By Staff Writer – Boonsri Dickinson (@boonspoon)

CEOs of medical start-up companies, investors, writers, and lawyers attended a networking event at Merrill Lynch tonight. The room was packed and was full of energy during the happy hour session.

John R. Lieberman CPA/PFS at Perelson Weiner LLP and Wendy Altman Brown, assistant vice president at Merrill Lynch, co-hosted the Medical Technology Startups Networking Event. I have watched this event grow over the past year. High-level investors and industry executives are becoming regulars. One lawyer was excited to tell me that he remembered me because I am a writer.

After the business cards are quickly exchanged during the happy hour, most people stay to hear a guest speaker and three medical tech executives discuss their companies.

Tonight’s guest speaker, Sandra Holtzman at Holtzman Communications, talked about customer focused marketing. To illustrate her point, she described zit popping in detail. Stiefel Laboratories wanted to ask a customer focus group about their acne fighting gel, so they could design a website that was catered to their tastes before they officially launched the zit product.

In the focus group, the teenagers were asked what they wanted the website to look like. One teenager said he wanted to see two fingers popping a pimple.

Ewwwwwww.

That was a little much for the executives, so the company designed the page so that zits would pop, when the teens scrolled their mouse over the zits.

The acne gel, Duac Gel, sold like crazy. It was Stiefel Laboratories’ most successful launch, says Holtzman. GlaxoSmithKline ended up buying Stiefel for $2.9 billion last year.

Thanks to SEO magic, companies can create websites that have a lot more influence than buying an ad in a magazine would. So, start-ups need to brand themselves. “It’s not what you say, it’s what they take away,” says Holtzman.