The Fear and Exhilaration of Breaking New Ground

I’m the Communications and Customer Service Manager for a 26 year old company that provides a specialized service that is predicated on absolute precision.  Our customers rely on us to validate the accuracy of their testing and research equipment, perform exact repairs when needed, and to provide measurement traceability for internal and external audit purposes.  It’s a pretty rigid environment populated by detail-focused academic and private-sector researchers and scientists. 

When I started my current graduate course, The Global Impact of New Communication Technologies, I didn’t think social media had any place whatsoever in my company’s business model.  Even a basic blog seemed too flip and trendy for our line of work.   

As it turns out, that initial intuition was well founded.  I’ve found numerous articles and blog posts proclaiming the lack of enthusiasm among scientists and researchers for social networking. 

“This is an odd finding, according to Richard Lackes of the Department of Business Information Management at Technische Universitaet Dortmund, Germany. He points out that scientific research is essentially a communication-driven process and that most of its participants are young and part of what we might refer to as the Facebook generation (Gen-F, you might say). Members of the business world have a much more even spread of ages and differences in internet acceptance, and yet, it is business users who are much more committed to online social networking.”  via Gen-F Scientists Ignoring Social Networking

Others attribute the ambivalence of scientists toward online social spaces to the need to protect the intellectual property of research projects.  Then there’s the whole perception of social networking as a frivolous waste of time  – time that could be better spent reading journals or running another batch of samples.    

“Scientists really don’t like discussing their thoughts and ideas in the public domain (both for scooping and patent issues) .  There may be an assumed lack of security on internet-based social networks and a time-wasting aspect in that there’s nothing gained from time spent online when conferences and meetings provide all that many scientists feel they need”.  - Brad Kruger, Labspaces.net

“Most networks seem to make two assumptions that doom them to failure: 1) that networking and communication is a central part of a scientist’s day, and 2) that scientists are willing to openly communicate on a wide scale with their communities. The first is a failure of perspective, those building and promoting social networks are “true-believers“, people whose lives revolve around social networking. While communication of results, networking and building collaboration are important for scientists, they’re somewhat peripheral compared to doing actual research.”  - via Scientists Still Not Joining Social Networks « The Scholarly Kitchen

Still, as I participated in my company’s annual meeting recently, I found myself thinking that the nature of certain social media platforms could be really effective for some of the goals we were establishing for 2010.  I found myself in a dilemma.   

Maybe I was looking at social media through the wrong filters?  I went back to the web for more research.  I found a fair amount of chatter like this and this related to the scientific community’s adoption of social networking, so the topic was clearly percolating in the scientific arena.  But, not surprisingly, I found very few of our competitors or suppliers participating in the space.   

So is the conclusion that social media simply doesn’t work for our industry, or that it is being underestimated?   

My premise is that it’s being underestimated.  Call me crazy, but instead of a dead end I see a tremendous opportunity.  Scientists and researchers may not be considered mainstream users today, but given the overall trends, I believe they will embrace social media in growing numbers.  And with the right plan, my company can get ahead of the curve by establishing a prominent position in our industry’s social space before it gets crowded.  

“Sites like Academia.edu are growing fast; we have over 61,000 profiles at the moment and are seeing exponential growth. I think the critical mass point for an academic networking site is around 500,000 to 1 million profiles; that is when growth will really accelerate.”  - Richard Price, Academia.edu

“Chris Gunter started to explore Twitter about a year ago, shortly after taking up her current position as director of research affairs at the HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology in Huntsville, Alabama. ‘One thing that I have to do as part of my job is to communicate our science. I started to explore Twitter as a tool to do this, and I have seen a steady growth in followers.’ Her Twitter account, “girlscientist” (http://twitter.com/girlscientist), currently has close to 1000 followers.”    – via Cell – Should You Be Tweeting?#

“No one should even expect established scientists to give up their established processes for the new way of doing things. Architects didn’t throw out their drafting tables en masse when CAD programs came on the scene, and lawyers still keep legal libraries to this day, at great expense, when the legal databases are more up-to-date and easier to search. Perhaps I’m echoing a bit of Thomas Kuhn here, but new tools are used by the people who had them available as they were learning, and greater adoption comes from a greater number of these people getting into science, rather than a greater number of people already in science becoming those people.”  - via Why are we so impatient about new web technology? at Synthesis

If social media really is being underestimated, the question becomes:  how do I leverage social platforms to benefit a company whose customer base is largely composed of a population that currently isn’t considered a big user? 

Simple. 

Start small.  Involve the entire company in the social media plan.  Use social platforms to support a few specific company goals.  And concentrate on engaging those of our target populations that ARE using social media. 

Excited as I am about this opportunity, I must confess that I have a few concerns about leading my company into the social media space.  Namely that:

• We’ll turn off current or prospective customers with our social media presence (i.e., we are taken less seriously)
• Employees will stumble in the social space by either not participating or gaffing online
• Competitors will tap into our social media community to hijack ideas or identify customers
• We’ll give away competitive information in our effort to engage our community

But the driving force behind this project is my biggest fear:  that by hesitating we’ll miss the opportunity to create a landmark presence.  

I read more online content than I thought humanly possible to get to this point.   I’ve summarized  the key sources I used to make decisions about this initiative below, along with a brief description of their merit.  

LinkedIn
http://www.linkedin.com
LinkedIn will be the core platform for our social media initiative.  Though there are a fair number of social networking sites specifically for scientists, like this one and this one, LinkedIn provides us access to both our traditional and niche market populations in one place.  A quick search for “biotechnology research” on LinkedIn generates a list of 35,775 people overall, and 21,346 in the United States.  That’s just one broad category.  And even if only 10% of those numbers were relevant to our business, that’s a huge audience for our relatively small company.  LinkedIn will enable us to “listen” to our target population to understand their frustrations and needs (as related to our business).  Valuable information in our competitive market.  

The San Diego Biotechnology Network
http://sdbn.org/category/blog/ 
What led me to this site was a link to this slideshare presentation, “Social Media for Scientists.”  It provided great insight on how our customers might engage with social media, as well as ideas we can share with them about leveraging the platform for legitimate networking and research collaboration.  SDBN.org is dedicated to encouraging the San Diego biotechnology community to use social media, but the content transcends geography and discipline.  

ScienceBase
http://www.sciencebase.com
This site is maintained by David Bradley, who is a freelance science writer.  The site offers sci-tech articles, a blog, breaking news, and more.  I’ve found that Bradley is often cited in print and online in articles, forums, and blog posts.  He has compiled extensive lists of scientists using social media, including scientwists and science Twibe (scientists on twitter), and regularly writes about practical uses and application of social media for scientists and researchers.  

The Scholarly Kitchen
http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/
The blog site of the Society for Scholarly Publications.  Members of SSP “represent all aspects of scholarly publishing — including publishers, printers, e-products developers, technical service providers, librarians, and editors. SSP members come from a wide range of large and small commercial and nonprofit organizations.”   This group has a vested interest in tracking social media and networking trends in the scientific community — their livelihoods depend on understanding how their content providers and readers (scientists and researchers) publish and consume their information.   

ResearchGATE
http://www.researchgate.net
ResearchGATE is best described as a LinkedIn for scientists.  The site allows members to post their profiles, papers, research projects, interests, and skills to promote themselves and collaborate with others.  According to TechCrunch, “What makes ResearchGATE’s site useful is not only its ability to share documents but to be able to connect with scientists all over the world on issues of interest. By suggesting users with similar interests, the site does a lot of the networking work for users.”  The site’s semantic search engine drives the “suggestion” feature, and is what sets it apart from other scientist-centered social networks.   We can use our same LinkedIn strategy here, and it will be interesting to see what, if any, overlap we discover.  

The growing number of social networking sites targeting scientists
The fact that there are numerous networking sites for scientists like Mendeley, labmeeting, NatureNetwork, Laboratree, Scientist Solutions, and a host of others suggests that the scientific community is actually more social than they are given credit for.  In fact, the National Institutes of Health announced last week that is it creating what it calls “Facebook for Scientists.”  Despite the naysayers, though the scientific community may use social media differently than B2B populations, they are using it.   

Happily, my company has made a commitment to exploring social media.  Management is unanimously behind the initiative.  Employees are enthusiastic about the possibilities.  Now, to start small and begin to boldly go where few in our shoes have gone before, we just need to:  

1. Benchmark our current website traffic, SEO rankings, and service inquiries.  In order to gauge whether our social media initiative is having any impact, we must establish baselines in a few key areas.  We will also rely on feedback from individual reps on any impact they experience, either in recognition or actual sales, after we start using social networking. 
2. Communicate our social media strategy, goals, and guidelines.  Our “LinkedIn 101″ will explain the concept behind LinkedIn, why we are creating a presence on the network, and who employees might consider inviting to join their network.  It will also detail ways to properly leverage LinkedIn networks and communities to 1) build professional networks, 2) engage current customers, 3) get in front of new business opportunities, and 4) position the company as an expert in our field.  
3. Create LinkedIn profiles for the company and individual employees that communicate areas of expertise, scope of service, and innovative philosophy.  LinkedIn is familiar to most everyone, and is a non-threatening entry point to social networking.  We will develop LinkedIn profile templates to help employees get started in the network.  Employee profiles will contain consistent keywords to improve searchability and bind the company profiles together.   Our private company network will provide a safe environment for employees to get their LinkedIn bearings, and is the perfect platform for us to start building our internal brand.

Will we find success where others see only a wasteland?  Only time will tell.  I would love to hear from you if you have any experience with a similar situation.  Or if you think that my excitement has blinded me to obvious pitfalls. Or if you have any killer LinkedIn, Twitter, or other social networking tips.  In this case your feedback is golden, not your silence!

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