“Ultimately, Smith would like to identify a bacterium or set of bacteria that protects children from kwashiorkor, and add it to the emergency rations handed out to starving children, or give it to them beforehand. “Maybe we can do earlier interventions — before they suffer,” she says.”
Another interesting finding teasing out the importance of gut bacteria in human health. An interesting outcome would be creating a probiotic to prevent or recover from malnutrition.
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"Taxonomy has a reputation as one of science's least glamorous fields, and experts have been sounding an alarm over declining funding and a global dearth of practitioners. With extinctions estimated to outnumber discoveries of new species and many of Earth's most diverse taxa still unaccounted for, they say the effort to identify and catalog organisms is more critical than ever before. Now some researchers are calling for taxonomists to open wide their profession's gates to amateur scientists, as the popular GalaxyZoo Web site has begun to do with citizen astronomers."
Citizen science to the rescue!
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"PepsiCo says it is the world's first bottle of a common type of plastic called PET made entirely of plant-based materials."
Until I learn more, I think this is still PET, meaning plastic, with all the "fun" of PET and recycling. All because the source is some other organic waste shouldn't mean the PET is any different.
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"Researchers at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York have developed a Rat Conscious Animal PET (RatCAP) imager, which allows a rat to wear a scanner even while it moves around."
Quite cool!
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Traditional marketing ain’t dead yet.
Old skool, that’s how we roll
I was in a meeting last month and one marketing manager’s idea of promoting a sponsor was to slap their logo all over the place. I was partially against it because he wanted to slap that logo all over my social marketing channels. But it also struck me as bizarre and I couldn’t put a finger on it as to why it did.
I wrote down at the time that in “old marketing” you slapped your logo around, made sure that you took every opportunity to get your jingle, brand elements, company name, tagline, in front of anyone who would listen or look.
Isn’t this the type of marketing we are trying to change by being more social through blogs, social networks, and the like – socializing around media and stories that emotionally connect people to a product or brand? Isn’t “new marketing” about stories, causes, experience, and action?
Prove it to me, friend
A few weeks back I was browsing the Health Care Social Media EU stream on Twitter (#hcsmeu) and found some great nuggets that were relevant to this brain wave:
@garymonk asks if the EU wants folks to be bombarded by irrelevant un-targeted krap.
In a later message in that discussion, @arbeiza is on to something when asking how we can support evidence in a social context. And @angel189 then coins a great term “social evidence based medicine” that I think has the kernel of what I am trying to get at.
As @angel189 goes on to say: “Stop Marketing. Start Socializing.”
I think the cognitive dissonance I am feeling with all the logo-slapping is that marketing is not just about being social, but about tapping into the “social evidence” that a customer should care about a product or brand.
Social Evidence
We as marketers need to find, promote, reveal, and share stories that contain evidence that can be socialized (with the best evidence coming from our customers’ social network, not us). The only way to get past the noise of all that logo-slapping is to connect with customers with evidence they can understand within a trusted social framework, a social framework that they are part of and create the stories of, a social framework that contains the sources that influence these customers in their choice of brands, causes, belief systems.
What do you think?
Closing
And I could say that this isn’t a big revelation. But while I was at the Mecca of Social Media (aka SXSW) I was appalled (disgusted, shocked, disappointed?) with the complete dominance of old style, slap-the-logos-on-the-boobs-and-any-other-surface-you-can-think-of old marketing that the very hipsters of SXSW are trying to tear down.
As one old pal said, you can spend 40MEur on some big gimmicky marketing campaign or post a great story on a blog (albeit, his influential blog) – you still get one post on Engadget.
Every day, as I reach out to our audience of patients and families, each post is carefully crafted to be relevant, cognizant of the stories readers socially share as evidence of the amazing things our hospital does. This is not how they fit in my brand story, but how I fit in their stories, their evidence of how we are part of their lives.
And when I get that right, I am theirs.
"But as SXSWi ramped down, and the cool kids filtered in for Music, the decision was simple: I'm going back next year. It's the meeting place for friends old and new, a place to get inspired, a break from the norm, underpinned by the sunshine, amazing food and generous hospitality of Austin. If you're not having fun at Southby, you're not trying hard enough."
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Very cool summary of a recent finding regarding regions of the genome that a missing in humans and Neanderthals but conserved in most mammals. "Sometimes less is more," as they say in this report.
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"In 1946, scientists started tracking thousands of British children born during one cold March week. On their 65th birthday, the study members find themselves more scientifically valuable than ever before."
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"To avoid throwing talent on the scrap heap and to boost prospects, a new type of scientific post for researchers is needed" Hm. Not so sure. Just one piece in the twisted world of research.
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