Envisioning 2.0

Since early this year, Abbott Laboratories and the PR firm Fleishman Hilliard have been producing a contest designed to encourage young people to enter the clinical laboratory profession.  According to Abbott, the program, Labs Are Vital, was a smashing success.  It reached more than 1.8 million students interested in the sciences.

Students participating in the contests were asked to develop videos, T-shirts and advertisements encouraging people to start a career in laboratory medicine.  A key part of the programs’ success was the fact that Fleishman Hilliard was heavily engaged with the Facebook community surrounding the contest.  With a few exceptions, the contest sponsors were very responsive to community members’ needs and quickly answered questions.

Intimate interaction with community members was critically important, as Abbott changed the program’s various deadlines a few times over the past few months to give students more time to participate in the contest.  These changes confused community members.  In addition, Fleishman did a good job defusing negative commentary about the contest by quickly and honestly addressing criticism about the effort.

This contest illustrates that social networks have the power to “seed and grow” online communities around a common cause.  “Seeding” means providing the community with an online home.  Growth entails giving the community room to evolve at its own pace and constantly making adjustments as its needs change.

To learn more about the contest, click here.  To view the Facebook group, please click here (Facebook account required to view site).

This entry was posted on April 25, 2008 at 11:02 am and is filed under Marketing Communications, The Biotech Industry, The Pharmaceutical Industry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.