marketing (such as content marketing), avoiding pitches, creating engagement, and being human.

Most twitter users don’t know most of the people they follow; they follow them because they’re interested in what they have to say. Put extremely simply, for a life science social media campaign on twitter to be successful, all you have to do is be relevant and interesting.

Don’t forget to follow BioBM on twitter! @BioBM

"Don’t let life science SMM intimidate you. If you want to get more out of your SMM, develop a strategy that will help you engage your audience and deliver value to your company, and / or have your social media marketing professionally and personally executed by life science SMM experts, call BioBM Consulting. You can become an authority in your field via social media. BioBM can help you get there."
Blog / Social Media 7:10 pm , August 10, 2011

Value of Social Media Marketing

Douglas E. Rogers 10:05 am , January 5, 2011

Social Media Marketing is a great way to interact with customers, but many companies take it for granted and do not adequately plan their SMM strategies.Social media is all the rage – it has been for almost a decade now. From the generation Y-ers who initially picked up on the pioneering social network Friendster back in 2002 to the new generation of socially networked seniors with Facebook friends galore, the world is now socially networked. Using social networks for marketing purposes, a practice more technically referred to as social media marketing or just SMM, is a young and rapidly evolving practice (as you may notice from the lack of detailed information in the Wikipedia entry on the subject). While the leveraging of social networks for marketing purposes is not a particularly new idea, companies have traditionally been slow to adopt social networking. While some companies have had overwhelming successes with SMM – such as Bio-Rad’s PCR song spoof of the Village People’s “YMCA” that went massively viral within the scientific community two years ago – most companies’ social media efforts, particularly those of small companies, are largely failures. In this post, I will address some of the basic yet important and often overlooked questions and challenges of social media marketing that many companies fail to address, as well as discuss some of the social media outlets and some of the specific concerns involving each.

Issue #1: Understand who you are trying to talk to

This is the easiest and least complex step and should be the first step as well, but nonetheless even this relatively simple issue gets overlooked sometimes. Simply ask yourself: “Who am I trying to communicate with?” If you are serving life science researchers generally, then the answer to this question will be broad – you’ll be communicating with research assistants and lab techs, PIs and professors, grad students and lab managers, procurement department employees, etc. They may be in academia, pharma / biotech, CROs, etc, etc, etc. This will likely make it easier to find your audience but may make it harder to connect with them since they’ll have diverse interests. Alternatively you may be focusing on a small subset – say, researchers in big pharma performing mass spectroscopy analysis of proteins. This kind of refined specification may make it harder to find your audience but will make it easier to connect with them since you will know their interests to some extent.

Issue #2: Understand why you are talking to them

An equally important and amazingly frequently overlooked question is “why”. Why are we trying to engage this audience? Do we want to get their opinions? Do we want to control or convey our brand image? Do we simply want to promote products and / or services to them? Don’t just answer yes or no to these questions – delve into them a bit. If you want to promote products to them, think about how you plan on doing so. Do you plan on offering exclusive promotions? Do you want to use social media as an outlet for conveying information on new products? Dig deep and think about what your goals are.

Issue #3: Understand how your audience uses any given social media platform

This is the #1 reason for failure of any social media marketing strategy. Companies fail to understand how the audience is using a particular platform. A related pitfall involves rolling out an identical engagement plan across all (read: “disparate”) platforms. While this is a complex issue and could be the subject of a book, allow me to give you a few things to remember. 1) Social Networks are your audience’s turf, not yours. Unlike your website, print or online advertisements, or just about any other marketing platform you utilize, you are not in control of a social network, and your audience is not there specifically to interact with you. You are both a guest and a member of a conversation, so act accordingly. Interact. Contribute. 2) You need to give people a reason to listen to you, and this reason has to be congruous with the reason that your audience is on a particular social platform in the first place. In other words, delivering value is not enough – you need to deliver value within the context of the audience’s presence on any given social network.

Issue #4: Resource your efforts appropriately

One of the great things about SMM is that social platforms are almost always free to use, but this doesn’t mean that an SMM campaign doesn’t require any significant amount of resources. While SMM can be significantly less expensive than other marketing outlets, social media marketing is not some simple endeavor that involves merely sending out an occasional tweet whenever you have a promotion. It requires forethought, planning, engagement, conversing, creating and delivering value, and all these things take time. Figure out where you can get the greatest returns from your social media marketing investment and focus on that. Only roll out a broad SMM campaign across many platforms if you have the time and budget to do so. As with other marketing endeavors, spreading your efforts too thin will lead to failure.

Brief comments about different social media platforms

Facebook – This is a purely social, mostly recreational platform. It’s a great place for strong consumer brands, but others can have difficulty connecting with their audience here. Remember that people go on Facebook for personal reasons and to make personal connections. If you’re going to connect to most scientists here, you’ll need to reach out to them not just as scientists, but as people.

Twitter – People express a variety of interests here, so listen to what your audience is saying and participate. Perhaps the greatest power of social media marketing via twitter is it’s search function. Connect with people who are talking about things that pertain to your company. Also, be sure to give your account some personality.

LinkedIn – You’re probably not going to pick up many customers here unless you’re doing higher-level B2B sales, but it is a great way to connect with potential business partners. Since your space on LinkedIn is your turf, so to speak, make the best of it. When presenting yourself on LinkedIn think of your company first, and your products as a function or extension of your company.

Forums – While not always thought of as a social network, the same rules apply. Forums can be great ways to find and convey messages to groups of researchers and scientists (and others) interested in a specific topic. Again, be engaging and be sure to add value to the conversation.

YouTube – Remember that after someone watches a video on YouTube, they’ll see “related videos”, so if your competitors are on YouTube as well, they’ll probably be presented with their videos after watching yours (although this works both ways). It’s a great way to host content that can be easily linked to, shared, embedded, and otherwise distributed.

Virality

As a closing note, don’t spend all your effort trying to create the next huge, viral media phenomenon. While it’s a noble goal, the success rate in trying to do so is very low, and the compulsion to spread the word needs to be very high. A 2006 Millward Brown study suggested that on average only 13% of people who receive any viral message pass it on. This means that for every 8 people the message reaches, one of those must pass it on to another 8 in order for the message to maintain it’s rate of spread. That’s a lot to ask for. Don’t let these numbers discourage you from trying, especially if you have a great idea (again, I point to Bio-Rad’s video), but don’t think that going viral is necessary for a good SMM campaign.

Social media marketing is a great way to connect with customers, get feedback on products or services, crowdsource for ideas, and convey and monitor your brand identity, but it is something that requires planning. Not adequately defining SMM strategies, not understanding your audience or social platforms, or under-resourcing your SMM efforts are all-too-common and avoidable reasons for social media marketing failures. A little planning and some understanding of the social networking landscape can dramatically improve returns on social media marketing.

"Need help defining a social media marketing strategy? Want to talk to a social media marketing expert about how best to engage customers on a given platform? Want to create and launch a well-rounded SMM campaign? The marketing and web experts at BioBM have deep knowledge and robust experience in SMM. Talk to us and tell us about what you want to accomplish, and we’ll help get you there."

And now, for your enjoyment, the Bio-Rad PCR song!

Blog / Social Media 10:05 am , January 5, 2011