PJA Blog: The Complex Brand

Like a lot of bloggers, I’m a polygamist. I write for one at PJA, and one for The Life Science Executive Exchange, about marketing to life scientists. I’ll confess that I used to worry that our estimates to set up a soup-to-nuts blog for a corporate client, complete with concept, design, editorial plan and upkeep, might seem a bit steep. That was before I realized how much you have to work at a blog to keep it not only relevant and populated, but connected to the rest of the world.

Visibility means ensuring that your blog is clearly linked to any other blogs you write for, as well as other blogs and sites that you feel complement it. Transparency is, after all, at the core of social media. Until all relationships are clearly demarcated, your blog doesn’t look legit, or as legit as it could. Content is one thing you can control on your blog. Look and feel is another. But links are a third thing, and they’re every bit as important as the other two.

Reciprocity is another important component of the social media world. If you link to another site, they should know about it. If they like what you produce, they should link back to you. When we asked the president of BioInformatics if we could link his site to our blog, he not only agreed, he gave us two free banners to promote it, one on his Executive Exchange home page and one on his HTML newsletter. Content is king in social media, or to quote one of my favorite clients, “You’ve got to feed the beast.” Anyway, you’ll never know how much you’ll get unless you ask.

Tony Hung has more some tips on blog promotion at his ProBlogger site. Okay, he has 41 tips, which is 39 more than I do. In fact, I think it’s time for me to print out his list and hunt down my interactive department colleagues. They’ve been positively ignoring me, and my blogs. I just hope I can afford them.

”Our stock in trade seems to be going away.”

Is this a) a print media-based marketing agency or b) a geophysicist lamenting the disappearance of sea ice in the Arctic Ocean? (more…)

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.

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…)

Although I try not to bring politics to the workplace (it’s still a bit too volatile, even in Cambridge), I thought Frank Rich had an interesting point about Karl Rove’s resignation in yesterday’s New York Times.

The piece, entitled He Got Out While the Getting Was Good, notes that Rove’s style — tightly controlled, top-down messages that are centrally managed — effective as it was in 2002, is hopelessly out of date in 2007, with the rise of You Tube and other social media outlets.

To quote Rich, “A year [after George Allen's 'macaca' incident], leading Republicans are still clueless and panicked about this new medium, which is why they, unlike their Democratic counterparts, pulled out of even a tightly controlled CNN-YouTube debate. It took smart young conservative bloggers like a former Republican National Committee operative, Patrick Ruffini, to shame them into reinstating the debate for November, lest the entire G.O.P. field look as pathetically out of touch as it is.”

Whatever you think about Rich or Rove, what’s interesting is how quickly web journalists and content distribution have upended the age-old centrism and control structure in a government. The same is increasingly true for corporations. If you think you can control your message from above in an age of social media, you, too, may soon be announcing that you’re leaving your post to spend more time with your children.