PJA Blog: The Complex Brand

PJA recently launched a survey on social media in the IT world with our partner ITtoolbox. The response has been so positive that we have decided to launch a similar survey about social media use in life science, working with our partner BioInformatics.

Working with BioInformatics has been eye-opening. They’re very smart, of course, and that’s always eye-opening. What has been truly enlightening is that, contrary to some blather I’ve been carrying around in my head, scientists aren’t laggards to the IT crowd in social media, they’ve been ahead all along.

Electronic mail began in the university setting, right down the road from PJA in 1961, in fact, and typically was used between scientists. Tim Berners-Lee developed the idea of hypertext links in 1989 at the European Particle Physics Laboratory. To quote him, “Between the summers of 1991 and 1994, the load on the first Web server (”info.cern.ch”) rose steadily by a factor of 10 every year. In 1992 academia, and in 1993 industry, was taking notice.”

Here’s a more recent and much more robust example: The Science Advisory Board, currently an online community of more than 34,000 scientists founded by BioInformatics, just celebrated its tenth-year anniversary. It features blogs, a discussion forum, member-submitted reviews, white papers, and a ton of user-generated content. As one of their members put it, “It’s like going to a large scientific meeting, only you can go whenever you feel like it.” In short, it’s a social media site, except it has been around since 1997. How savvy was your Web use in 1997?

To quote Bill Kelly, President of BioInformatics, “Long before anyone used the phrase ‘Web 2.0′ we were leveraging the Internet to deliver online professional networking services to life science researchers.”

So, despite the fact that one researcher recently asked me about support groups for scientists who haven’t yet blogged, she’s been ahead of the pack for years now.

If you saw Jim Stengel, CMO of P&G, interviewed in the most recent Fortune, you probably paused as I did when I saw him get emotional about commodities. Here’s some of what he said:

“I hate it when someone says they’re in a commodity category. We don’t accept that there are any commodity categories. We are growing Charmin and Bounty very well, and if there is any category that people could say is a commodity, it’s paper towels and tissues. We have developed tremendous equities, tremendous loyalties from our consumers. So, no, I think that is a cop-out. That is bad marketing and an excuse. We are not in any commodity categories.”

How often over the course of a month does a BtoB marketer hear a client or prospect whine that they’re in a commodity category? No doubt pretty often. How often do they respond as Stengel does? Based on what you see when you flip through most magazines, a lot less frequently. If there is inspirational equity in a product or service – and you could argue that anything possesses it if paper towels do – it rarely makes it to the surface or is even pursued.

Look at the target customer. How well do you know them? What’s the inspiration? What’s the aspiration? A freelance team I know once went through a supermarket and chose the most commodity product they could find, bouillon cubes, and designed a campaign around them for their book. As I remember, it focused on the entire experience of opening the cube: where you likely were, what you were likely thinking, and how relaxing it was to be cooking from scratch rather than sitting in traffic. It worked for me. And there’s no barrier that exists just because we’re in BtoB to say we can’t be inspiring and compelling, either.

It’s working for Jim Stengel with a $6.7 billion ad budget, so it should be workable at our slightly lower budgets, too.

Once in a while you come upon a topic that makes anything look like a bully pulpit. You think, why isn’t every YouTube video coming out of every educated person’s video camera focusing on this issue? (Several are, but where’s the tipping point?)

So. The most compelling thing I’ve seen or heard this year is not, in fact, about wonderfully efficient storage, a better way to run gels, a more comprehensive approach to Integrated Healthcare Management, or a better Linux kernel.

It’s about our slavish addiction to oil, the root of just about every domestic and international evil we suffer from on a daily basis. And yet, seemingly under the radar, an amazing new project has emerged out of the Rocky Mountain Institute to slash oil use to levels not seen in decades. This project, co-funded by the Pentagon, may be the best use of tax dollars in the last eight years. Or eighteen years. Or longer.

It’s called Winning the Oil Endgame. This week it celebrates its third anniversary of publication, but it sure feels timely right now, with oil at $79.91 a barrel. (more…)

Over the past month, we’ve helped a client to find their best fit in a social media tracking and analysis vendor. Top contenders included Biz360, Nielsen BuzzMetrics, TNS Media Intelligence / Cymfony, and Factiva. With this group, we felt pretty comfortable we’d covered all the bases.

As an agency employee, it’s always interesting to play client once in a while and see how vendors look from the other side of the table. Who looks hungry and who comes across as surprisingly sleepy? Who attempts to dazzle with capabilities? Who really does their homework on the brand? Who pauses the longest on the well-designed slide that shows their huge global network, while the clients politely glance down and check their PDAs? Nothing leaves you feeling more exposed about your last pitch than seeing how others do it. On the other hand, talking to so many speciality vendors in a row is always instructive, and I’ve pulled out a few of the more interesting tidbits from all the presentations. (more…)