It Starts with One-Partnering Meeting Leads to Unique Public-Private Partnership

Roy Zwahlen took a long shot when he requested a meeting with an investment firm at the 2017 BIO International Convention in San Diego. As Assistant Dean for Innovation and Strategy at the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy and the Eshelman Institute for Innovation, Zwahlen was in search of a partnership that could help bring the University's science to the marketplace. He was aware of the firm's  interest in unique partnerships with leading academic research institutions and discovered, to his delight, the firm  was participating in BIO One-on-One Partnering™.

BIO One-on-One Partnering facilitates upwards of 45,000 one-on-one meetings among 7,000 partnering delegates during the four days of the Convention. It has an intuitive interface that allows participants to search company and investor profiles to identify the right prospects and begin a direct dialogue with potential partners. The impressive database includes biopharma and medical technology companies, in-licensors, investors, and others across the life sciences. The program will automatically add scheduled meetings to Outlook calendars and retains meeting histories across multiple conferences.

So Zwahlen took his shot. "I didn't actually think it would be a good place to connect with them. I presumed the VCs get a lot of requests at these meetings and have limited capacity to field meeting requests.  However, I was pleasantly surprised that they were available and interested in meeting.

Zwahlen was strategic in his use of the partnering system. He sent his meeting requests early on (participants can sign up as early as February!) and he made sure his pitch to the firm aligned with what they were interested in."UNC was looking for unique public-private partnership models that could both increase our chances of taking research from the bench to the bedside and accelerate the process. When we learned that the investment firm was exploring unique partnerships with leading research institutions and that they were in the BIO partnering system, we hoped BIO would be the perfect place to begin discussions about a potential partnership and we were pleasantly surprised."

The rest, as they say, is history. In October of last year, UNC-Chapel Hill and the investment firm announced a $65 million commitment promising new drug research at UNC-Chapel Hill across a wide range of therapeutic areas through the creation of a company called Pinnacle Hill. Profits from successful projects will be shared by the firm  and UNC-Chapel Hill.
Preparation, planning and research were the keys to Zwahlen's success. Getting started early allowed him to evaluate the partnering database and meet those with mutual interests. BIO provides guidance for using the partnering system with webinars like this every year and a team is available to answer questions anytime.

As Zwahlen noted, "The Convention was really the critical starting point for the relationship. The process took several phone calls, several onsite visits by the investment firm to evaluate our science, a process of learning how the other partner works and how best to streamline our efforts…"

UNC-Chapel Hill  can attest to the BIO 2019 theme-It Starts with One. A promising partnership "started with one" meeting and blossomed into a solid collaboration.

Glossier CEO: We're Building this People-Powered Ecosystem

Glossier is both a beauty company and a tech company that is succeeding by staying incredibly connected to their customers. Glossier founder and CEO Emily Weiss says that they are building a people-powered ecosystem where they are co-creating with their customers.

Not only do they ask for feedback from their customers, but they communicate with them on a Slack channel directly. This level of communication with consumers makes Glossier unique and is what powers their product creation and innovation.

Emily Weiss, Glossier founder and CEO, recently discussed the people-powered ecosystem that makes Glossier a unique kind of company with Kara Swisher for her Recode Decode podcast:

We're Building this People-Powered Ecosystem

Glossier is a pretty unique kind of beauty company that's also a tech company. So it's hard for me sometimes to answer that question, are you beauty or are you tech? I think we're both. Right now at a glance were about 200 full-time employees across three offices in New York, Canada, and London. We're about 70 percent female. Our board is 60 percent female. Our engineering team is 50 percent female. It looks a little different than most tech companies. We just crossed last year well over a $100 million in revenue. We're very excited about that.

The way we look at it is that we're building this people-powered ecosystem. Since we launched four and a half years ago, we have co-created with our consumers. The reason we're able to do that is because we know who they are. We have a direct relationship with every single person who buys something from us, unlike you all of the incumbent companies that have been built through retail channels. We've never existed through retail channels. We have no plans to exist through retail channels.

Using Technology to Do Things Differently

The reason being we think that through using technology we can do three things very differently than what all beauty companies have done in the past. One is channel. The second is discovery. The third is listening at scale. Fundamentally, we just think about how do to give people amazing experiences.

In that way perhaps we're similar to Amazon in that they're extremely devoted to the customer. We're very devoted to the customer from the standpoint that we don't want to put things that aren't amazing into the world.

Since we launched we've always relied a lot on user-generated content and feedback. We really started out of a blog that began in 2010 that was all around this premise that people are going to drive purchasing decisions in the future. Not algorithms. Not upselling or cross-selling. If anything, upselling and cross-selling people's opinions, helping to evangelize people's voice such that people can decide what they want.

At Glossier, we've really taken user feedback and asked them for things like what products to make, and where to go in terms of pop-ups or countries. We have fundamentally been able to really change the relationship between brands and customers.

Make Incredible Things That Stand the Test of Time

Traditionally, the way that I grew up with beauty products and brands was always sort of from brands speaking top down to customers. They are saying you're not good enough, saying you don't know what you want, let us tell you what you want. Really dictatorial. In a way, not giving people enough credit to be able to say, hey, actually I use this deodorant every day. So I am an expert at this deodorant. Seriously, we are all experts on the things that we consume and the things that we use.

What we're trying to do is provide the tools, whether it is the physical products that we've created over the last four years or the digital conduits that we're creating now. In the future we hope to help people use their voice and say, hey, how can I help someone else talk about what they've learned about beauty and their products and hopefully inspire others.

We've just typically had a pretty simple premise which is making incredible things that can really stand the test of time. That has equaled so far building these very modern essential products that we hope become icons in the same way an iPhone or an Air Jordan became essential products. Hopefully in thirty years time Boy Brow will connect a fifteen year old in the Middle East to a billionaire in Silicon Valley and we'll be cross generational and cross socio-economic.

We get very excited about creating quality things that make people want to talk about them. Just period full stop. Over 70 percent of our growth so far has been through owned, earned, peer-to-peer, or organic because people just fundamentally want to share that they enjoyed their Boy Brow.

For Us It Has Been Quite Analog

This is something that people are really curious about. I think especially in this age of machine learning for us so far a lot of it has been quite like analog. It's just been posting on the platforms that we have or in our Slack channel, where we have a lot like several hundred top customers, and saying what's your dream face wash?

Sometimes, that's the way in which we will make product decisions. But typically, it's really an art and a science. It really depends on the project and how involved we're going to get versus just sort of say in the office what are we excited about?

Our Innovation Comes From Staying Connected

We stay very connected. Every every team at the company, we're about a third TAC across engineering, digital product, data, and design. Then we have an in-house creative team and we have in-house R&D. I think we're all very connected to the to the customer. We have all of our Net Promoter Score feedback and comments from every single customer who answers it.

We are constantly taking into a Slack channel that everyone from me to my assistant to an intern can read every day just to stay connected to the customer. Sometimes it's a single comment or sometimes it's a macro trend that we that we hear about the translates into innovation.

The post Glossier CEO: We're Building this People-Powered Ecosystem appeared first on WebProNews.

4 Social Media Calendar Tools to Plan All of Your Content [Template]

What do cross-country road trips, wedding speeches, and social media marketing have in common?

You could improvise all three, but it's better to have a plan for what direction you're heading -- especially when developing your social media content strategy.

By now, most marketers recognize that social media plays an integral role in an effective inbound marketing strategy. And with so many social networks to manage and publish on, it's important to stay organized and have a plan for when and what you're going to share on these platforms.

In this post, we've rounded up some of the most helpful tools and templates for building out an effective social media content plan. Check them out below.

The Benefits of Using a Social Media Content Calendar

We're all busy. And when we're busy without a plan in place for the tasks we have to get done, things inevitably slip through the cracks. Social media content is no exception.

Just like with blogging, a successful social media strategy requires regular publishing and engaging with followers to see positive results -- whether that be in terms of SEO, brand recognition, lead generation, or all three.

So, if you're not already using a social media content calendar, hear me out:

1. Calendars help you get organized to avoid the dreaded scramble when things come up. With a social media calendar, marketers can plan out posts for entire weeks or months in advance, which frees up working hours to strategize for the future -- and to dash off any posts about breaking news in your industry. Otherwise, you'll spend valuable time each day searching the internet for that day's content to share, which is a known productivity killer.
2. A calendar helps you plan for each social network to customize posts instead of spamming all platforms with the same message. Social media marketers should take the time to craft custom messages for each network, and doing this in advance will save time throughout the week and ensure you're being thoughtful and intentional when you do post.
3. Calendars can help you track performance and plan for future posts. Without a calendar, social media marketers are publishing content into the void and are unable to track big-picture and past performance. With a calendar, marketers can look back and analyze which content performed best so they can adjust their strategy accordingly.
4. With the help of a calendar, marketers can plan for holidays and observance days, such as National Cat Day, when they can tailor their content and engage with a wider audience.
5. Social media calendars improve efficiency. According to Content Marketing Institute, 72% of B2B marketers attribute the success (which has increased annually) of their content to the development of a formal content strategy.

Now that you understand the merits of having a social media content calendar in place, check out our list of top tools to stay organized and on top of your game.

4 Social Media Content Calendar Tools to Plan Your Messaging

1. Trello

Trello is another organizational tool that's highly effective for team collaboration. More specifically, social media managers can use Trello's flexible assignment "cards" and customizable "boards" and "lists" to map out to-do lists, manage a content calendar, plan a campaign, and house ideas from a brainstorm.

Here's an example of a Trello board a social media marketing team might use to plan posts for the upcoming week:

But you're not limited to just one structure: Users can customize boards according to their needs. For example, a team could create a board to organize social media posts for a given week, on a specific platform, or post ideas around a topic, such as a campaign or awareness day.

Trello cards allow for a ton of customization as well. Here's a fictitious social media editorial calendar card with Twitter copy options around a piece of blog content. Note that you can track progress toward completing a checklist, which could be useful for social media marketers looking to track campaign progress.

Additionally, Trello cards can be assigned to different team members, marked with due dates, and commented on. Users can even customize the labels (as in the image below) with different publication statuses so the entire team can see the progress of their social media posts and when they're due on the calendar. The labels could also indicate different social networks that content is being published on.

Source: BlueGlass

Trello also offers a full calendar view (shown below) which makes it easy to visualize what content is going out, and when.

Source: BlueGlass

2. Microsoft Excel

Marketers might already use Excel for different types of reports and data analysis in their roles, but it's a highly useful tool for social media content calendar organization, too. Excel can be customized according to whatever priorities or metrics a team is focused on, so it's a great tool for planning ahead.

The good news? We've already done the heavy lifting for you by creating a free, downloadable social media content calendar template using Microsoft Excel. Marketers can use this template to easily plan out individual social media posts -- monthly or annually -- while keeping an eye on bigger picture events, holidays, publications, and partnerships.

For more on how to use the templates, check out this in-depth guide from my colleague Lindsay Kolowich.

Use the Monthly Planning Calendar Tab above to get a bird's-eye view of what's coming down their content pipeline in a given month.

In the Content Repository tab, users can record the content they're publishing on this tab to keep track of which pieces have been promoted and to easily recall older content that can be re-promoted on social media.

On the Social Network Update tabs, users can draft and plan out social media posts in advance. These tabs are for organizational purposes, and the content of the posts themselves must be uploaded into a social media publisher.

This free resource can be used to draft social media posts, or it can be bulk-uploaded into a publishing app to maximize efficiency. (HubSpot customers: You can use this spreadsheet to organize content and upload it directly into Social Inbox. For instructions on how to do so, check out the template's cover sheet here.)

3. Evernote

Evernote is a note-taking app that marketers can use to keep track of all the moving parts that comprise a social media campaign.

The tool also features yearly, monthly, weekly, and hourly logs, which make it easy to keep track of when you're publishing content on social media, when you're producing blog content, and other team-wide priorities. (Evernote offers customizable templates for each of these that can be downloaded into the app.)

Another useful feature? Evernote's Web Clipper extension for Chrome. Marketers can use this tool to easily save links to their Evernote Notebook for sharing later on.

The Evernote mobile app also boasts some interesting features to help marketers keep their social content ideas straight. For example, you can easily snap a photo and save it to your Evernote files for review later.

Source: Evernote

This feature is of particular valuable for social content creators looking to maintain a backlog of photos to publish on Instagram.

4. Google Drive

Google Drive has several helpful features that make it easy for social media marketers to build out an effective content calendar.

Here's an example of how a team might use Google Calendar to track both their editorial and social media calendars to make sure they're aligning posts with new blog content. These calendars can be easily shared with multiple teams to avoid scheduling conflicts and ensure that campaigns are aligned.

Marketers can also use shared Google Sheets to schedule posts on social media, track the status of different pieces of content, and assign tasks to team members -- all on the same platform as their calendar.

With the help of Google Docs, users can keep comments all in one place and can collaborate on different projects without emailing back-and-forth or having to schedule a meeting. This is a particularly useful feature when editing content for social media, which may need to be drafted and approved quickly.

(HubSpot customers: You can link your Google Drive account to your HubSpot portal to easily upload files from Drive into your HubSpot software.)

Now that we've reviewed a few helpful tools to kick your social media strategy into high gear, experiment with them. Every social media team is different, and it could be a combination of these tools that helps you execute your strategy efficiently to drive ROI. For getting all of your ideas down and developing a big-picture plan for your social assets, we recommend starting with our template and going from there.

What tools do you use to build your social media content calendar? Share with us in the comments below.

It Starts with One-Partnering Meeting Leads to Unique Public-Private Partnership

Roy Zwahlen took a long shot when he requested a meeting with an investment firm at the 2017 BIO International Convention in San Diego. As Assistant Dean for Innovation and Strategy at the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy and the Eshelman Institute for Innovation, Zwahlen was in search of a partnership that could help bring the University's science to the marketplace. He was aware of the firm's  interest in unique partnerships with leading academic research institutions and discovered, to his delight, the firm  was participating in BIO One-on-One Partnering™.

BIO One-on-One Partnering facilitates upwards of 45,000 one-on-one meetings among 7,000 partnering delegates during the four days of the Convention. It has an intuitive interface that allows participants to search company and investor profiles to identify the right prospects and begin a direct dialogue with potential partners. The impressive database includes biopharma and medical technology companies, in-licensors, investors, and others across the life sciences. The program will automatically add scheduled meetings to Outlook calendars and retains meeting histories across multiple conferences.

So Zwahlen took his shot. "I didn't actually think it would be a good place to connect with them. I presumed the VCs get a lot of requests at these meetings and have limited capacity to field meeting requests.  However, I was pleasantly surprised that they were available and interested in meeting.

Zwahlen was strategic in his use of the partnering system. He sent his meeting requests early on (participants can sign up as early as February!) and he made sure his pitch to the firm aligned with what they were interested in."UNC was looking for unique public-private partnership models that could both increase our chances of taking research from the bench to the bedside and accelerate the process. When we learned that the investment firm was exploring unique partnerships with leading research institutions and that they were in the BIO partnering system, we hoped BIO would be the perfect place to begin discussions about a potential partnership and we were pleasantly surprised."

The rest, as they say, is history. In October of last year, UNC-Chapel Hill and the investment firm announced a $65 million commitment promising new drug research at UNC-Chapel Hill across a wide range of therapeutic areas through the creation of a company called Pinnacle Hill. Profits from successful projects will be shared by the firm  and UNC-Chapel Hill.
Preparation, planning and research were the keys to Zwahlen's success. Getting started early allowed him to evaluate the partnering database and meet those with mutual interests. BIO provides guidance for using the partnering system with webinars like this every year and a team is available to answer questions anytime.

As Zwahlen noted, "The Convention was really the critical starting point for the relationship. The process took several phone calls, several onsite visits by the investment firm to evaluate our science, a process of learning how the other partner works and how best to streamline our efforts…"

UNC-Chapel Hill  can attest to the BIO 2019 theme-It Starts with One. A promising partnership "started with one" meeting and blossomed into a solid collaboration.

It Starts with One-Partnering Meeting Leads to Unique Public-Private Partnership

Roy Zwahlen took a long shot when he requested a meeting with an investment firm at the 2017 BIO International Convention in San Diego. As Assistant Dean for Innovation and Strategy at the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy and the Eshelman Institute for Innovation, Zwahlen was in search of a partnership that could help bring the University's science to the marketplace. He was aware of the firm's  interest in unique partnerships with leading academic research institutions and discovered, to his delight, the firm  was participating in BIO One-on-One Partnering™.

BIO One-on-One Partnering facilitates upwards of 45,000 one-on-one meetings among 7,000 partnering delegates during the four days of the Convention. It has an intuitive interface that allows participants to search company and investor profiles to identify the right prospects and begin a direct dialogue with potential partners. The impressive database includes biopharma and medical technology companies, in-licensors, investors, and others across the life sciences. The program will automatically add scheduled meetings to Outlook calendars and retains meeting histories across multiple conferences.

So Zwahlen took his shot. "I didn't actually think it would be a good place to connect with them. I presumed the VCs get a lot of requests at these meetings and have limited capacity to field meeting requests.  However, I was pleasantly surprised that they were available and interested in meeting.

Zwahlen was strategic in his use of the partnering system. He sent his meeting requests early on (participants can sign up as early as February!) and he made sure his pitch to the firm aligned with what they were interested in."UNC was looking for unique public-private partnership models that could both increase our chances of taking research from the bench to the bedside and accelerate the process. When we learned that the investment firm was exploring unique partnerships with leading research institutions and that they were in the BIO partnering system, we hoped BIO would be the perfect place to begin discussions about a potential partnership and we were pleasantly surprised."

The rest, as they say, is history. In October of last year, UNC-Chapel Hill and the investment firm announced a $65 million commitment promising new drug research at UNC-Chapel Hill across a wide range of therapeutic areas through the creation of a company called Pinnacle Hill. Profits from successful projects will be shared by the firm  and UNC-Chapel Hill.
Preparation, planning and research were the keys to Zwahlen's success. Getting started early allowed him to evaluate the partnering database and meet those with mutual interests. BIO provides guidance for using the partnering system with webinars like this every year and a team is available to answer questions anytime.

As Zwahlen noted, "The Convention was really the critical starting point for the relationship. The process took several phone calls, several onsite visits by the investment firm to evaluate our science, a process of learning how the other partner works and how best to streamline our efforts…"

UNC-Chapel Hill  can attest to the BIO 2019 theme-It Starts with One. A promising partnership "started with one" meeting and blossomed into a solid collaboration.

It Starts with One-Partnering Meeting Leads to Unique Public-Private Partnership

Roy Zwahlen took a long shot when he requested a meeting with an investment firm at the 2017 BIO International Convention in San Diego. As Assistant Dean for Innovation and Strategy at the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy and the Eshelman Institute for Innovation, Zwahlen was in search of a partnership that could help bring the University's science to the marketplace. He was aware of the firm's  interest in unique partnerships with leading academic research institutions and discovered, to his delight, the firm  was participating in BIO One-on-One Partnering™.

BIO One-on-One Partnering facilitates upwards of 45,000 one-on-one meetings among 7,000 partnering delegates during the four days of the Convention. It has an intuitive interface that allows participants to search company and investor profiles to identify the right prospects and begin a direct dialogue with potential partners. The impressive database includes biopharma and medical technology companies, in-licensors, investors, and others across the life sciences. The program will automatically add scheduled meetings to Outlook calendars and retains meeting histories across multiple conferences.

So Zwahlen took his shot. "I didn't actually think it would be a good place to connect with them. I presumed the VCs get a lot of requests at these meetings and have limited capacity to field meeting requests.  However, I was pleasantly surprised that they were available and interested in meeting.

Zwahlen was strategic in his use of the partnering system. He sent his meeting requests early on (participants can sign up as early as February!) and he made sure his pitch to the firm aligned with what they were interested in."UNC was looking for unique public-private partnership models that could both increase our chances of taking research from the bench to the bedside and accelerate the process. When we learned that the investment firm was exploring unique partnerships with leading research institutions and that they were in the BIO partnering system, we hoped BIO would be the perfect place to begin discussions about a potential partnership and we were pleasantly surprised."

The rest, as they say, is history. In October of last year, UNC-Chapel Hill and the investment firm announced a $65 million commitment promising new drug research at UNC-Chapel Hill across a wide range of therapeutic areas through the creation of a company called Pinnacle Hill. Profits from successful projects will be shared by the firm  and UNC-Chapel Hill.
Preparation, planning and research were the keys to Zwahlen's success. Getting started early allowed him to evaluate the partnering database and meet those with mutual interests. BIO provides guidance for using the partnering system with webinars like this every year and a team is available to answer questions anytime.

As Zwahlen noted, "The Convention was really the critical starting point for the relationship. The process took several phone calls, several onsite visits by the investment firm to evaluate our science, a process of learning how the other partner works and how best to streamline our efforts…"

UNC-Chapel Hill  can attest to the BIO 2019 theme-It Starts with One. A promising partnership "started with one" meeting and blossomed into a solid collaboration.