Where Do Your Technology Descriptions Come From

It’s Not The Arrow; It’s the Archer

No matter whether you have a home-grown IP Management Database or a commercial application, the problem isn’t the IP Management System.  Most technology tracking and management software was never meant to be a central repository for Search Engine Optimized technology marketing content.  No prior system was specifically designed to integrate with the vast array of new, user and search engine-friendly, web-based technologies, without significant and costly customization.

When new or updated information is published, a manual process must still be undertaken to get the same information, which now resides on the website, out to its intended audience.  That is also assuming that there are adequate resources available to build fully developed marketing campaigns for the tens of thousands of new inventions and discoveries coming out of research facilities each year.  Further, the same process must be repeated each time there is an update or upgrade.

In fact, there are plenty of tools that are simple to use and produce dramatically better results than the way most TTO's do things now, but between bureaucracy, budget and fear of the unknown, most tech transfer offices refuse to accept that they are doing a terrible job of getting information about their innovations out to the world in a way that those searching for it can actually find it and begin to engage in the licensing process.

The Promise of the Future for Tech Transfer

How to Get There

It is possible to leverage the power of the Web to bring potential licensees, folks that you don’t have contact info for, to the universe of amazing technologies that often lie dormant waiting for someone to discover them.  By using ubiquitous web tools, and following proven content-optimization methods, industry can find out about licensable technologies and, in many cases, actually license it, with no human intervention, no phone calls, no negotiation and no paperwork.

Whatever applications and tools the TTO chooses, though, should really be a secondary consideration.  The application itself is simply a means to an end.  In my mind, which application one uses is only as important as a tech transfer office's ability to change the way they market their technologies.  It is so important for people to understand that they should not be using jargon, technical descriptions and the indecipherable gobbledygook that professors and researcher write. (mostly, it seems, to impress other professors and researchers)  one can find reams of quantitative data that PROVES that people simply do not use the web to search for solutions to problems the way most of us in the tech transfer world seem to think they do. 
 

If folks aren't beating down your door to find out more about all of the cool, ground- breaking inventions and discoveries that you have to offer, you no longer have to ask yourself why; It is because you are writing for the wrong audience.  I have had this argument a hundred times with folks in our own office and all I can say is that the results speak much louder than anything I can say or do to convince them.  

I can give you a hundred examples of how easy it is to get people to actually notice your licensable technologies, but most often, it doesn't matter, because folks don't want to do the work it would take to fix their content.  They just want to post whatever they have in KSS, InfoEd or Inteum, directly to the web, with no regard for whether or not anyone in the world will ever be able to find it, use it or understand it, if they do.  We in the Tech Transfer world seem to think that the simple act of getting a technology description online means that anyone searching for a solution to a problem, one that has anything at all to do with the general nature of one of our inventions, will easily be able to find it.

The fact is, there are tens-of-thousands of technologies being listed on IP aggregator sites, but the real people out there searching for them can't find them because we do such a horrible job of writing technology descriptions, optimizing our content and setting ourselves up for success.  We don't understand the tools that we are using or how search engines work.  Optimizing content can help us do our jobs by bringing unsolicited leads to our doorstep.

Tech Transfer Offices need to completely scrap the way they think about how they describe their technologies.  We need to begin to learn how to use the tools that we already have available to us.  And, finally, we need stop trying to turn technology management systems, like KSS, Inteum and InfoED, that are in no way meant (or equipped) to help one market the technologies whose descriptions are housed there, let alone do so online.  We need to start thinking more clearly about our the behavior of our audience.

Why are Tech Transfer Organizations Using video / Web 2.0 / social media tools

It Gets Worse

The trend that sees tech transfer offices skipping the most important steps in the online-marketing-tool "learning curve," and instead jumping directly to a strategy of using video/Web 2.0/social media tools, without ever learning how the web, search, content optimization and basic internet marketing processes work, means that they are focusing time and resources on steps that won’t help them until they go back and learn the basics.

If you can’t effectively market a technology online, so that you get unsolicited leads, why would you shift your focus to trying to market a video about that technology.  If you are doing this you are throwing good money after bad.

Innovation Lives; Just Not Inside the Tech Transfer Office

Are We Scared or Apathetic?

Most folks from private enterprise would be shocked by the vast array of bureaucracy and manual processes that nearly all tech transfer organizations engage in, which choke the use of new, better and more appropriate ways of marketing innovations.

Tech Transfer Professionals Can't Be Experts in Everything

Why Do We Try to be Smarter Than the Inventor?

An obvious problem in Tech Transfer is that many people, working in TTO's all over the world, put much more value on being completely conversant in the minutiae of the technologies they are tasked with marketing and licensing, than they do the ability to actually market them.  They get brow beaten by professors and researchers who claim that the reason nobody is beating down the door to license their innovations, is because the tech transfer professional doesn't understand the technology well enough to be able to explain its value.  That argument would be completely moot if the folks in the TTO were better at engaging their audience and actually licensing the technology

Why Don't Tech Transfer Offices Know How to Market Their Innovations?

Why Don’t People Seem to Care About All the Cool Innovations That We Produce?

In the interaction between potential licensees and tech transfer offices (TTO's), there are critical missing pieces of an ever-expanding puzzle.  Creating, managing and displaying useful information about their intellectual property in such a way that it is understandable, easily found, accessible in many formats and most importantly, simple to license, seems to be a puzzle that TTO's are unable to solve.

Most tech transfer offices have web sites displaying technical jargon, acronyms, patent application data or the verbatim content from an IP disclosure that some researcher or patent attorney wrote, which they pass off to the public as marketing content for their technological innovations.  With very few exceptions it is clear that TTO's don't understand that by using language that nobody, not even other researchers, are using in web searches, that they don't have any idea who or how many people might be searching for the solution to a particular problem; Potential licensees can't find the ready-made answer, because of this faulty approach.

Instead, Universities have to hope that potential licensee’s will be able to follow a trail of breadcrumbs through academic databases, journal publications and patent searches, to ultimately find a some new innovative technology that could help make the world a better place to live.; or at least solve the problem that sent them searching in the first place 
 
I've spoken to dozens of Tech Transfer professionals and whenever I ask them what they do to market their institution's innovations, to all of the people that they don't already have contact information for, they always seem to fall back on the fallacy of “personal contacts” being the most important tool in business development.  Most don’t see the point or value of embracing the web, engaging new ideas, or learning new marketing skills.  They seem to believe that as long as they put something, anything, on a website, or IP aggregators, like iBridge, Folio Direct, Knowledge Express, Flintbox, etc, then people will automatically be able to find them.

Problems with Tech Transfer, Online Marketing and Licensing Innovation

This is the first in a series of articles about the issues surrounding online marketing and licensing in Technology Transfer Organizations at Universities, Hospitals, National Laboratories and Government Sponsored Research Facilities

In subsequent articles there will be new content posted regularly, from industry leaders, regarding new ways of solving all of the problems identified here.  This blog series will tackle:

• The Problems Facing Tech transfer Offices
• Writing Effective Technology Descriptions for the Web
• Content optimization techniques for Tech Transfer Office websites
• Understanding How Search Engines See Your Content
• SEO Tips and Tricks
• Social Media Strategies
• Everything You Need to Know About Online Licensing
• Collecting Data about Your TTO’s Web Visitors and What to Do With It
• Analysis of IP Listing Sites
• Why TTO’s Don’t Have to Negotiate
• Statistics about Web Usage and Scientific Breakthroughs

what a mess

OK, I am completely aware that I am the exact wrong person to criticize anyone about home-office cleaning, clutter or organization, but...a complete day spent cleaning and organizing, in only one room, is not really ok. It is obsessive-compulsive.  

I have three offices (let's not talk about my neurosis and other obvious issues or we'll be here all day) and even if I had dog urine covering every square inch I'm pretty sure I couldn't spend more than three hours cleaning them. My sister does the same thing; she spends 12 hours cleaning, which is akin to a vacation for her, then spends another 12 hours congratulating herself for having done something "productive." NOT EVEN CLOSE

Feeling good about getting stuff organized is one thing, but not feeling a little ashamed (instead of triumphant) that it got that way in the first place is kinda weird. Don't you think that it is more a display of tendency toward giving yourself messes to clean up because the accomplishment of cleaning them is a tangible manifestation of the work you got done at home that day.  

I used to work for a huge company and I was the very first "remote" worker. In fact, I wrote the business case for a new product bundle called "work-at-home solutions." Since then I have learned some things about people who spend most of their time working at home. One of the most common things that we do while we are supposed to be working is household chores/home improvement activities. This is because most of us who sit in front of a computer screen or talk on the phone for a living don't produce something that we can reach out and touch, see or hold. We, therefore, compensate by trying to complete tasks with tangible results.

The other thing that we do is that we print stuff out and create piles of paper, files full of folders and shelves full of stuff. Thus the clutter. I am not judging, because even though I realize that this is, subconsciously, the reason why my office is usually messy, I rationalize these bad habit by saying "its just easier to read stuff off paper," or "if I print it out then I can make notes during that meeting..."  

The moral of the story is that the mess (with the possible exception of the dog pee) didn't get there by accident. It's there because you need it to be.

Posted by Lee Odden on Jan 29th in Online Marketing, SEO, Business of SEO |

Explaining search engine optimization to newbies is something that anyone with sales or account support responsibilities at a search marketing or interactive agency is going to have to get good at. I used to spend a lot of time using the notion of “organic” and the whole “making fertile ground, planting seeds, nurturing, cultivating, watering, air, sun, bear fruit” kind of analogy but it gets old using the same description all the time.

The best way to explain the notion of optimizing web sites for search engines can vary depending on the starting point. For people stuck in 1999 SEO land, where it’s all about meta tags, submissions and SEO as a “one time” event, an explanation of the need for fresh, themed content and an ongoing pursuit of inbound links can become the focus.

On the other hand, if the company has been through 3 or 4 SEO overly aggressive SEO consultants, the situation may warrant some bad news about all the reciprocal links, third rate directory listings and keyword stuffed doorway pages that need to be cleaned up or dealt with before a reinclusion request can be filed.

The thing is, many of the companies that think they need SEO are in dire need of other process improvements first, such as a well defined conversion process, tracking and analytics. Sending a ton of qualified traffic to a site through relevant visibility on the major search engines, news search, blog search, social media and high profile links isn’t going to do you much good if there’s no accountability between the marketing and sales departments.

Many companies think they’re getting results from their online marketing, but do they REALLY know? In many cases, they don’t and need to spend some time on process and interdepartmental communication right along with their search marketing.

Search engines aren’t the only source of quality traffic either. The art and science of optimization can be extended to any document or file that can get crawled, indexed and ranked. Add to that the idea of social media and the effects of personalized search and explaining the variety of ways to optimize can become information overload.

The moniker, “search engine optimization” is a bit of a misnomer, since you’re not optimizing seach engines, you’re optimizing FOR search engines. SEO is fundamentally a set of methodologies that make it easier for search engines to find, include, categorize and rank your web content. That’s the starting point.

Because so many companies are in dire need of improvements with other matters related to marketing and business processes, many search marketing agencies that specialize in SEO provide a lot more than just keywords and links. That means the definition of what SEO “is”, means more as well.

So rather than spending a lot of time explaining algorithms, ranking and conversion analysis to someone who is very new to the idea of SEO, another explanation might have more to do with business marketing optimization. Or as an upcoming article I’m writing is titled, “Optimize Your Business for Search”.

This is a holistic approach to optimization that can affect a company from branding and communication to public relations, direct marketing and online marketing. For example, something as fundamental as including keyword research into corporate wide messaging can create many opportunities for search visibility as part of an ongoing process rather than individual “optimization” events.

How do you explain search engine optimization to newbies? Have you found clever analogies or metaphors?

Recruitment Tools

Tools are one of those things that job-seekers are increasingly frustrated by. I am the former owner of a recruiting website (actually I still own the domain name, www.GetWork.com but the company doesn’t exist anymore) so I have been exposed to hundreds of different recruiting tools. I am now a job-seeker and I have made a point of keeping notes on the recruitment tools that are easy and intuitive for applicants and those that are brutal and time-consuming.

Here, in my opinion, are the main issues that we applicants face:

1) Tools that ask for a Word version of a resume and then require one to fill out a long, cumbersome web form that includes everything already detailed in the Word resume. Applicants go to a lot of trouble to make résumés look nice and spend countless hours trying to make them stand out. I ask you; what is the point of having a tool that sorts, filters and qualifies applicants if good people are so frustrated by the redundancy and poor design of application tools that they quit half way through the process. Our time is valuable and filling out endless web forms with basic info is patently unnecessary. A tool that asks, "Do you fill these requirements?" then lists them, would be much easier. The only thing worse than that scenario is using a tool that parses info taken from your formatted résumé and places it into web forms incorrectly. This results in great candidates spending even more time correcting all of the mistakes that the form now contains and inevitably leads to a sloppy looking application.

2) I would guess that most HR people have never actually gone through the process of applying for a job using the online tools available to the public. Also, a great QA step would be to have 10 people who already work for the company, and preferably are managers that hire people, gather in a conference room with their laptops, go through the application process as if they were outside applicants, then write detailed notes about what they think of the efficiency of the process. Then compare and contrast this to ten people who have never worked for the company going through the same process. Especially take into account how long it takes to apply and what questions are asked that each group feel are absolutely necessary.

3) Almost all recruiting tools miss the mark when they do not enable one to ask pertinent questions about a position or contact someone to find out important details. In fact, I think the problem with all of these tools is that they have taken the human element out of the recruitment equation. For instance, if a position says it "requires" an MBA (as most of the jobs that I am interested in, and qualified for, do) I might want to ask if a M.A. in a similar discipline acceptable, or am I wasting my time even applying. I have a an advanced degree in organizational leadership, along with 12 years in marketing and strategic development, but if a company insists on limiting their applicant pool to those with a specific business degree, I would like to know if the degree that I have might be considered an equivalent or if I will DQ’d by the software that will see my résumé before any person does. The bottom line is that I only want to apply for jobs that I am qualified for so I do not look like I am just applying for every job posted on the site, but in many cases a tool might not recognize that I am qualified for a specific job due to fields which are too narrowly defined.

4) Many tools default to questions that are a little bit offensive and not pertinent to the recruitment process. A GREAT example is asking for specific salary details of past jobs. I completely understand the thought process behind this; figuring out whether someone who had a "director" level job title actually had a director level job. The problem is that some folks who choose to work at smaller companies might wear many hats and have titles and corresponding salaries, like Analyst or Manager, but may actually be doing Director or VP level jobs which would easily qualify them for that level position at a larger company. We are told that we should do what we love, but we are nearly forced into chasing dollars and titles by non-intuitive, "tools" that cannot take into account nuance, description and reason.

I think the best recruiting tool in use today is the telephone. Spend five minutes on the phone with just about anyone and you can tell whether he/she will fit your company's culture and if they are smart enough to do the job well. The details of the position might require a more thorough evaluation of their experience, skills and abilities, but for those applicants who might be on the bubble, based on their resume, talking to them can quickly provide the information needed to decide what the applicant’s future value to your recruitment efforts will be.

Finally, let me say that if companies did a better job of telling applicants exactly what they want to see on résumés submitted to them, they would likely get a much higher quality applicant pool. If there is a way to better sell myself to a company, without wasting their time with extraneous information, I would absolutely tailor my resume’ to their specific parameters. In the absence of this guidance, they get what I already have done and in some cases I feel like they miss important information and I miss out on jobs that are perfect for me.