Pharma Strategy Blog

There is, understandably, quite a lot of mainstream resistance to social media from scientists.  They wonder about the time factor, the need to 'chat', how it fits in their workflow, why bother, is it even relevant etc.

Image via CrunchBase

The Life Scientists Room on Friendfeed has been going a while now, in fact it was one of the first rooms that was created there by Deepak Singh and now has nearly 900 members.  It's a great example of different types of life scientists from bioinformaticians to bench scientists to cancer researchers to science writers all congregating together and providing discussion, help and support around a common interest.  Check it out, it's well worth looking at!

In fact, one of the many useful things I found there was this great slide presentation from Richard Grant on Scientists and Social Media:

View more presentations from rpg7ss.

Another useful source of information that came from Twitter and Friendfeed, was a linked to David Bradley's post on ScienceBase about Scientists on Twitter.  Yup, there are now nearly 500 of us, up from about 100 in January this year. 

If you have started on Twitter, one tip that you may find useful is rather than randomly follow all the recommended people and celebrities, check out the Life Scientists room and David's list for other scientists, many of whom may share similar interests or research areas, offering opportunities for collaboration and sharing virtually. 

You can also use Twitter Search to find people with common interests, assuming they are tweeting about the topic or include relevant information in their bios.

If you're a scientist or biotechnology geek in San Diego, then you're in luck.  Mary Canady of Comprendia runs the excellent San Diego Biotech Network and they have a meeting coming up for scientists on May 28th.  Check it out.

There are also a number of useful links in the box below.

{UPDATE: See also details of SciBarCamp in Palo Alto, July 8-9th via the Comments section at the bottom of the blog}

If you enjoy reading these blog posts you can subscribe by email and read at your leisure offline at your convenience.