Simply put, twitter may be worth the fuss

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Correspondent  |  April 13, 2009

Justifying Twitter hoopla. Calling Twitter "a deceptively simple idea with remarkably powerful applications," writer and consultant Paul Gillin attempted to explain the online messaging service to those who still don't get what all the fuss is about.

The 140-character limit is liberating. Writing blog entries is a time-consuming task. . . . Twitter's 140-character limit lends itself well to quick thoughts that I believe are worth sharing with others but that don't justify a full-blown blog entry.

When you just can't wait for information, Twitter can't be beat for getting your question to a large group. It's impractical to do this with e-mail: People's inboxes are already cluttered with spam and you have no way of getting your message to people you don't know. Also, through "retweeting" a message can reach a large number of people who aren't on your follower list. This brings new perspectives to the conversation and gives you the opportunity to discover people you wouldn't have otherwise met.

If you want to find out what people are saying about you right now, services like Twitscoop and Monitter enable you to instantly track mentions of your company, product, industry, or whatever and to save them as RSS feeds for later browsing. You can do the same with Twitter Search. Google Alerts currently doesn't index Twitter feeds, but Filtrbox does. paulgillin.com See also: Boston.com's twitter accounts

Furrowed brows in biotech. The Charles Hotel was packed with attendees for last week's Biotech Business Development Conference, and everyone brought a laundry list of concerns about the industry. I reported on the gathering on my Innovation Economy blog.

Biotech CEOs working on new drugs are worried about FOBs: follow-on biologics. The US could soon make it legal for companies to produce generic versions of biological drugs (the biotech industry prefers to call them "biosimilars"). That could cut the profit potential of the very expensive new molecules now in development.

John Maraganore, CEO of Alnylam Pharmaceuticals, said the industry needs to adopt "a science-based approach" to persuading legislators and the public that follow-on biologics ought to be tightly regulated, rigorously tested, and carefully evaluated by the FDA. In the past, Maraganore said, "we were obstructionists" about the very idea of follow-on biologics.

There's concern about new regulations that govern how biotech and pharma companies can discuss (or "detail") their products with doctors. "Detail times of 60 to 120 seconds is not much different from the UPS guy making a delivery," said David Pyott, CEO of Allergan. "The only difference is the drug rep is better paid, and, sadly, better educated." Pyott predicted that drug companies will have to devote more resources to online education for physicians.

Privately held biotech companies worry about losing negotiating leverage with bigger partners if it's perceived that they're running short on cash. Duncan Higgons of Archemix suggested that many big pharma companies have created their own lists of distressed little biotech companies, and are planning to do some "bottom-feeding" in this environment, buying them (or certain assets) at a discount.

Publicly traded companies feel like the markets aren't rewarding progress. David Meeker of Genzyme noted that the company has had three new drugs approved in the past three months, and yet the company's stock is down 30 percent.
innoeco.com

Advice for start-ups.
New companies always expect their product or service to take the world by storm. But devoting a bit of effort to marketing helps. Cambridge entrepreneur Dharmesh Shah offered some "tactical tips for start-up marketing" on his blog.

Pick a name that works. Needs to be simple, memorable, and unambiguous. The ".com" domain should be available without playing tricks with the name (like dropping vowels or adding dashes).

Kick off a blog. You can use one of the free hosting tools (like WordPress.com), but don't use their domain name. Put your blog on blog.yourcompany.com.

Find three closest competitors. Pretend like someone is paying you $10,000 for locating each competitor. Really try hard. Barely managed to find three? Take a lot of effort? Great. Now find three more. Of these six, pick the two that you think are the most marketing-savvy. . . . These are the competitors that you're going to start "tracking". Add their names and websites to your Google Alerts.

Update your LinkedIn profile (you do have a LinkedIn profile, right?). Mention your new start-up, and add a link to your start-up website to one of the three slots for this purpose.

Find the bloggers that are writing about your topic area. Subscribe to their feed, and read their stuff regularly.

Leave valuable comments and participate in the conversation. (Do not spam them or write "fluff" comments. If you don't have something useful to add to the conversation, don't comment).

Get some analytics: Install some Web analytics software and start watching your traffic. Where is it coming from? How is it growing? What keywords are people using to find you? What content are they looking at? It's okay to get a bit maniacal and obssessed about it at first. Many of us do that (and some of us never get over it).

onstartups.com

Have you seen an interesting item on a local business blog? E-mail kirsner@pobox.com.