There’s a line from a song on one of my favorite albums that goes like this:
Has anybody else but me ever felt this way before?
Like the world’s spinning much too fast and you’re falling through the floor.
Struck by lightning, it’s so frightening when the morning feels like war.
Unbreakable (don’t you wish you were) Unbreakable?
My paper covered desk sure does look like war.
This is a crazy time of year. Just when you’ve unpacked from the spring shows and your summer vacation, it’s call for papers time for next year’s shows. There’s Interphex and IQPC’s infrastructure in pharmaceuticals and Drug Information Association’s annual show and BIO 2009 and Project World and Bio-IT World and DisneyWorld…..Ok, strike the last one unless Peter Pan volunteers for some biotech clinical trial to show why he never grew up.
This one wants a short abstract, that one wants a short and long abstract and three learning objectives, this one wants money NOW before you can even begin abstract thinking. I really hate the ones who are so anal about their 156.5 word count that their online submission stops you at 156.9 words. Pretty soon, they will give you so little space; you’ll need to grab a teenager to help you.
U R Submtng a drg 4 resrch and IMO U need awdit
But it’s all worth it because not only do our people do a great job speaking but we meet very interesting people who further the discussions on different topics in pharma and biotechs.
I must confess that I do get annoyed when they treat vendor submissions as if we’ve all got a Scarlet V on our shirts. We’ve run into the no vendors rule, we’ve run into the vendors can speak but you must cough up the first year’s tuition at a public college first. That has never seemed fair to me, we’re not a huge company. My budget is probably a rounding error of the budget of the mega consulting companies yet I feel we’ve got just as much to say.Another way around that is to hold events of our own. So right now, I’m working with both Cisco and Microsoft to hold two events within three weeks of each other. (Yeah, I’m kind of regretting that little move.) The Cisco one will be fun, it’s interactive discussion “How safe is safe enough?” No, it’s not talking about the fact that my broker put 5% of my holdings in AIG and Bank of America. It’s talking about internal and external vulnerabilities of your network. That one is local so I wonder if I can just hang a sign outside of my fifth floor office window. I’m a budget hawk, ya know.
The Microsoft one is actually an intersection of our SharePoint and Life Sciences. There’s been a lot of interest in just how to make a document management system compliant with 21CFR11. We’ll kick that around at this event. Microsoft is letting us use their Waltham, MA offices.
The good news is that it is closer to a lot of the life sciences companies out in Eastern MA. The bad news is I will probably have to get up at 4:30 in the morning to get there on time. So, if you join us, please don’t comment on the bags under my eyes. I did find a nice image to represent electronic document collaboration for the presentation. It’s these two mice; don’t they look like they want to work together? It’s like a mice romantic comedy. Actually, I just liked it because it matched our logo colors.Finally, I keep forgetting to tell you all about the interesting marketing ploy that another company tried to play on us. Our CEO (the one who actually has authoring rights to this blog too…hint, hint) got a letter from a website company. His executive admin saw it while opening his mail and brought it to me. The letter basically trashed my brand new website and said it wasn’t helping the business but of course, this company (I’ll be charitable and not say their name) could fix it. Well, it was Friday afternoon and I was tired and feeling…shall we say, Unbreakable. I called the author. I told him that our website in fact had gotten great reviews and even a new client within 48 hours of launch that paid for the whole project. He stammered and stuttered and said the letter really wasn’t that bad because in fact, he never even looked at my website. It was a form letter. I said “so basically, you sent these letters to CEOs all over the country, which probably resulted in a certain percent of our fellow marketing peers getting trashed and you don’t even look at the websites?” I was incredulous and he had nothing more to say.
It was a very good way to start the weekend.
The Marketing Maven
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