No Big Surprises from a Biotech Social Media Experiment

I previously reported top line data from our pedometer campaign to find out how healthy the J.P. Morgan Health Care conference is.  We also used this campaign to conduct a social media experiment, and some of the observations may surprise you.

Because the buzz around the conference becomes a smattering of anecdotal hearsay, we wanted to make some of this information available on the internet for broad public consumption.  Unless you’ve spent a few days immersed in the J.P. Morgan conference experience, you can’t truly comprehend the amount of energy and productivity generated from events taking place in and around Union Square. One biotech CFO mentioned how valuable it would be to share that experience and energy with employees back at the farm.

So we encouraged participants in our study (recall they wore pedometers to track the distance covered by foot at the conference) to engage on Twitter or LinkedIn and using the #JPM10 hashtag. We made it easy, providing tools including training for getting started in a safe, compliant and non-corporate way. Some top line observations:

–       Participants were more willing to email their data and commentary to us than to post online themselves

–       Many that were invited to participate were more willing to watch from the sidelines (more on this later)

–       Some media departments at financial firms have policies against employees posting comments online, including Twitter

–       Some media are still determining what to share on Twitter vs. what to share in blogs and traditional stories

–       There may be some truth to previous reports that the top 10% of Twitter users account for more than 90% of tweets

 The experiment did result in a number of colleagues jumping into social media to get some firsthand experience. I heard that a few of them have already made valuable contacts with other industry influencers in the Twitosphere. Which brings me to my point before about watching from the sidelines. Dances are pretty boring when you’re back is on the wall. They’re a lot more meaningful when you’re participating on the dance floor, not to mention being seen and heard…and more importantly, influencing. And it just might encourage others to get involved. While other industries have found utility in social media, our industry is still catching on.  The lack of perceived utility may not be in the platform, but rather in the lack of participation. The stage is yours.

An archive of the #JPM10 Twitter conversation is available at www.twapperkeeper.com/JPM10.