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01.14.13.
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biotech, business, cambridge, diagnostics, health IT, information, links, people, reference, science

Life Science + Digital Health + Tech Blog List

It seems like digital health and drugs/diagnostics/delivery are maybe starting to rub off on each other a little bit. David Shaywitz said it well in his column last weekend:

The good news is that some digital health companies (though still precious few tech-oriented investors, who have remained generally skittish) are beginning to brave the complexities of what might be called “real healthcare”.

Totally agree. It’s a good sign.

On that note, I realized my blog list is nicely curated to cover the spectrum from ‘hard science’ to TechCrunch (no offense, TechCrunch). This isn’t totally comprehensive, but it’s probably a decent starting point for biotech / business / digital health / tech. I’m sure I missed some and will update. And, not for nothing, posting it here will make it easier for me to email to people…

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01.14.13.
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business, ideas, marketing, social media, Uncategorized

Marketing Makeover for Unsexy Companies

I had the pleasure of speaking at the FutureM conference last year in their 20/20 track. It took me awhile, but I uploaded the slides here.

This is what I had to say… or at least what my notes said I was planning on saying:
01.5.13.
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business, debate, marketing, people

The Peoples’ Club

Jolie O’Dell wrote a fantastic smack down of some misogynistic marketing recently. The company at fault had a bunch of sexified disembodied lady body parts drapped around some sound system to try to get people to attend their booth at CES.

Cool, guys. Creative.

But what really made me pause was the last note in her article:

” *Note: Dirk Marketing is run by Angie Dirk, a woman. Patriarchy wouldn’t be patriarchy without women’s participation, and we wish Ms. Dirk would have had the wherewithal to do better work and demand higher standards of her clients.”

Here’s where I don’t have any answers. In 2013 when we talk about being ‘one of the boys’, I think what we really mean is being able to develop the kinds of relationships with people where you can be both casual and off-the-cuff when the situation calls for it and then be highly professional and buttoned-up when the situation calls for that.

More frequently today, thank goodness, that’s not a gender-specific ‘Boys’ Club’ but a gender-neutral ‘Peoples’ Club’ – meaning people with personality, not just some body at a desk staring at a computer screen. It’s a real skill to be able to develop those relationships and switch back and forth at will. It’s also the place where you end up being super-productive, creative and happy. (I’m lucky in that this is how the large majority of my professional experiences are and have been.)

I think, though, that it can be challenging for women to figure out the line between this kind of healthy banter and the kind of negative actions that are detrimental to the advancement of women in the workplace. With so many men still dominating a lot of businesses, I think for some women it still feels like this kind of relationship is still exclusively male, so you need to bend to misogynic attitudes if you want to play the game.

I don’t have an answer and I don’t know how to teach anyone how to find that line. But I do think it’s possible to not to freak out about things that just don’t matter while being able to put your foot down and tell it like it is when something does matter, with everyone in your life.

Maybe Ms. Dirk at this ad agency thought the ad was just ‘boys being boys’. But they weren’t acting like people and it’s an idiotic, cheap campaign. She should have called them out on that, no matter how much she wanted the contract or to maintain the relationship.

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08.16.12.
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business, debate, health IT, reference, yum

A two-fer + guacaritas

Whew! Summer is busy, huh? Yessir, it is.

That’s why you’re getting two short Intelligent.ly class recaps in one, with a side of guacaritas. Cheers!

First. Usability Testing.

When I was a child my dad would send me off to school by saying, “Another day, another chance to excel.”

Now, before you assume I grew up in some tiger-parent-pressure-cooker, what he meant by that was only that you don’t need to wait for a soccer game or a big test to be excellent. You can kick ass whenever you want.

I bring this up not because its sound advice, but because what I learned about usability testing was kind of the same. You don’t need to be all crazy about waiting for the right time and investing in expensive tools. Just do it. There are lots of free/cheap tools. And once you start, it gets easier. So go. Test away.

Second. Getting Your Ideas Shovel Ready

On the topic of free tools. I’d never seen a wireframe program. This was revolutionary (lay off me, bro. I was a poli sci / bio major. and the internet had just been invented).

Cort set out a solid overview of how you should think about a project before bringing in engineers.  One question he brought up that made a lot of sense was, ‘What is our problem and what are the fewest things we need to solve it?’ It’s pretty easy to think about all the things you could solve, and forget about solving the one thing you set out to do. Truth be spoken. And thanks for the t-shirt. #brandlove

BONUS: Guacaritas.

Yum. Corey from @Onthebar was pouring some delicious Taneto teQuila margarita-ish cocktails.Pleasantly surprised about the number of health start-ups in attendance. Interesting discussions about how many will have a real impact vs how many are just trying to do social in the health space (that… probably… won’t work. happy to debate about it, though.) AND my cousin showed up. Surprise family reunion. The best. Great night. Thanks Intelligent.ly!

05.11.12.
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business, cool company, marketing, people, quotes, strategy

How to get your Customers to Drive you to the Airport

I went to a super cool class at Intelligent.ly on product management, taught by Christopher O’Donnell who does some kind of awesome at HubSpot. Check out these things, but wait till you’re done reading my post.

Walking home I was listening to the best song ever right now. You may know it. So in this here song, Carly Rae Whatever sings to her brandy new boyfriend, “Before you came into my life, I missed you so bad, I missed you so bad.” And this echoed a key idea about customer love that Christopher put forward in his talk. He said that as a product manager you should take a step back and figure out what it is that your customers will miss so bad before you come into their lives. Ok, not in those words.

What he actually said was that it’s a super valuable exercise to write a love letter to your product from the perspective of a customer in the future. It’s a cheesy activity. But so is pop music. And I dig them both.

So you pick apart your letter and figure out what values make a customer *love* your product. What is it exactly that makes your customer want to snuggle up with your product and a glass of shiraz? Cook it scallops in cream sauce. Drive it to the airport for a 6am flight. Stuff like that. Then you can read your letter, translate your sappy sentiments into core values and understand the customer for whom you’re building.

Great idea.

Then I started thinking about if it’s necessary to love your own products. And struggled with that. If you love something it’s hard to see the flaws, it’s hard to demand change and it’s really hard to kill pieces of it. It’s probably better NOT to love your product, right? In fact you might want to hate parts of it. So, Christopher, I thought to myself, all indignant, “How am I supposed to expect my customers to love my product if I don’t love my product? Hmmm?”

Oh wait, self. Duh.

It’s not a love letter to the product, it’s a love letter to the values the product delivers. That’s what he was getting at with wading through the cheese to find the value. It’s not about *loving* the way a navigation tool functions, it’s about loving that you find your information quickly. Hopefully I took this message home right, but I don’t think you should love any one feature or set of features, because someday you might kill it. But it is important to absolutely love and (even more importantly) understand the core values your product delivers to your customers.

Sidebar: in adding the links to this I went over to Mr. O’Donnell’s blog and found this post. Rock on:

If no one ever hates anything about your product, there is a good chance you are trying to build a “faster horse.” Fierce objections to a feature or approach indicate a break from the traditional worldview, and therefore an opportunity to change the world. - @markitecht

03.5.12.
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business, money

Good-bye, BofA.

02.21.12.
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business, economy, watch

Greed is not good

Check out this cartoon from the Oatmeal. I’ll wait.

Now think about the fact that three separate Kickstarter campaigns raised over $1,000,000 last week. Of course it costs more than that to make a season of Game of Thrones ( like, 100 times more. I know). But when they go to make the next season, couldn’t there be a Kickstarter wherein $50 gets you the full season and you get incrementally awesome stuff up to $10 million, which gets you, I don’t know, the pre-credit advertisement slot and a hot date with the lead of your choice? Or a baller product placement? Everyone wins. Except traditional cable companies.

The problem with that is that some distributor would quickly offer $200 million for exclusive access. There’s a price for anything, so the producers accept. The distributor bundles it in with their already-over-priced package of crappy TV shows and calls it “cable”. We pay for it because it’s the only option. But really, we’re paying to subsidize the very existence of these networks rather than the actual content we want. And that model keeps working only as long as people keep paying for it. You see where I’m going with this, yes?

01.10.12.
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business, design, images, marketing, strategy

A picture is worth the eyes of the beholder

If you (are lucky enough to) live in the Cambridge/Somerville area you may have seen a series of bus stop ads featuring large-format faces holding seashells up to their ears (these ads may also be in other places, I don’t know). Cases in point:

The Sea is Calling

What you don’t see on those seashell ads is a call to action. Or any real indication of the feature, service or benefit that the person, group or company who paid for the ads might be offering. All you get is a tiny little URL at the bottom of the ad: www.theseaiscalling.com 

Now, it turns out that these particular ads are for Royal Caribbean because they want you to go on a cruise. But what really struck me about them was that they were actually perfectly targeted to yours truly. With the exception that I have absolutely no desire to go on a cruise. However, the idea of a person using a shell as a phone plays to both my love of technology as well as my prior research interest in Strombus gigas (a different story). It’s a goofy picture and the copy is pun-tastic, but you wouldn’t even need the copy to get my attention. I actually stopped running, took out my phone and hit up the URL. And was kind of disappointed that it was for a cruise ship. Don’t ask me what I thought it might have been that would have been more exciting.

So what? It’s not like Royal Caribbean is the first company to have vague, odd images and copy to pique a viewers curiosity, nor are they the first ones to have a discreet call to action, so you feel like you’ve discovered something secret. What I think is interesting though, is that nowadays here in 2012 they can do this on a street corner and a large segment of people have the capability to stop and look up the website right there on their mobile devices (not saying a large percentage will do this, just that the have the technology). I would love to know what percentage of hits that website gets from mobile.

Here’s my concluding question. I was drawn to that ad because it combined two ideas that I identify with in an unexpected image. Visual images are obviously very powerful marketing tools (duh) but can also be used for market research (check out this Prezi on ZMET). ZMET is a technique designed to get people to use images to delve deeper into their connections with certain products and brands. If you could target your audience demographic closely enough one could, presumably, also figure out what images would make that target audience pick up their mobile device and go to a website. Do you even need the images to relate to your product? Do you need copy? Could we live in a world where all advertising is just large format images precisely selected, arranged and designed to get a specific targeted customer to stop, locate the website* and visit it on spot?

I don’t know. But it would make for a much prettier advertising landscape.

*Sidebar: this is what I think was the real use for (now defunct, i think) stickybits. so ahead of your time, stickybits. also maybe QR codes. or something.

01.9.12.
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business, ideas, social media

Reverse Engineering

You know what I really love about part-time grad school? I’ll tell you. The mandatory 1- and 2- credit pass/fail courses. Love. Them. Nothing says “totally worth your time and money” like a nice round “P” on your transcript. Amiright? No. Not at all.

I digress. I’m currently in a (1-credit) exec skills class that meets from 6:00-9:00pm every night for four days. As you might imagine, this is not exactly something I “want” to “do” after working a ten hour day. So, on our morning run, A and I brainstormed ways to make it more fun.

“Maybe I’ll live tweet the whole class,” I said, only somewhat joking.

“And you could make a Top 10 list of things the professor says,” she replied.

“Yea! Great idea!” I answered. “I’ll just write down anything funny or interesting.”

And that, my friends, is how we reversed engineered a technique known in some circles as, “taking notes.”

Rev-o-freaking-lutionary.

I live tweeted my class on paper.

11.5.11.
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business, just saying, social media, strategy

You’re Doing It Wrong: Voss Edition

Pre-rant disclaimer #1: Between school and career I am certainly over-saturated with branding and marketing philosophy.

Pre-rant disclaimer #2: I have a strongly negative stance on bottled water.

Nonetheless: a spot for Voss Water came on today that made me ashamed to call myself a copywriter. For context, this was the sponsor sound bite for The Moth podcast (The Moth is a weekly podcast that features true stories told live at their shows in New York and across the country, it’s awesome). The first plug wasn’t so bad:

Like Moth storytellers, Voss is more than meets the eye. It’s natural artesian water from Norway, bottle at the source, and is committed to the pursuit of operating with a zero carbon footprint. Through the Voss Foundation, Voss is committed to delivering clean water to sub-Saharan Africa. Voss. Look deeper. Join in the conversation at facebook.com/vossworld.

The sentence structure here was kind of annoying because the artisan water itself can’t really be committed to carbon neutrality and also, I really don’t want my water to be more than meets the eye. I want it to be just… water. And the parallel to Moth storytellers is a stretch, but fine. Ok. Carbon neutral, water in Africa, sponsoring a good podcast. Great.

What really rubbed me the wrong way was the end-of-podcast sponsor spot:

Voss is the perfect pairing for your special dining moments. A night worth talking about *always* starts with Voss on the table, because with Voss comes great conversation and with great conversation comes a story worth sharing. Look deeper into the art of conversation at facebook.com/vossworld

Good marketing is supposed to evoke the emotions that people associate with your product, true. Social media is about starting conversations, also true. Creating a story around your brand is important for both of these components, yes. But it’s like Voss took those facts at surface level and made it a campaign. Guys, you have to dig a littler bit deeper.

And it’s horrible copy writing. Don’t tell me my significant nights always start with fancy bottled water, you don’t know me. Finally, don’t juxtapose this junk with the fantastic storytelling of The Moth.

Sorry Voss, nobody’s perfect, but I think you’re doing it wrong.

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