Medical Technology and Bioscience marketing tips
I am attending the annual OMS conference in San Diego. Today is about social media integration and execution. Many of us have been working on integrating social media into campaigns and tactics. We finally have a number of case studies and processes to follow.
To view some of the links and thoughts: search hashtag on Twitter: #0ms10
More info will be posted on this blog.
It seems I have conversations DAILY with people wanting to learn more about social media. In the past few weeks, I’ve spoken with people with entities ranging from a cupcake bakery, an automobile parts manufacturer, a nursing association, a dog trainer, and a medical device company. I tell all of them equally “your customers or members, prospects and competitors are using these online communities every day” – and more than likely, they are also talking about your products or services in these online communities!
What is Social Media? It’s the use of technology combined with social interaction to engage and participate in conversations. Instead of one-to-one conversations, it’s one-to-many conversations.
The social media space includes blogs, RSS, social search, social networking and bookmarking. This quiver of tools gives the savvy marketer the ability to create richer communications to generate new business. Now, it is easier than ever to build up thought leadership and credibility online by posting articles, blogs, video and pictures.
A Quick Snapshot of Social Media Tools:
LinkedIn: Most likely, you are already using LinkedIn for your professional network, quite possibly with a group related to your association. If you don’t have a profile set up or have an updated profile, go to LinkedIn.com. Tip: Use the Q & A section to build up thought leadership. You can join up to 50 groups and submit relevant news articles that you enjoy to the groups you belong.
Facebook: Many people are only using this for their personal online community. I recommend that you keep this to friends and family. Business contacts can join your association’s Facebook fan page. Tip: Join relevant Facebook groups to find potential members/customers, articles and industry information.
Jigsaw: This is a great tool for prospecting and an excellent way to find contacts within an organization. Note: There is a fee for this service. Tip: Combine Jigsaw with LinkedIn to find contacts.
Twitter: This is really just a Microblogging site. Twitter is a great tool to use for research. Tip: Download Tweetdeck and use the search tool to find conversations about topics of interest to you and your business.
Social Media Submission Sites: Digg is a social news website made for people to share content. Digg allows you to submit articles that people can give a thumbs ups or thumbs down. Tip: Digg is another way to build up thought leadership, and a treat place to search for content.
Slideshare: This is a great site to post your PowerPoint, PDF and Word presentations. However, be sure not to post any proprietary information. Posting builds up your credibility and adds to your thought leadership reputation. Tip: You can also link Slideshare with your LinkedIn profile.
Blogs: Technorati is an online tool to search for relevant blogs. I don’t recommend starting a blog until you are committed to keeping it updated. Tip: Rather than starting your own blog, find blogs that are interesting and post your comments and feedback for others to read.
Ning.com: This tool allows you to search existing online communities or start your own for free. Tip: Ning is a good place to join online communities that are of personal interest.
Social Media Monitoring: It’s important for you and your organization to listen to the online world first, before engaging. This will allow you to formulate a plan and determine the key online communities that are a fit for you. Social media monitoring uses key words to search for information. This is a great way to keep up on what people are saying about your company, industry and competitors. Tip: Try one of the social media monitoring free services (Tweetdeck, Google Alerts, Yahoo Pipes, coComment and Commentful) or use a professional monitoring service like Radian6 and Filtrbox.
A few tools and tips:
1. Manage your time with social media. Like any new tool, learning to use social media will take time. Take a little time every day to review, respond and engage in the online community.
Follow the rules:
• Remember that getting involved requires a commitment. Your readers will easily get turned off if you start and then leave them hanging.
• Be honest and authentic with what you post.
• Do not spam. Nobody likes a hard sell.
• Review your employee handbook and make sure you have rules for employees to engage social media tools.
• Assign social media responsibilities to various employees, including your customer service team. Your employees should report back anything relevant to your industry.
There are new social media tools coming out every day, and most of these tools are very simple.
Spend a little time learning about these new tools and finding the ones that make sense for your company. Put your plan together with few simple goals and assess it quarterly. You will be on your way to conversing and contributing in the Social Media Space!
Ubiquity Group specializes in generating demand for life science companies.
Greg@ubiquitygroup.com
303-962-8700
Follow on Twitter: @ubiquity
For more information: Follow my blog:
www.ubiquitygroup.com/resources
I have had many conversations with life science companies about social media/emerging media. The light has finally gone on in the room and I believe this is due to all the media attention. Many of my contacts in the medical technology and bioscience industry indicated that their products or services are not consumer facing and thus do not need to participate in social media marketing.
Now it is becoming clear within the life science community; whether you sell stents, heart monitoring software, medical tubing, the famous blue pill or products only in development; you will need to actively listen to what is being discussed online. Your customers, decision makers, influencers and investors are participating online. Discussing your products and service on blogs, videos, podcasts, news articles, and possibly talking to your parents about your company. While monitoring can help with most things we can’t really monitor what they say to your parents.
All joking aside, this article is to bring you up to speed on how to get involved in online monitoring and some top reasons and give you an understanding how Ubiquity may be able to help you. (Its my blog, I can self promote every 96 days.)
Online media is becoming more and more prevalent every day. With new information being discussed in blogs, social communities, news feeds and even online video conversation. Keeping up with online conversations can be a daunting task. But, interesting conversations are happening all over the web, making the resources worth the effort.
See Social Media Basics blog entry: The dog ate my social media: Social media basics.
Customers, prospects, and peers are discussing your business brand, your industry, and your competitors using social media, with or without you. Unfortunately, choosing not to listen doesn’t make those conversations go away. ‘Actively listening’ means protecting your business brand reputation, discovering opportunities, staying competitive, and avoiding a runaway crisis.
Why Actively Listen:
1. It will uncover potential new customers and partners at their point of need.
2. It provides real-time data as it is discovered.
3. Conversation dynamics are constantly tallied from every post/video/image in a topic profile so we can track the viral nature and allow for easy sorting. This enables us to quickly sort through the noise.
(Click on image for larger size: From Brian Solis)
Actively Listening to social media will also provide:
Multiple Languages - Online monitoring can support for multiple languages including English, French, Spanish, Italian, German, Simple Chinese, Korean and Japanese.
Crisis Monitoring - Watch daily for words that could be potentially damaging to your brand.
Competitive Intelligence - Watch daily for competitors’ brands or partners to appear and investigate further.
Marketing Trends - New words and topics associated with your brand can provide an opportunity for the development of new business channels.
Online Communities and Influencers - Learn which online communities are important to your business.
Branding and Marketing - The findings will help you in determining proper messaging for your products, help you better target and also help improve your organic rankings on the web.
10 reasons to monitor the online world: This is a good list from David Alston at Radian6.
Check out his recent column yet 5 more reasons to listen.
How to get started: A typical process
Why use Ubiquity for Life science Online Marketing:
Ubiquity specializes in generating demand for Life Science companies. We understand the medical technology and bioscience industry, your clients and the decision makers. We work in emerging media and know how to create actionable, measurable strategies from the information we find.
Ubiquity uses a number of tools to aggregate data which is supplied to our medical technology clients as an executive summary. Each summary may have charts, graphs and the links to each conversation and is customized to fit your needs.
Greg Olson :: Ubiquity
2406 West 32nd Ave., Suite B
Denver, Colorado 80211
tel: 303.962.8700
cell: 303.587.2847
www.ubiquitygroup.com
Follow me on Twitter:@ubiquity
I have had many conversations with people wanting to get started in social media. It is a wide range of companies: Ranging from a cupcake bakery, automobile belt and hose manufacturer to a medical device company. Everyone has certain excuses to why they have not become part of this emerging media. So I just tell them to say, my dog ate my social media. All fun aside. Your customers, prospects and competitors are using these online communities every day and I bet a few of them are talking about your product or service.
Lets run through a few basic items.
What is Social Media: There are probably a 1000 definitions. Lets go with this one.
Social media is the use of technology combined with social interaction to engage and participate in conversations.
Instead of one to one it is one to many.
There are so many definitions but it is more about how it is changing marketing.
• Social media, and by that I’m lumping together blogs, RSS, social search, social networking and bookmarking, presents the marketer with a rich set of new tools to help in the effort to generate new business.
• Social media can help business: The list is endless:
Increased web traffic/more inbound links, build brand awareness and improve customer loyalty, earlier problem detection, relatively low cost, and integrates with marketing.
What is Twitter:
Twitter is micro-blogging: 140 character limit. A Web site and service that lets users send short text messages from their cellphones to a group of friends. Launched in 2006, Twitter (www.twitter.com) was designed for people to broadcast their current activities and thoughts. Twitter expanded “mobile blogging” (updating a blog from a cellphone) into “microblogging,” the updating of an activities blog (microblog) that distributes the text to a list of names. Messages can also be sent and received via instant messaging.
Every day there are stories popping up in local papers, on local news stations and even the radio. Here are few interesting ways Twitter is being used:
• Dell has said it has made 1 million (Read more)in revenue last year using twitter promoting items in its outlet department. Great way to move product.
• A pregnant woman has a band on her belly with sensors that sends alerts through Twitter, every time the baby kicks.
• A sensor placed in a plant, sends alerts through Twitter when it needs water, has too much water, needs sunlight, etc
• Milwaukee Wisconsin is using Twitter for public safety alerts, receive leads on accidents. (Read More)
• 2008 California Fires: The really bad fires last year: THE (Los Angeles Fire Department) LAFD used it to keep the community appraised of fire emergencies. (Read More)
• Personal uses: Twittering you are at a restaurant or trying to find friends at a concert.
• Cyclist Lance Armstrong has over 500,000 followers (Follow Lance)
• I have about 2,000 but I haven’t won the Tour De France even once, so win the Tour de France a few times and you to can have a half a million followers.
B2B Followers flock to Twitter: Great article
How not to use Twitter:
If your not going to invest time into Twitter, than it probably isn’t for you. I find Twitter an amazing tool for research and listening to what people are saying.
List of Twitter Tools and Twitter Tool Box: Couple of good links of a variety of tools to use Twitter in your business. Various Twitter-related tools and plugins have been multiplying fast
Facebook:
Facebook is a great online community. I am amazed at how fast it is growing. The numbers today are something like over 4 million new users a day. The interesting data is in the growth and what ages ranges are coming onto Facebook. This is great opportunity for businesses to tap into these online communities.
Facebook’s 35-54 year old demographic segment not only continued to grow the fastest, but it accelerated to a 276.4% growth rate over the past 6 months. That demo is DOUBLING roughly every two months. Here’s the full breakdown:
The 35-54 year old demo is growing fastest, with a 276.4% growth rate in over the approximate 6 months since we last produced this report
The 55+ demo is not far behind with a 194.3% growth rate
The 25-34 year population on Facebook is doubling every 6 months
For those interested in advertising alcohol on Facebook, there are 27,912,480 users 21+, representing 66.3% of all users
Miami is the fastest growing metropolitan area (88.5%) and Atlanta (6.4%) is the slowest
There are more females (55.7%) than males (42.2%) on Facebook - 2.2% are of unknown gender.
The largest demographic concentration remains the college crowd of 18-24 year olds (40.8%) which is down from (53.8%) six months ago.
A warning about being involved on social networks and posting personal information.
This information can be found and someone else can post it. I have consulted many companies about having personal information on the site. The Colorado Govenor’s son had pictures of him and friends drinking in the Governors mansion (They were of age but riding the Colorado flag around like a horse is probably not the best picture to post.)
What does listening to social media mean?
Use a free tool called Tweetdeck which allows you to easily search by terms.
Direct unfiltered brutally honest nature of online discussions is black gold.. Helping you spot tends and find out what customers really think…
How would a company go about listening?
Every company should be listening. Another topic around Social Media is online marketing and Search.
Many online tools which will search online news sources, blogs, video and photo site comments and microblogs.
Content Aggregation: Tweetdeck, Google Alerts, Yahoo Pipes, coComment, Commentful
Professional monitoring services: Radian6 and Filtrbox
How should they respond to what they hear?
I prefer transparency and authenticity. People are really good at reading BS. If there is a problem, lets get down to it immediately.
Recent example: Amazon: See NY Times Article on a good example of what can go wrong when you don’t listen.
Be proactive, Listen and help bring the conversation closer
How do you measure your social media efforts?
Measures vary greatly on a client by client basis and the network they are participating.
First: Take a snapshot of your social media world.
Obvious numbers: Number of FB Fans: Twitter followers, web traffic.
Two real measurements are influence and engagement.
Engagement metrics:
Unique visitors, Time spent on site, Frequency of visits, conversations
Things I would think of with Social Media measurement:
Steps to think about.
New puppy syndrome: I see so many people and companies start out with a big exciting effort on social media and then it soon passes. This is a program not a campaign, meaning that you cant stop talking and listening to your customers and prospects because you are getting bored with the puppy. It takes love and attention.
Responding to bad buzz: As I stated in the beginning of this story, this is one to many. The old way was, if you have one un-happy customer they may tell 10 people. Well now it is one un-happy customer may tell 683 of their Facebook friends, 2389 Twitter o and 590 Myspace friends and then they will pass your link on to their friends. One comment could reach a million people in minutes. Quick story: A friend was standing in a long Starbucks line and very slow service. He decides to go to another Starbucks since there is usually one within a block, as he is walking he Tweets about the horrible service as said Starbucks. He immediately gets a reply from Starbucks about the situation and they email him a gift card. That is listening and taking care of the situation.
I will post more on Social Media and will be looking at specific case studies within different industries. I look forward to hearing from you.
Greg Olson::Ubiquity Follow me on Twitter: @ubiquity
greg@ubiquitygroup.com :: 303-962-8700 :: www.ubiquitygroup.com
Over the past few years we have seen so many new tools come into play for marketers. We have had blogs: Are you still working on getting one up? Youtube, Podcasts, Vcasts, and now Twitter. Michael Stelnzer’s blog post about How to use twitter to grow your business is very interesting. He gives us real life examples of who is using Twitter, from creating new inbound leads to replacing their PR firm. It is an article worth a read.
http://www.copyblogger.com/grow-business-twitter/
Continue reading ‘Can Twitter be used to grow your business?’
Twitter / ubiquity