How to Market Your Business on Social Media – 3 Awesome Case Studies
When it comes to the issue of social media marketing, businesses are beyond asking, Should we? The question is now, How do we? Plenty of experts have tried to answer this question with a social media marketing guide.
While these have their place, there’s plenty you can learn
just by looking at what other people have done. Facebook, Twitter, and
Instagram have all helped catapult certain businesses in ways that
traditional marketing could not; savvy business owners have been able to
leverage these platforms to connect more authentically with their
customers, creating loyal followings.
To see what this looks like
in action, let’s look at success stories from each of the Big Three
social platforms: Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
1. Facebook Success: Mark Dawson, Author
As far as small businesses
go, “Self-Published Fiction Author” has to be the smallest. Mark Dawson
handles every aspect of his business, from writing the novels he sells,
to publishing the novels he sells, to marketing the novels he sells,
to—of course—selling the novels he sells. And he sells a lot of them.
But before Dawson was a wildly successful writer, he was…well, a
successful writer.
Mark Dawson, and his laundry. This is not your average head shot.
By that I mean that Dawson
had gone the traditional fiction writer’s route to success, landing a
book deal, getting a decent advance, and then watching two of his
creations get published and stocked on the shelves of UK bookstores. For
many writers, just getting published can feel like you’ve made it—and
that’s how Dawson felt. Until, that is, no one bought his books. The
frustrating thing for him was, he could hardly fault the book-buying
public for ignoring him. His publishers did nothing to market or promote
the books, and Dawson walked away from writing feeling let down, as
though his books weren’t even given the chance to fail on their own. It
wasn’t until Amazon introduced the Kindle Direct Publishing platform
that he decided to give his first love another go.
This time, he could handle
the marketing and promotion all on his own, and developed and tweaked
his own system with the release of each new work. His first
self-published book, 2012’s The Black Mile, didn’t
do much sales-wise, but the experience taught him he needed to market
himself better. That’s when Dawson began actively promoting himself
using the tools in his budget—email and social media. Three years later,
he was earning $450,000 a year and celebrating his 1,000,000th download
from Amazon.
How’d he do it?
Hook them in with a freebie
First things first, he wrote a lot of books. Like, a lot of
books, and in a very short time. His John Milton series of
action-thriller novels is about to see its 10th release; the Beatrix
Rose series stands at six. These make up the bulk of the 20 works Dawson
has written and published Since 2014. His prolific output helped his
marketing greatly.
With Facebook and
MailChimp, Dawson runs very tactical promotional campaigns. Using
Facebook for outreach—through paid ads and organic posts on his
Page—he’d offer the first two installments of his John Milton series,
free, to anyone who subscribed to his newsletter. His books are the kind
of fast-paced action-thriller novels that avid readers can soak up in a
day at the beach. But they are also character driven, the kinds of
characters who reveal themselves over the course of several novels; by
giving away the beginning of the series, Dawson bet that people would
pay for the rest. Which is exactly what happened.
In January 2014, as Dawson
began to understand what he needed to do, his Facebook Page had 1,000
followers. He started writing at a furious pace, and would complete 6
novels and 2 novellas by the end of the year. He’d also amass an
additional 14,000 followers while selling 10,000 books a month.
The first of six rows of novels listed on Dawson’s website.
Target people who like your competitors
Much has been made over the way Dawson began using Facebook Ads in highly targeted ways. In an interview that appears on the Reedsy blog, Dawson explained how he was able to convert so many people who’d never heard of him:
My books are often compared in their genre to Lee Child, so one of the things that I do on Facebook is serve ads just to people who know or like Lee Child — fans of his fan page, fans of the Jack Reacher fan page, etc.
Notice how he didn’t just
go generic, and start serving ads out to people who had Goodreads
accounts, or list “reading” as a Like. He definitely would have reached
more people that way—millions more, probably—but with no guarantee of
being relevant to the user. Getting this precise in his targeting also
allowed for a more cohesive user experience. The ad itself was written
to appeal to those Jack Reacher fans he targeted, and those who clicked
through to sign up for the email list were presented with a landing page
optimised to convert that specific audience. Dawson has other, no less
precise, ways of targeting users to serve ads with direct links to buy
his books. But he didn’t start doing any of this until 2015, after he’d already exploded into a bona fide success.
In 2014, he simply
maintained an active and personal presence on Facebook. His posts are
about a 50/50 mix of promotion and interaction. The promotional posts
are clearly still working—he went from 22,106 followers to 22,332
followers in the 30 or so minutes I spent poking around his Facebook
page.
Tellingly, though, it’s the
non-promotional posts that get the most engagement. He’ll often post
inspirational or witty quotes from other authors that can be hit or miss
with the audience. But when Dawson shows up and is just being himself,
the page gets active.
Use Personality to Breed Loyalty
The most popular post he’s made in the last few weeks was a Facebook Live video tour of his new office—essentially an empty room with white walls, a desk, and a computer in the corner. 117 different comments and reactions were logged in the 5 minutes his video lasted.If you send a private message to him, you’ll get some kind of response. According to FB, he “typically replies within an hour.”
Ask him for a question about his craft, and he’ll answer.
Tell him you love his books, and he will always say thank you.
There seems to be literally
nothing that this man won’t respond to, and that breeds loyalty in his
fan base. That’s important: you may have noticed his rate of acquiring
new followers has slowed considerably since his breakout year. He jumped
from 1K to 15K during 2014, but has only increased that number by 6K in
the two years since. His sales haven’t slowed down, though; with three
new books out this year and another due by Christmas, he’s still selling
hundreds of books per day on the Kindle store.
What Any Business Can Learn From All This
Giveaways Give You an Edge
Mark Dawson, as a
financially successful self-published author, occupies a tiny niche of
an extreme subset of a very small percentage of retail operations in the
world. His business might be very specific, but his social media
marketing tactics aren’t. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that
self-published authors are the least likely to benefit from the wisdom
of his experiences, simply because most authors don’t have the
superhuman capacity to write full-length books at the pace Mark Dawson
does. Giving your book away for free isn’t exactly a customer magnet
when you’ve only written one or two of them.
In retail or hospitality,
though: you’ve got plenty of that item you’re selling. If you’ve got a
bookstore, giving away books is done knowing you’ve got another thousand
or more different titles to choose from. If you own a coffee shop, you
can’t run out of your product, by definition. Handing out free coffee in
exchange for signing on to a newsletter or liking a Facebook Page isn’t
just doable for you: it’s advisable.
Target Ads at Your Competitor’s Customers
Likewise for Dawson’s
Facebook Ad tactic of targeting users who like Jack Reacher novels, aka
his competitor’s customers. If you’re a small business, there’s no shame
in finding people who patronise the competition. A family owned coffee
shop should absolutely be targeting their ads at people who like
Starbucks. There’s nothing wrong with saying, “You like coffee? We make
it, too!” Note, too, that when Dawson pays for ads, he does so with very
clear goals. In his interview with Reedsy, he said this explicitly,
“There are two things I use Facebook ads for: growing my mailing list
and driving direct sales.” Many people make the mistake of spending on
Facebook ads without a specific purpose beyond “raising awareness.”
That’s an easily achievable goal—people will see your ad and become
aware—but nobody ever paid the bills with awareness (except Bono).
2. Instagram Success: Wedding Chicks
Weddings are big business in the United States, with the average couple spending $26,645 on their special day. That figure goes way up when adjusted for Kardashians. At $51 billion a year,
it’s a very lucrative industry, which is to say that it’s also super
competitive. That’s a lesson learned the hard way by the two owners of
Wedding Chicks, photographer Amy Zawacki and graphic designer Jocelyn
Canrinus. They each worked for years in the industry—Zawacki behind the
lens at weddings while Canrinus designed invitations in advance of them.
Eventually, all the long hours, emotional customers, and stiff
competition had the two friends conspiring for ways to take their
combined talents and knowledge in new directions.
The Wedding Chicks: Amy Zawacki, left, and Jocelyn Canrinus, not left.
In 2008, they started Wedding Chicks,
a website that is essentially a hub for all things wedding and
wedding-planning related. Their blog is a collection of posts designed
to inspire, advise, and educate about the kinds of things people just
don’t think about every day: what to look for in a dress; great
locations for an engagement photo shoot; proposal stories; decoration
ideas; the occasional personal essay
meditating on the female experience. Wedding Chicks is also a
marketplace of sorts. It’s got its own shop, offering custom printed
apparel, tote bags, napkins, and other items (for party favors and the
like). The website also boasts a large network of vendors, from
photographers to caterers to—you get the idea. The company’s grown
steadily since its inception, and social media has definitely played a
role.
They’d been on Facebook
almost since the beginning and in that time have amassed over 2 million
followers. That’s an impressive number, but it’s their Instagram account
where all the action is happening. That account’s been live since 2012,
but didn’t do much with it at first. “We typically hop on any new
social platforms to secure our name,” Zawacki said. They didn’t start
using Instagram in earnest until 2014, and the account has exploded
since then—which makes a lot of sense considering their visual
backgrounds. Their current follower account is nearly 669,000 and
climbing—not even half of what they have on Facebook—but the audience
engagement on IG is several orders of magnitude larger. The last 5
Facebook posts, as I write this, received a total of 37 likes between
them. The last 5 on Instagram? 12,356.
How’d they do it?
Instagram being Instagram, Zawacki and Canrinus make sure that their feed is always visually appealing and relevant to what their followers want. They source images from any of the scores of wedding and lifestyle photographers who populate the platform, all of whom are happy to show their work, with a photo credit, to a much larger audience. The visual appeal doesn’t stop at the individual photo, though. Looking at the Wedding Chicks’ feed in the standard three-across thumbnail arrangement is to understand that there is a unifying aesthetic to all the images. It’s a cohesive gallery of photographs, one that has the look of a singular photo album. You half expect a pair of giddy newlyweds to narrate each image at you while their parents serve you appetisers.
Leveraging Other Tools
A satisfying aesthetic is only half the battle, though.
Within that singular look has to be content that followers want to see.
Zawacki and Canrinus make sure of this by using Have2Have It,
a tool designed to help people sell items on Instagram. H2HI works by
making use of the one place in an Instagram profile that has a clickable
link: the bio. That link takes users to a webpage that lists all the
items that are for sale within an IG feed. Click on the picture you saw
in the feed, and it takes you to a website where you can buy it. Every
click is tracked for use with advanced analytics and reporting. But the
Wedding Chicks are using this tool differently: instead of selling
things on Have2Have It, they’ve used their curated page to function as a
mirror of their Instagram feed. Every post on Instagram links to a post
on their blog, and Have2Have It is the vehicle by which they get their
followers from point A to point B. Doing this not only drives website
traffic, but provides them usable data about which types of posts get
the biggest response, which sputter and die, and much more. They’re
constantly looking at this data to identify ways to stay relevant to
their audience—knowing what they have liked makes it easier to know what
they will.
Capitalizing on #Hashtags
To attract new followers,
they rely mainly on hashtags. Each post might contain a dozen or more of
them, and they consistently research what’s trending to see if there
are any slightly off-brand ones that might work. For example, their
recent post showing an autumn themed place setting—complete with fancy
china and silverware, stemmed glassware, and small, colorful gourds as
centerpieces. In addition to the usual suspects for wedding hashtags,
they added in #thanksgiving, #thanksgivingdecor, and #holidaydecor.
Between staying on top of hashtag trends and leveraging their various
social media presences, the Chicks haven’t really seen a need to
advertise. Zawacki said, “We very rarely pay for ads, mainly because we
have little time to research what would best work for us.”
Engaging with Giveaways
Finally, no social media
success story would be complete without free stuff. When I’d gone to
check their feed to see if they did that sort of thing, i didn’t have to
scroll back more than a day: an image of tote bags from the Wedding
Chicks shop, with the words “Eat Drink and Be Married” printed on them.
Participation in the contest meant going to their website, picking out a
favorite design, and then leaving a comment as to which one you picked.
Three random entries would be picked to win. I almost entered myself
just to win those tote bags and put commas on them, because these are
the things that keep me up at night. But, one day and 2,625 likes later,
there were 367 entries and my chances looked slim. Such is the power of
free stuff.
What Any Business Can Learn From This
Give the People What They Want
The Free Stuff Strategy is mostly self-expanatory, though Zawacki cautioned that giveaways are only successful “IF you are promoting something your audience wants/likes.” Again, it’s a matter of relevance. The freebies you hand out, like the posts you’ll making to your account, need to be something of interest to your audience. That might seem self-evident, but you won’t know exactly what interests them till you get to know their preferences. If you’re just starting out on Instagram with next to nothing on your feed, you’ll be doing a lot of guesswork for the near future. If you’re already established with a sizable feed, then there’s data sitting there, waiting for you to mine it. In either case, you should be using some kind of analytics engine.Use Analytics Software To Uncover What Works
That can be part of a suite of social media management tools—like Have2Have It, Hootsuite or Agora Pulse
—which can help with scheduling curating posts, monitoring mentions of
you, tracking followers and likes and hashtag use, all in addition to
having reporting functions to help you make sense of it all. If you’re
on a budget, there’s a free tool over at Websta.Me
that can provide basic insights, like what times and days your posts do
best at, and which hashtags are behind the most engagement. This
service only shows data for the current month, but that shouldn’t be a
problem: this kind of work (analysing what’s working and what isn’t)
should be happening on a regular basis. As your audience grows, and
hashtags cycle in and out of popularity, these trends will change over
time. A big part of the Wedding Chicks’ success is their commitment to
this very important—albeit less sexy—part of social media marketing.
3. Twitter Success: Curtis Kimball, The Creme Brulee Man
The more I researched Curtis Kimball,
the more I felt that he might not be the best example in a piece on
successful social media strategies. For one thing, his success on
Twitter can’t be measured in likes and retweets. And, maybe more
importantly, Kimball didn’t actually have a strategy. He came upon
Twitter as a marketing tool by accident, and his success on the platform
wasn’t the result of any grueling market research. Kimball’s approach
to Twitter—and his business—was to create something that he would want to be a part of.
Humble beginnings.
It was with that mindset
that Kimball, in March of 2009, began selling homemade creme brulees out
of an awkward little cart that looked more like a magician’s prop than a
food concession. He’d set up at various places around San Francisco in
parks and on busy streets, without a schedule or a license to operate.
Donning a chef’s hat that appeared incongruous with the rest of his
street clothes, Kimball torched each sugary crust to order and quickly
gained a modest following of friends and neighbors. In a place like San
Francisco, creme brulee is generally the $10 dessert at the end of $100
meal—it turned out there was a big market for fancy snacks under $5
It was only three weeks
into the experiment struck up a conversation with a customer he didn’t
recognize. Somebody had tweeted out the location of the cart,
enthusiastically recommending Kimball’s custard concoctions. Everything
pretty much snowballed from there: seeing the power of Twitter as a way
to let people know where he’d be, Kimball took @cremebruleecart live on
March 21, 2009. By July of 2009, the account had 5,400 followers—not
bad for a weekend side gig. Kimball would tweet his location and
hours—sometimes a day in advance, sometimes last minute—along with the
menu of flavors for the day. By July of 2010, the Twitter account stood
at 12,000 followers and Kimball upgraded to a proper food cart and even got his operator’s license.
Over the ensuing years,
growth was explosive. Catering became a regular part of the business.
Kimball also added a full-service food truck, which roamed the streets
of San Francisco’s Castro neighborhood while the cart made its rounds in
the financial district. Then he opened a walk-up window in SoMa,
another SF neighborhood. By July of 2012, @cremebruleecart
regularly tweeted locations and menus to its more than 22,000
followers. Another cart was added. A brick-and-mortar storefront
followed in 2013. By 2015, Kimball was sitting atop a gooey and
delicious empire—the Creme Brulee Man had become big business. And that
turned out to be too much for Kimball; he closed all his doors
indefinitely and limited his brulee-ing to private catering gigs. In
May, 2016, the Creme Brulee Man announced on Facebook he was selling:
I’ve had a great run, but the truth is that I was never meant to be a businessman. At least not in that sense. I like creating and building and trying things that no one has ever done before. I like working with my hands and with a small group of weird people to build a thing.”
Turned out the crust of
sugar on top of every dessert he made wasn’t the only thing that was
burnt. While this is a loss for the community of fans he built in his
home city, it’s a win for him. He built something huge, and when it
stopped being fun it was big enough that Kimball could afford to step
back and figure out his next step.
How’d he do it?
Tell your followers things they need to know
That’s a question that
Kimball himself would not have been able to answer without the benefit
of hindsight. He started the creme brulee cart because it was something
fun to do while making some extra money, and every bit of growth he
experienced was an organic occurrence. As he explained in a 2010 interview with the New York Times:
I would love to say that I just had a really good idea and strategy, but Twitter has been pretty essential to my success.”
Loosely translated, this means, I kept tweeting things and people kept showing up. Kimball won’t be writing a social media marketing guide any time soon, but
it would be reductive to say that he succeeded out of dumb luck. That’s
because the way he used Twitter is something like a master class in
small-business marketing. He may not have had a formal strategy, but his
Twitter timeline shows a man with an instinct for drumming up
excitement around his business. The fact is that Twitter was something
of a necessity for him in starting up: operating without a license meant
it was a good idea to not show up to the same place everyday. Also,
during the cart’s early stages, Kimball was still working his job in
construction. The cart was something fun on the side and would operate
according to a schedule defined by its owner’s whims. It’s tough to
build something sustainable when people don’t know when or where to find
you. During his first year, Kimball could basically trace every sale
back to his tweeting, since there was no way apart from chance for his
regulars to track him down. Less than three months into the venture, a
tweeting pattern emerged: announcements of his whereabouts with maybe 30
minutes notice, followed by a “Sold Out” tweet a few hours later.
Incidentally, the above tweets were supposed to have
been the last night the cart was in operation for a few weeks while
Kimball went on vacation for a few weeks, which he’d only announced the
day before. He must have gotten some responses from people who couldn’t
make it that night, and who didn’t want to go three weeks without his
creme brulee. It wasn’t long after that final, pre-vacation “Sold out”
tweet that Kimball got back online.
Build a community
The “top secret mission”
became a regular, if infrequent, occurrence, though it happened enough
to help add to the excitement around the car. With only limited numbers
of people privvy to the cart’s whereabouts, Kimball created an aura of
exclusivity and belonging around his business. Again, this wasn’t
something he planned as a marketing strategy. Rather, it was a natural
way for him to create something that he was excited to be a part of. In
an interview with SF Weekly back in his early days, Kimball explained his motivations for the way he ran his business:
The reason I’m into this is it makes people happy and brightens their day. There’s a touch of excitement to it, not like having regular hours and regular locations. It’s like an event that you’re part of rather than being a once-a-week supermarket. I don’t like feeling like the help, or like a carnie. I like to feel like a member of the community.”
When you read that, it’s
easier to understand why Kimball ended up shutting it all down and
putting the business up for sale. But it also becomes easier to
understand the loyalty of his fans and customers. People who came to buy
his desserts weren’t regarded as customers when they got there. Instead
they were treated as a part of a community, like friends with a
sweet-tooth whose days Kimball could make a little a better. And that
kind of bond he felt spilled over into his non-brulee related tweets.
When he wasn’t telling you where he’d be and what flavors he had,
Kimball was tweeting nice things about other food carts and trucks, or
posting pictures of customers with a quick backstory attached. Most
notably, he kept it personal, broadcasting messages to thousands of
people like they were part of a small circle of friends:
Kimball wasn’t afraid to
get political, either, often tweeting his views and opinions on local,
national, and global issues. Of course, sharing your left-leaning
liberal views on current events with the city of San Francisco is about
as controversial as attending a bankers’ convention and declaring you
like money. But these are the kinds of things that put a relatable,
human face on the business and very much fostered a community.
What Any Business Can Learn From All This.
Kimball may not have had
much of a plan or strategy entering into things, but he also had
incredible instincts to make his Twitter account work for him. The
@cremebruleecart account succeeded for two main reasons: it had a
personality, and it fostered a sense of community (which is just a nicer
word for “exclusivity,” where a business is concerned). These are
things that go a long way on social media, especially Twitter.
Play to Your Platform’s Strengths
One of the
Twitter’s hallmarks is the way it’s rooted in the present. The character
limit on a tweet means there’s only so much information you can
include. That gives Twitter, more than any other social platform, a
feeling of immediacy and urgency about it. A tweet is a little slice of
life at a given moment presented in a user’s feed, often without
context. This focus on the Now works to a small, local business’
advantage. A large national chain can’t operate with the same kind of
agility:
Starbucks could never decide at the last minute that all their
locations (even in a single metro area) we’re going to stay open an hour
later for a members-only happy hour. And even if they could, it’d be
hard to create a sense in customers that they were in on something
special, that they were part of a small group of people enjoying the
perks of belonging to something.
Create and Nurture a Community
Any
small business can do all these things: humorously confessional tweets,
special and time-sensitive offers made only to followers, and even more
exclusive events (a la Kimball’s “top secret missions”). Tweets sent
out during your work day, maybe with behind-the-scenes pictures
featuring the staff can demonstrate a business’ humanity. And exclusive
events, like a members only happy hour in-store sale, open only to your
loyal Twitter followers—and announced at the last minute—create a
feeling of belonging and community among those who’ve chosen to follow
you. Those who go the extra step to follow you on Twitter ought to be
given special consideration, anyway. The simple fact of them having let
you into their newsfeeds is enough that you shouldn’t want to betray
that acceptance with spammy posts that annoy people.
Do as Kimball did: create a
community, the kind that you’d want to be a part of. Then participate
in that community, regarding its members as friends and allies. Be
personable and relatable; when you have to tweet about the business
proper, keep the spotlight on customers and topical subjects:
advertising 10% off everything for a day won’t be as effective as 10%
off a specific item that only Twitter followers have access to. Twitter
may allow you to reach thousands, if not millions, of users with each
tweet, but it’s those one-on-one personal connections that need to
nurtured. This is something that came naturally to the Creme Brulee Man,
and by studying his instincts any small business can act off an
established blueprint to success.
Think Like a Customer not a Marketer
So what’s the uncomplicated
answer to the question of how to market on social media? If you look at
the companies that are doing well, they’ve all got something in common:
they’re likeable. It’s not that they make or sell things that make them
likeable. It’s more that they’ve remembered the rules of engagement of
the platform. What works for a personal profile works for a business. Dave Kerpen, CEO of social media agency Likeable (really!), breaks it down this way:
If you stop thinking like a marketer and start thinking like a customer, you’ll understand that the secret to social media is being human–being the sort of person at a cocktail party who listens attentively, tells great stories, shows interest in others, and is authentic and honest.
Biologists watch speciation in a laboratory flask
November 29, 2016
"Many theories have been proposed to explain speciation, and they have been tested through analyzing the characteristics of fossils, genomes, and natural populations of plants and animals," said Justin Meyer, an assistant professor of biology at UC San Diego and the first author of a study that will be published in the December 9 issue of Science. "However, speciation has been notoriously difficult to thoroughly investigate because it happens too slowly to directly observe. Without direct evidence for speciation, some people have doubted the importance of evolution and Darwin's theory of natural selection."
Meyer's study, which also appeared last week in an early online edition of Science, began while he was a doctoral student at Michigan State University, working in the laboratory of Richard Lenski, a professor of microbial ecology there who pioneered the use of microorganisms to study the dynamics of long-term evolution.
"Even though we set out to study speciation in the lab, I was surprised it happened so fast," said Lenski, a co-author of the study. "Yet the deeper Justin dug into things—from how the viruses infected different hosts to their DNA sequences—the stronger the evidence became that we really were seeing the early stages of speciation."
"With these experiments, no one can doubt whether speciation occurs," Meyer added. "More importantly, we now have an experimental system to test many previously untestable ideas about the process."
To conduct their experiment, Meyer, Lenski and their colleagues cultured a virus—known as "bacteriophage lambda"—capable of infecting E. coli bacteria using two receptors, molecules on the outside of the cell wall that viruses use to attach themselves and then infect cells.
When the biologists supplied the virus with two types of cells that varied in their receptors, the virus evolved into two new species, one specialized on each receptor type.
"The virus we started the experiment with, the one with the nondiscriminatory appetite, went extinct. During the process of speciation, it was replaced by its more evolved descendants with a more refined palette," explained Meyer.
Why did the new viruses take over?
"The answer is as simple as the old expression, 'a jack of all trades is a master of none'," explained Meyer. "The specialized viruses were much better at infecting through their preferred receptor and blocked their 'jack of all trades' ancestor from infecting cells and reproducing. The survival of the fittest led to the emergence of two new specialized viruses."
Meyers's study was conducted over six years in two separate labs. The first experiments were performed at Michigan State, supported in part by BEACON, the National Science Foundation's Center for the Study of Evolution in Action, and the analyses were completed at UC San Diego.
Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2016-11-biologists-speciation-laboratory-flask.html#jCp
Biologists watch speciation in a laboratory flask
November 29, 2016
"Many theories have been proposed to explain speciation, and they have been tested through analyzing the characteristics of fossils, genomes, and natural populations of plants and animals," said Justin Meyer, an assistant professor of biology at UC San Diego and the first author of a study that will be published in the December 9 issue of Science. "However, speciation has been notoriously difficult to thoroughly investigate because it happens too slowly to directly observe. Without direct evidence for speciation, some people have doubted the importance of evolution and Darwin's theory of natural selection."
Meyer's study, which also appeared last week in an early online edition of Science, began while he was a doctoral student at Michigan State University, working in the laboratory of Richard Lenski, a professor of microbial ecology there who pioneered the use of microorganisms to study the dynamics of long-term evolution.
"Even though we set out to study speciation in the lab, I was surprised it happened so fast," said Lenski, a co-author of the study. "Yet the deeper Justin dug into things—from how the viruses infected different hosts to their DNA sequences—the stronger the evidence became that we really were seeing the early stages of speciation."
"With these experiments, no one can doubt whether speciation occurs," Meyer added. "More importantly, we now have an experimental system to test many previously untestable ideas about the process."
To conduct their experiment, Meyer, Lenski and their colleagues cultured a virus—known as "bacteriophage lambda"—capable of infecting E. coli bacteria using two receptors, molecules on the outside of the cell wall that viruses use to attach themselves and then infect cells.
When the biologists supplied the virus with two types of cells that varied in their receptors, the virus evolved into two new species, one specialized on each receptor type.
"The virus we started the experiment with, the one with the nondiscriminatory appetite, went extinct. During the process of speciation, it was replaced by its more evolved descendants with a more refined palette," explained Meyer.
Why did the new viruses take over?
"The answer is as simple as the old expression, 'a jack of all trades is a master of none'," explained Meyer. "The specialized viruses were much better at infecting through their preferred receptor and blocked their 'jack of all trades' ancestor from infecting cells and reproducing. The survival of the fittest led to the emergence of two new specialized viruses."
Meyers's study was conducted over six years in two separate labs. The first experiments were performed at Michigan State, supported in part by BEACON, the National Science Foundation's Center for the Study of Evolution in Action, and the analyses were completed at UC San Diego.
Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2016-11-biologists-speciation-laboratory-flask.html#jCp
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