T2B Tag: communications

Value of Awards and Speaking Opportunities

A couple other common components of thought leadership programs are awards and speaking opportunities, which both provide outside validation of the brand at hand.

To win an award, a person or company presumably meets certain qualifications and either attains a high score of some kind or beats out other candidates. Think about it, there’s a reason why Nobel Prizes are understood to be prestigious, or another example, if you see one of those best place to work logos for a company you’re applying to, that little badge tells you a whole lot because it’s an endorsement of the workplace by a vast majority of employees.

Now, when we say speaking opportunities, in this context we don’t mean podium presentations at academic meetings. Instead, we’re talking about invited keynotes or panel participation. There’s a difference between being a headliner at a highly regarded medical meeting or summit sponsored by a known news outlet, and giving a talk at the first annual symposium of … fill in the blank here.

Of course, be wary of so-called “pay-for-play opportunities.” There’s nothing inherently wrong with these, as long as you know what you’re getting into and understand that these are usually, essentially advertisements or sponsored placements.

Tell us, do you include award applications or speaking opportunities in your thought leadership plans?

What are your winning strategies for landing an award, a spot on a coveted list, or an invitation to a star-studded event?

Come back next week as we continue our journey exploring the ins and outs of thought leadership.

Modern-Day Commentary Ops

Last week we shared an overview of how we think about thought leadership as an overarching topic.

One of the pillars of an effective program is commentary and op-ed.

A concept that’s really resonated with us is the modern-day definition of op-eds, thinking about them more holistically, as any kind of opinion piece.

Like most other media, opinion pieces fall into three categories: Earned, paid and owned…

Each with own merits:

A more traditional op-ed, whether in a mainstream or trade publication, arguably “earns” some element of legitimacy.

More advertorial-type opportunities have popped up recently, such as certain columns in Forbes,

Entrepreneur, Fast Company and Newsweek. While these are paid placements, they do still have a massive reach and can help boost your message.

And then of course, there are so many ways to self-publish owned media nowadays – anything from books to blogs and social media posts, like this one. This type of content allows for full editorial control on your own time.

The bottom line is that there’s more than one way to think about op-eds nowadays.

Our questions for the T2B community this week are:

Where does commentary like this have a place in a broader comms strategy?

What are the considerations to determine which type of op-ed is appropriate and when?

We’ll be back next week.

Defining Thought Leadership

Ticket to Biotech’s February focus area is thought leadership – sometimes a nebulous term.

We define it as proactively yet opportunistically positioning a brand, whether that’s a company or a person, as a foremost expert in a given field among predefined audiences to create influence.

This week we’re sharing in broad strokes how we think about it:

Get to know the person or entity – what are they all about? Program should be related to what they’re good at or what they’re passionate about.

Platform, what you stand for or what you want to be known for?

Gauge what your guardrails are – are you working with a CEO who’s never been on social media and doesn’t want to start, or the opposite, someone who’s a loose cannon. Be realistic about what you’re working with.

Now that you have all these inputs, it’s time to determine the outputs.

Look at priority social media platforms and content cadence.

Volunteering and community involvement – whether in a professional or medical society or in a local organization.

Awards – what better way to demonstrate expertise than to get a third-party stamp of approval.

Bylined articles and op-eds in outlets that are important to your predetermined key audiences.

Organic media engagement – appropriate to incorporate the platform into your broader corp affairs strategy?

Don’t forget about the internal aspect with colleagues too – is there a plug and play opp like an ERG or culture group, or is there value in creating a new forum?

Make sure you have both quantitative and qualitative measurement mechanisms in place for the long term, and don’t necessarily expect quick wins. Sample considerations could be related to business goal achievement, more inbound speaking opportunities, increased engagement on social media or even with employees.

Tell us how you think about thought leadership and what your must-haves are for creating influence.

Exploring Varied Entry Points to Our Profession

Welcome back.

This week’s community discussion topic looks at the various pathways to becoming a biopharma communicator.

The two most common that we see are people who study PR, communications, journalism, maybe even English in school, but who learn science on the job, talk to experts, have a passion for it, and become a successful biopharma communicator.

The other that we’re starting to see more of at Ticket to Biotech, which is really exciting, are scientists by training, people who are postdoctoral students or have their PhDs and want to communicate their work to the world.

Maybe they don’t want to be a bench scientist, and feel like they can have a better impact in a different way.

These folks can often learn PR, communications best practices on the job.

And there are many other ways to become successful.

These are only a couple, but we want hear from you, Ticket to Biotech community, about your experiences.

If you’re at the early stage of your career and considering becoming a communicator, or coming over from being a scientist, what do you need to know?

What’s going to tip the scales?

And if you’re a communicator — which most of us in the Ticket to Biotech community already are — what’s been your experience?

How did you get to where you are?

Do you have any tips, advice for people looking to make the leap?

What else would you share about your experience?

So, hop over to Slack and tell us what you think, and we’ll see you next week.

Biopharm comms’ unique challenges

First video, turning our Weekly Comm Discussion Topic into a video series

This week’s topic inspired by recent convos @ JPM:

Asked why I started Ticket to Biotech, what the impetus was.

How we landed on the model and programming where we’re at now is a diff convo.

What I want to focus on today is the uniqueness of what it means to do biopharma comms.

Our take is that biopharma comms and PR folks have to think about things that other comms pros don’t, like:

  • operating in highly regulated industry
  • complex science and technology
  • it’s a long time until we’re consumer-facing- if at all

Like, debating whether or not to use the word “potentially” in comms materials is a perfectly normal thing for us to spend our time on. While I admittedly am not familiar with a lot of other kinds of PR, I don’t know another industry where using this word – or not – has serious legal and regulatory ramifications.

So, needless to say, we’re special, and that warrants a space for us to talk, vent, commiserate, learn and evolve. Voila, here we are.

Our community questions for you this week:

Tell me you do biopharma comms without telling me you do biopharma comms.

What are some of the things that you spend time thinking about that you suspect peers in other areas of PR or comms don’t? And are these areas where you could use support or you want to learn about others’ experiences?

Jump onto T2B Slack to tell us what you think.