I think I got it now. I think I can finally explain my job. A little bit.

I work for a consulting company, so every project is different, and many are running at any one time. We bid for government contracts by writing long and painful proposals, or RFPs. If we are lucky, and our price is right, we are granted the contract, the money, and the time to do the work.

I just finished writing my very first RFP, for a contract with the FDA. The FDA would like a company to track and assess the FDA/CDCs use of social media in spreading the news about the last huge salmonella outbreak that was eventually linked to contaminated peanuts. [Social media? Check. Food? Check. That’s pretty much my life, in a nutshell (pun intended), which is why I was called on to write the proposal.] It’s really pretty cool – the FDA is looking to embrace social media in their work of alerting consumers to product recalls and contaminations, and they want someone to take a look back, and trace forward, to figure out how effective their approach is. The FDA set out a list of requirements for the work – what they would like to see in the interim and final reports, what analysis they need, what statistics they would like to see. In addition to characterizing how social media was used in the aftermath of the peanut-salmonella outbreak, the contractor is to track the response to two future outbreaks in real time.

My very own office. I have an office! There is more stuff on the walls now, but not much.

Writing a proposal is no different than writing a grant, it turns out. You tell the funding body (in this case, the FDA) how you are going to approach the problem, lay out the experimental detail and list alternatives, should obstacles be met. You then describe how you will process the data once it’s acquired and what it will mean, in the grand scheme of things.

The glorious view out of my office window. It could be worse.

So that’s what I did. I wrote out a list of search engines, blog platforms, and other sites that we (Gryphon staff) would use to find mentions of the peanut outbreak and a future, unnamed outbreak, and how we would gauge their use. I then discussed the pros and cons of all sorts of social media sites, such as Facebook and NN (as if I was going to let this opportunity go without a plug), and how they might be best used for the FDA’s purposes. Did you know, by the way, that the FDA has a Twitter stream? They do, and it’s a little sad. It mirrors product recall announcements on their main website and not really utilizing this particular social media tool to it’s fullest potential… that, of course, also went into the proposal.

The second part of the proposal was a list of our relevant corporate experience, meaning what projects in our past give us the experience and knowledge to complete this one successfully. The third part is the money. We break down the number of hours each proposed team member will spend on the project and how much that will cost.

And my desk, already messy after just a week. It’s not any cleaner now. Nor are the shelves any fuller. I am taking my time.

And that’s about it. The proposal will get sent off tomorrow, along with my Gryphon-formatted resume (no longer a scientist’s CV, mind you, but now a consultant’s resume, legible and comprehensible to all manner of government employees). We won’t hear the FDA’s response to our bid for months. If we are lucky enough to win the contract, we won’t begin work for 6 months to a year. It’s a slow and painful process, as I said, but the payoff for a small company like Gryphon could be pretty big – some of our contracts each bring in hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in revenue.

Overall, I think it’s great that the FDA is thinking about how to use new media for their purposes. I also think that they have a ways to go before they fully grasp what social media means and all the strings that are attached to it – internet discussion forums are tempestuous mistresses, one wrong word and they will swing against you faster than you can say ‘backlash.’ I got the feeling that they didn’t quite know what they were dealing with, or what they were asking for. One of the pieces of information that the contractor is supposed to provide the FDA as part of this project is traffic statistics for sites mentioning the outbreak, and site visitor demographics. If I could get that information, I would be so rich. I wouldn’t be working, I would be eating ice cream aaall day, on a beach, with my laptop and hordes of marketing firms begging for a minute of my time. In other words, it can’t be done. And I told the FDA that, in my proposal (not in so many words). We’ll see how it goes. For now, I am happy eating ice cream on my couch. With no hordes of any kind in sight.