Life Science Leader just published my series of interviews with 3 bioentrepreneurs – Jim Chinitz of Population Diagnostics, Craig Shimasaki of BioSource Consulting and Stan Yakatan of Katan Associates. It was great fun to interview each bio-entrepreneur. Here’s a couple of key quotes:
Chinitz: The challenge… is how will you communicate your story? Will you conform to telling a watered-down version to an audience that won’t listen or want your pitch packaged their way? Or, do you look for the audience that will listen intently and take the time to get it?
Shimasaki: [To be successful as a bioentrepreneur] You must have passion, vision, and persistence. …you need to create the opportunities to be successful. You need to go out and talk to people, ask questions, take risks, listen to new ideas, and be a part of the larger biotechnology community.
Yakatan: Everyone starts a company with a plan. The biggest challenge is being able to modify that plan. The easiest way to fail is to stick to a rigid plan.
Read it over at Life Science Leader.
What does the death of the Yankees’ owner have to do with biotech and entrepreneurship? It has to do with attitude. Steinbrenner was obsessed with winning. He famously said,
“Winning is the most important thing in my life, after breathing. Breathing first, winning next.”
And,
“You show me a good loser—and I’ll show you a loser.”
(Which incidentally, is also attributed to Vince Lombardi. Shout out to Jim Chinitz for the quote and reminding me to write this.)
Consider this… Swine flu vaccine disposal is your tax dollars at work.
If you have any interest in applying social media to your company (or yourself), you must read Mashable.com, an essential resource for social media marketing. Mashabable ran a feature titled, 10 Essential Social Media Tips for B2B Marketers. I thought it was worthwhile to revisit them and make some comments. I’ve rearranged the tips in what I consider their order of importance to life sciences and biotechnology companies.
1. Monitor Your Industry. Author Christina Warren suggests using Google Alerts, Social Mention, YackTrack or BackType to monitor mentions of your business on social sites. I put this first, because you need to have an understanding of what your audience is saying about you, the industry before you start any conversations.
2. Find and Follow Industry Influencers. Whether you’re on Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook, you’ll want to identify leaders and influencers in the industry. I recommend doing this before any of the steps that follow.
3. Start a Blog. While this is a no-brainer outside the life sciences and in pharma, there is still a lot of hesitance, especially in companies that have FDA-regulated products. It does take time and requires writing skills. A few week’s back, I blogged about Mary Canady’s article on social media in the life sciences. In that article, she mentioned MO-BIO Laboratories, a small company that runs a blog perfectly targeted toward its audience. Definitely worth taking a look at. Since most people won’t take the time to write a full-fledged blog, at least start micro-blogging on Twitter.
4. Use Twitter Effectively. Mashable’s suggestion is to start Twitter by ’searching phrases relevant to your business and monitoring those searches regularly…’, which is 1 above. Once you understand what people are saying, then join the conversation.
5. Take Advantage of LinkedIn. I am a huge LinkedIn user (16K network) and have easily sold several consulting engagements using that network. One way to build business leads and get well known is to use LinkedIn Groups and to participate.
6. Figure Out Your ‘Social Voice.’ One thing that marketers say social media can do for pharmaceutical (and any other large) corporations is put the ‘human’ back in business. Warren reminds you that your social voice is informal and responds to customers and inquiries. Your brand voice is more anonymous. I suspect that in the not too distant future, the social voice will become brand voice.
7. Be Consistent and Don’t be Afraid to Followup. Consistency means blogging or tweeting regularly. For some that will mean once per day, for others, once per week. Following up means you don’t leave anyone hanging. You respond and acknowledge.
8. Leverage Analytics for Business Metric Measurement. This means paying attention to your traffic numbers, understanding where traffic is coming from, what traffic is responding to and changing your habits accordingly.
There were two tips that I didn’t think applied to most life sciences and biotechnology companies – 9. Use Social Media for Giveaways and Promos and 10. Don’t be Creepy. The latter goes without saying; the former might make sense for companie that produce a lot of product and use samples as part of their marketing.
So there you have it, 10 tips you can leverage today for your social media marketing program. If you have any questions, drop me a line.
Yesterday, I had the pleasure of attending the Keiretsu Forum’s Life Science Forum. This invitation-only event resembled UltraLightStartups in that it allowed each company to present for 20 minutes (an eternity! ULS gives you ONE MINUTE!), then the entrepreneurs left the room while the investors discussed the pros and cons of the company.
In general, the presentations were interesting, but sadly, no one presenter blew me away, but if I were investing, there were three companies I *might* consider:
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Aesthetic Factors, which has developed a proprietary product for facial aesthetic treatment. The product, market and team were stellar. My hesitation there is around intellectual property.
Immunomic Therapeutics, which has developed a proprietary vaccine technology platform, which they’re applying to the allergy immunotherapy market. Stellar team with a fantastic track record.
Makefield Therapeutics which has two late-stage pre-clinical products based on a nanotech delivery platform. Again, a stellar team.
There were a number of presenters that really wasted their 20 minutes, using too many charts, financial statements, and scientific diagrams (boring!). Plus, a few just didn’t have the answers the investors were looking to have answered. Bad preparation does not an investment gain.
But there was one tremendous development: Here’s something I’ve been recommending and finally saw an early-stage biotech company using Twitter! Dr. Bill Hearl, C.E.O. of Immnomix and a serial entrepreneur himself, said he tweets as @immunomix. He admitted it during the presentation and encouraged the investors to follow him. In conversation with him after the meeting, he told me he tries to Tweet at least weekly, hasn’t yet attracted the investors on Twitter, but he knows it’s worthwhile and has incorporated tweeting into his weekly routine.
This isn’t a big deal to those of us who blog and tweet on a daily basis, but after going to countless emerging biotech events, it’s nice to start to see a company doing this.
Kudos Dr. Hearl!
Pixels and Pills posted a great guide to Facebook on their site yesterday. The graphic alone is worth the click over. Puts Facebook in historical perspective.
