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Finding a New Way“The audience professional communicators end up writing for is the one that has to approve the message, not the one that has to consume it.” Jason Falls, Social Media Explorer Jason’s statement is true for more than social media outreach. Many pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies that would never consider putting out an untested product message, still don’t pre-test their corporate messages with the audiences they want to engage, like industry thought leaders, investors and physicians. For many corporate communicators, the most challenging part of message development is convincing senior management that pre-testing is worth the time and money. Granted, running focus groups, especially for these expert audiences, is not inexpensive. Online research companies like Zoomerang and SearchMonkey have made it cheaper and easier to test all kinds of information with consumer audiences, but they aren’t as helpful if you want to test messages with biotech investors, for example.
When I was trying to do just that on behalf of a client, I posted my question on LinkedIn. Among a number of responses was one from Aman Kant, representing a life science business development company called BioXcel. I have no economic ties with BioXcel, but am writing about them here to demonstrate the value of LinkedIn in finding new ways to get things done. BioXcel’s co-founder Nandu Nandabalan, PhD and Aman were quick to understand how their business development services could be adapted to conduct communications research. Working with them and my client, we conducted a telephone survey of biotech investors, venture capitalists and market analysts to test their understanding of three scientific concepts that are the foundation of my client’s proprietary research and development platform. The survey results changed our entire approach to investor communications, because they showed that most of the investors interviewed were able to correctly describe only one of the three concepts. The survey was small, a sampling, because of the size of our budget, but it gave us a basic indication of how to develop a presentation that would be meaningful to potential investors. Have you had similar experiences with LinkedIn? Can you suggest other ways to put it to use? Leave a Reply |
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