Rankle Over Rankings

It started with the PharmaGossip post "Who's hot in Pharma?", which compared the Huffington Post ranking of the "newsworthiness" of Peter Rost (Question Authority blogger) vs. his nemesis Pfizer CEO Jeff Kindler.

Insider at PharmaGossip then followed up with a similar newsworthiness comparison between Peter Rost and "John Mack" ("Who's hot in Pharma? 2"). I assume Insider was trying to compare me with Rost because what other John Mack could he know or care about?

It turns out that there are several famous "John Macks". One was a Harvard professor who was famous for psychoanalysing people who claimed to be abducted and probed by aliens. I have never been abducted, but lately I feel I'm being "probed" by fellow bloggers. One good turn deserves another, so I don't mind these jabs.

However, the most famous "John Mack" is Morgan Stanley chief executive John J. Mack. Obviously, this John Mack is in the news a lot and his rating trumps that of Peter Rost (168 points vs. 34).

Rost fired back with a few of his own ranking charts, one of which compares the rankings of various blogs in the Pharma Blogosphere (see "Wow. I guess Pfizer wouldn't like this."). He compares Question Authority, PharmaGossip, Pharmalot, and "PharmaMarketing," which I presume was meant to be "Pharma Marketing Blog" (my blog). The chart shows Question Authority way ahead of all of us! (20 for Rost, 0 for the rest of us!)

Unfortunately, Peter's chart is not accurate because he used the generic "Pharmamarketing" tag rather than my blog's brandname, which is Pharma Marketing Blog. Here is the chart with the proper tags:



Rost still beats us handily, but not by such a wide margin.

Which all goes to prove what?

Well, maybe we shouldn't be wasting our time on these cool tools, especially if we do not know how to use them properly. Also, maybe we shouldn't waste space on our official blogs with this tongue-in-cheek one-upmanship! That's why I started this blog.