B2B social media - Communities in Medical Industry

I have been researching:

• Should a B2B Medical diagnositics company start a professional community site for a group of users? Within this are questions:
• ROI of social media, specifically
• ROI of professional community sites
• Direct Revenue from site
• ROI from increased sales as a result
• Other measures which influence sales
• Increased Brand image, Trust -> customer retention
• Increased Trust -> increased customer testimonials
• Decreased Customer support calls, 
• Increase in marketing data collection at decreased cost
• Increase in ability to hold and record conversations with end users
• ROI of other B2B social media (facebook, twitter)
• Costs of implementing
• Community site
• Other social media program costs
• Examples 
• Concerns about regulated industry what can be done

B2B, Medical and Lifesciences diagnostics;  case studies and best practices examples

• Key is Utility, Value, Entertainment "because they believed in the power of their strategies, they went ahead without compromising and focused their efforts and resources in developing best in class executions. Unfortunately, diminishing initial creative ideas is a mistake that still happens too often due to the difficulties in evaluating return on investment in social media." BurgerKing, BestBuy, Gap,  Canon EOS (community photos )  http://jyesmith.com/social-media/4-case-studies-in-utility-value-and-entertainment/
• Indium - 15 engineers blog: 70 blogs.  http://socialmediab2b.com/2009/09/b2b-social-media-example-indium-blogs/  - Rick Short Indium
• There is also a statement that these are personal opinions, rather than company positions.
• Mayo clinic
  You tube channel - community  - testimonials from patients, talks by docs
  http://www.youtube.com/user/mayoclinic#p/a/u/0/3N-2v-fjCB0
  Thought Leadership: Mayo Clinic center for health social media
  http://socialmedia.mayoclinic.org/
  
  Social Media tools for analysis:
  Listening: http://socialmediab2b.com/2010/06/b2b-social-media-tools-4/
  
  Industry segment:  life sciences diagnostics
  biorad genomics FB -
  They also have some amazing youtube video
  http://www.facebook.com/BioRadGenomics
  http://www.facebook.com/BioRadGenomics#!/topic.php?uid=315474864939&topic=14356
  
  
  Sigma-Aldrich
  Facebook
  http://www.facebook.com/SigmaAldrich
  
  Roche xcelligence
  http://seekingalpha.com/article/140515-bio-rad-sparks-video-war-among-lab-supply-companies  20k views
  Roche also has twitter pages (multiple)
  
  Applied Biosciences
  PCR - Amplitaq 360
  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISGQt9WJi5k&feature=related
  
  
  Illumina - Genome analysis machines
  900B revenue / 124m income 2010
  
  

  Real-Time PCR (qPCR) uses various fluorescent detection chemistries to monitor a PCR reaction as it progresses, allowing samples to be characterized at the point when amplification is first detected,

  
  twitter https://twitter.com/illuminaqpcr
  http://twitter.com/illuminainfo

ROI 
Compendium on ROI case studes http://barnraisersllc.com/?p=2504

• Cisco saved $100k on product launch costs through investment in social media instead of in traditional media http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/cisco-social-media-product-launch/
• ROI and internal community and Social media strategy: IBM 
• Has SM guidelines, but does not police employees
• Provides and internal platform for Inside co social media with 17,000 blogs, internal wiki with over a million daily page views.
• Crowd-sourcing identified 10 best incubator businesses, which IBM funded with $100 million
• $100 billion in total revenue with a 44.1% gross profit margin in 2008
• http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/how-ibm-uses-social-media-to-spur-employee-innovation/ 

Community sites: 
presentation on why brand communities? Benefits:
http://www.slideshare.net/agentwildfire/it-takes-a-community-to-raise-a-brand-not-a-campaign-presentation

• Hispanito http://www.socialmediaportal.com/Research/2008/04/How-to-build-and-grow-a-Hispanic-Social-Network-the-case-of-www-Hispanito-com.aspx 
• Oracle Partner Network:Gartner report http://www.gartner.com/technology/media-products/reprints/oracle/article134/article134.html 

• Nurse one
  http://nurseone.ca/

• List of patient and practitioner communities
  http://www.doseofdigital.com/healthcare-pharma-social-media-wiki/
   
• review of physician communities, July 2010
  http://careers.bmj.com/careers/advice/view-article.html?id=20001227
  Top 5: doctors.net(175k) sermo.com(112k) doc2doc.bmj.com (28k)  doctorshangout.com (17k) 

• Vitabotics ROI from community site
  http://www.freshnetworks.com/case-studies/social-media-case-study-vitabiotics 
• The UK's leading health supplement manufacturer used social media to learn more about the health and beauty needs of their customers.  Created a community site with forums, blogs, beauty experts to answer questions. 13,000 community members, 1000 women apply for product trials which get a 95% completion rate.
• learn more about customers
• find customers to test and trial products and get feedback
• Promote products to target audience
• Responses from customers feed into new product development

Platforms

 Jive is used by Cerner (ucern), Netapp, Charles Schwabb
see book
The 2020 Workplace - in depth discussion -
Company Goals, commmunity, transparency, collaboration -"bottom up" culture
"community gardners" - from corp learn ing who moderate. Internal launch 2009 - point systems. helpful employees get points from participating online which leads to + performance reviews. system is integrated into workflow not separate.
http://www.jivesoftware.com/# 
 
Netapp community http://communities.netapp.com/index.jspa

Charles Schwabb http://activetrader.schwab.com/research/TradingCommunity.aspx
trading community. "Share ideas, ask questions, and find ways to improve your trading - plus network, socialize, and learn from other Active Trader clients, Schwab and third-party experts. "

Customer Development for Startups

What is it?  It's a way to develop a new product/startup through frequent interaction with your likeliest early customers.


Bottom line, it's based on the radical idea that you can find out more about "the market" for your "product" by getting out and talking to customers than from complex market research. And it gives hints and structure for these conversations.

It focuses on the "pain" the product meets (the use) - And on narrowly targeting the "earlyvangelists" (people dying to use your product) for these conversations.
 

Some concepts:

• Lean Startup

Some people:

• Steven Blank http://steveblank.com/
• Eric Ries http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/

Some links 

• http://www.amazon.com/dp/0982743602/
• I love how clearly Cindy Alvarez writes http://www.cindyalvarez.com/best-practices/customer-development-interviews-how-to-finding-people
• http://www.cindyalvarez.com/learning/faq-customer-development-for-product-managers

Unrelated, but since this post is on startups - On 5 slide venture pitch
http://knowledgeissocial.com/365-days-10-million-3-rounds-2-companies-all-with-5-magic-slides/

Google apps marketplace - Security, Privacy

I like http://insight.ly - it seems like a sweet app, a simple but good CRM/ Project Management application, and amazingly its FREE!
But is there always a catch?
Think about it.

It's a Customer Relationship Management application. That means you give it all kinds of private information, your contacts, your documents, your plans and the vendor doesn't even provide YOU with a mailing address and phone number on the insight.ly website.  Hmmmm. But surely they are ok?

I mean... this is a Google Marketplace App... So the great and powerful Google must vet these folks, right?
Let us consult the oracle.
Sayeth Google:  " NO! "

You are solely responsible for any compromise or loss of data that may result from using a Marketplace app....you should be cautious and install applications only from vendors that you trust.

Caveat Emptor! Sez the great and powerful Google!

Think about it.
If someone walked up to you on the street and asked for all of your email contacts, and the contents of all of your documents, and the phone numbers off of your cell phone, would you do it?

Higher Edu Ch ch ch changes - Anya Kamenetz

"There are people out there who are extremely talented and valuable, who don't have the resources to succeed in the current system. In a crass sense, they are undervalued talent. They're non-credentialed talent. Is there a way for them to prove their talent in order to succeed? ...  they're going to get hired by forward-looking companies who are going to underpay them because they don't have a credential, and then those companies are going to succeed wildly. So that's the opportunity that the Silicon Valley group sees. And I think that's going to be a growing opportunity until it evens out. "

The foundation of the value of higher education is institutional trust -- The institution prints paper we call "degrees." Just as paper money is backed by "the full faith and trust of the US government," degrees are backed by the full faith and trust of the institution.  A degree costs more than a piece of paper because of the public trust of the institution - its reputation. We trust that the institution has made sure that  students know enough before they graduate so that they won't go out and be an embarrassment to the institution -- Accrediting bodies police schools as well.  The system is necessary cause a lone individual has no way to show the world what they know or  have done. Oh, wait - what about the internet? What about blogs, videos, websites, etc...?

This is what I was talking about. A school certifies two things:

1.  What knowledge, skills, abilities and accomplishments are "good" - i.e. important, useful, relevant, necessary
1. In a particular field
2. In general
2. Who knows that stuff - or is smart/dedicated enough to learn that stuff.

Higher Ed is pretty close to losing its monopoly on 2) - I am not sure about 1).   

Article about Anya Kamenetz here.
Read a chapter of her book here http://diyubook.com/read-the-book/

Just Ship It

For fun I've been reading  interviews with Ward Cunningham.  (Inventor of Wikis, and a big influence on modern software development) He says:

  [so] much time is spent worrying about decisions that don't matter. To just be able to make a decision and see what happens is tremendously empowering... "

He explains that it is easier and works better to have a plan for recovering from mistakes than to prevent them.


Seth Godin talks about bypassing the lizard brain (deep seated fear of failure) through Just Shipping It.  (Whatever IT is)

7 steps:

1. Connect
2. Be generous
3. Make art
4. Acknowledge the lizard
5. Ship
6. Fail
7. Learn

Now I guess I better get to work.

Open source collaboration, safety and enemy images

Two guys who started the subversion project talk about how their community works. I guess they work for google now doing open source development.


Enjoyed hearing about how they keep projects on track. After taking a semester-long course in project management, replete with all of the PMBOK high-falutin' language, I like the practical 'lessons-learned' wisdom here. Though the title and a part of the flavor of the presentation bothers me, "surviving poisonous people," the approach they describe is actually fairly flexible.

"poisonous people" is a judgment. A poisonous person is a "thing" in your imagination. A scary thing. Immutable, fixed. An enemy.  And that is not useful. I'd prefer to think about "people patterns which threaten a project." (This is not as pithy as poisonous though)  Maybe they could call it poisonous patterns instead or dangerous patterns.

To summarize what I understand :

As open source software project leaders we are afraid of the threat of dissolution of our project, the frustration of our desire to make something awesome .  If this were to happen we would lose respect, maybe money, and the fun, inclusion, connection, and sense of competence we get from being part of the project community.

We need safety to work well.  We are going to tell you about some  common dangerous people patterns which have threatened us and got us all distracted, frustrated and disconnected,  and how to keep the community safe from community death (falling apart).

Groups do need freedom from distractions - e.g. too many ideas,  and/or  arguments, (What NVC might call needs for: "ease","harmony", "stability" "clarity" and "order") - But they also need to be open and welcoming to new ideas, new members to keep "alive" (needs=growth, stimulation, learning, spontaneity) -- and fair and collaborative in decision-making to survive...seems like a tall order to balance all of that!

It thrills me to learn more about collaborative forms of software development - though I have been involved in evaluating, installing, configuring and using open source products for over 10 years -And have even done bug reports,  I have never contributed code to a project.

The thing that thrills me is that if I can pull some of my enjoyment of group process, improv and Non-violent Communication practices together with my tech background   it would be lots of fun.

Marshall Rosenberg (NVC founder) on  enemy images: - Hearing what people feel and need instead of what they "think" when they label you as a powerful technique to get to communication. Someone calls him a "murderer" (sees him as very poisonous) - he is able to get past that to communication.  His distinction between violence and protective use of force is very clear here.

Amazon Cloud Computing: EC2 and EBS-Booties

The Google  App Engine is a "cloud-based virtual hosting" platform. Pluses are: Free, no configuration necessary,  and cool tools. Minuses are: proprietary - you use what they have, not what they want. (ie. bigtable vs mysql) - lack of flexibility - i.e. you can't install a languge, or specific php libraries to play with them.

We selected Amazon EC2 instead because we already knew and understood mysql, and we wanted to be able to install anything we wanted as the project developed because we were not sure in advance what tools would fit our needs - in fact as we worked we ended up writing non-http backend php/shell scripts to process xml files - which would have been more difficult without a command line interface.

More than the usual number of Acronyms and terms in the Amazon Cloud. To wit:

• AWS = Amazon Web Services - Amazon's various "cloud computing matter"e.g.:
• EC2 =  Elastic Computing 2 "duh compute cloud" (Xen-based?) (presumably EC1 sucked?)
• EBS =  Elastic Block Storage (Closet to keep bouncy blocks of permanent "disk" ;)
• AMI = Amazon Machine Image = Similar to a VM Image. A "file" which contains an 'EC2' bootable image of a particular OS.
• Instance =  When you "boot"  an AMI  that running image is an instance.
• EBS-boot AMI = Traditionally instances evaporate without a trace when you terminate them, .i.e. any changes to the file systems are ephemeral.  EBS-boot AMI's are new and have two stop conditions. terminate (ephemeral) and stop (persistent) = So they behave more like a "real" machine, ie. storage(disk space) sticks around when you shut them down.

Having fun doing a project in "duh cloud." I chose EC2 as opposed to a hosting service because I like having full root/admin access and being able to load or remove whatever packages we want instantly. Note that it is easy to get ssh access to your "instance".  Root access uses "keys" and it is pretty simple.

  Project: PHP/MySql Web application. I am using an EBS-boot LAMP server = This link is a good summary of LAMP install on EC2  - But it uses EBS for additional volume (not for boot/root volume).

(I have to say that the term "Elastic Block Storage Boot" sounds more like goofy footwear you are ashamed to wear, so you keep it in a closet than a computing service)  ------>

This is an intermittent project. So EBS-boot made sense because it allows us to just "stop = shutdown" the machine & not pay for compute, only storage, which is purty cheap.  I just grabbed the available Fedora 8 version which amazon has published. See this useful overview of EBS-boot.
And nice Step-by-Step guide which I used.

Next time I would probably try Ubuntu - I have no idea why Amazon uses Fedora and the version is so old.  Here is a link to information on ubuntu EC2 AMI with EBS-boot

I also tried out Elasticfox - a Firefox plugin which allows you to do all kinds of things more easily than the AWS http console does.

<--- (Long LOLcat seeks ElasticFox) 

Pricing summary for small instance Elastic gob=  ~2Gb memory, 1 cpu, 160 GB disk limit.


45 days use total includes 20 * 24 hrs + 25 days "off"


EBS storage:    15 GB @ .10 per GB/month  = $1.50/mo
CPU:      .085/hour x 24 hrs * 10 days  = ~ $20 *2 = $40
"Elastic IP" (= static IP continues when you turn it off)
     = .24/day * 25 =  ~$5
Data in = free ; Data out: est 10 Gb at  .15 per GB (first Gb free) = $1.40
 Total price =  $40 + $1.5 + $5 + $1.4 = approx $50 for 45 days "up" ~ 40% of the time.

(And by the  way, yes "elastic gob" is a technical term - it's just my private technical term)