New Media Tricks Used by Pharma Marketers

Gaming Web 2.0 Sites, Bad Google Adwords, Wiki Edits, Phony Meta Tags, and Other Ways to Get Around the Rules in Online Marketing.

• Guest: Jeffrey Light, Chairman, Patients not Patents, Inc.
• Live Podcast Date: Thursday, September 6, 2007, 2 PM Eastern US time
• Listen Live (or to the audio archive after the show) via the Pharma Marketing Talk Channel page.
  

Web 2.0, with its user-generated content (eg. wikipedia), blogs, and social networks, is the New WILD WILD West of the Internet!

Marketing Banditos are out there taking advantage of the system, editing content, making comments to blogs disguised as common consumers, designing Google Adwords that flaunt FDA regulations, etc. (see "Web 2.0: The New WILD, WILD WEST of the Internet!").

Self-regulation does not seem to be working. The FDA has its head buried in the digital sand. PhRMA is quiet on guidelines for Internet marketing by drug companies.

We need a new sheriff in Web 2.0 town!

Patients not Patents, Inc. founder and Executive Director, Jeffrey Light, may be just what honest folk are looking for (and maybe the last person the banditos want to see in town).

I will be having a conversation with Mr. Light on a Pharma Marketing Talk podcast, scheduled for Thursday, September 6, 2007, at 2 PM Eastern time. For more information about listening live via the Web or listening to the audio archive after the show, click here.

To Blog or To Clog, That is THE Question

Recently, I've hit a blogging dry spell and haven't been posting as often as I would like. It's not that I am on vacation like Ed Silverman (Pharmalot) who hasn't posted anything since last Friday.

It's just very slow this time of year. There are not that many news stories and not many people at work reading blogs when they should be working. So, the effort hardly seems worth it!

Many bloggers post at least once per day and more frequently, even during the last week of summer and even if they have nothing to say!

Other bloggers prefer to post only when they have something to say. At least that's what Scot Donaton, Publisher of AdAdge would like to see.

What I don't get is why bloggers seem so hell-bent on establishing a clear set of rules around what does and does not constitute acceptable blogging practices. One of those being the idea that you need to update your blog at least once a day, preferably more.

Says who? Posting for the sake of posting is absurd. I read many blogs, and too often the daily update boils down to something like, "Had a cup of coffee this morning, and it was good," or, "Did you see that piece on the 'Today' show? What was that about?" or "Hey, I've been asked to keynote such and such conference; come see me there and tell all your friends, and by the way I wrote a book and you should buy it." I'm exaggerating, but not by much.

There's a lot of sharp, intelligent insightful commentary on blogs that offer a unique perspective. But the pressure to update them constantly (or face disapproving tsk-tsks) means there's also a lot of meaningless crap and babble, not to mention endless, empty interpretations of news stories that have already received saturation coverage elsewhere.

David Langan, a commenter from NYC, had this to say about that:

Blogs have taught me that my mother was quite right about people who talk all the time... they almost always have nothing important to say. I'm sooo tired of blogs and self-important bloggers. Kudos to you, and long live the clog. Hopefully you're on the front edge of a welcome trend.

Hmmm...sounds familiar, doesn't it?

Read Scot's entire rant here ("Welcome to My Clog").

Simply Irresistible: Abbott Tampering with Wikipedia Entries

According to Patients Not Patents, a group that "challenges the validity of medical patents before the United States Patent and Trademark Office," Abbott Laboratories is a serial Wikipedia tamperer.

Here's the press release:

Newly available data show that employees of Abbott Laboratories have been altering entries to Wikipedia, the popular online encyclopedia, to eliminate information questioning the safety of its top-selling drugs.

In July of 2007, a computer at Abbott Laboratories’ Chicago office was used to delete a reference to a Mayo Clinic study that revealed that patients taking the arthritis drug Humira faced triple the risk of developing certain kinds of cancers and twice the risk of developing serious infections. The study was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 2006.

The same computer was used to remove articles describing public interest groups' attempt to have Abbott's weight-loss drug Meridia banned after the drug was found to increase the risk of heart attack and stroke in some patients.

The site's editors restored the deleted information, but Abbott's activities illustrate drug companies’ eagerness to suppress safety concerns, said Jeffrey Light, Executive Director of the Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group Patients not Patents. "The argument that drug companies can be trusted to provide adequate safety information on their own products has been used by the pharmaceutical industry to fight against government regulation of consumer advertising. Clearly such trust is misplaced. As Abbott’s actions have demonstrated, drug companies will attempt to hide unfavorable safety information when they think nobody is watching."

The changes are part of over one thousand edits made from computers at Abbott's offices. The data was obtained from WikiScanner, an independent site that allows users to look up anonymous changes to Wikipedia articles.

According to CL Psych Blog, Wiki Scanner is "simply irresistible" and more people should use it to discover who's gaming the system (see "Amateur Sleuthing"):

"Pharmalot let us know that AstraZeneca had changed the Wikipedia entry for Seroquel (story via the Times of London). Read more at Wired and Forbes. But, why wait around for a journalist to break the story when you can do it yourself? The Wiki Scanner site is a wonderful tool for amateur sleuths such as myself. Wanna see which companies made changes to Wikipedia entries? Here's just one example: Edelman PR made a change to the Wikipedia for Celecoxib (Celebrex) and for Viagra."

Yet Another "Unscientific Survey"?

My friends Fard Johnmar of HealthcareVOX and Envision Solutions and Dmitriy of Trusted.MD are at it again!

They are again hosting a "global healthcare blogger survey," the first one of which was done last year (see "Taking The Pulse Of The Healthcare Blogosphere").

Needless to say, this is a very "unscientific" survey, just like the "First Ever Pharma Blogosphere Reader Survey" (download summary here).

Of course, critics of these kinds of surveys always point to the fact that they are "unscientific" and hint that the surveyors are trying to pass them off as scientific. Never mind that we surveyors never made that claim and, in fact, pointed out that our surveys are NOT "scientific" from a statistical significance point of view. See, for example, the video of an interview I did with Fard about the Pharma Blogosphere Survey (access it here).

If there's one thing bloggers in this pace have in common, it's our belief in science and the scientific method. Science, after all, is the foundation of the pharmaceutical industry that we all love to hate. Maybe we feel that science should serve the public good rather than serve the investment community. But as Mr. Merck once said, "We try never to forget that medicine is for the people. Not for the profits. The profits follow, and if we have remembered that, they have never failed to appear."

But I digress!

I believe in science and I have the degrees to prove it: BS (Chem), MS and MPhil (Biochem). But I also believe that you can learn a lot by using non-scientific methodology. Market researchers do this all the time with surveys and focus groups.

To require scientific rigor in every thing we do is unrealistic and not necessary. It would take too long and cost too much. Sometimes, we just need some quick and easy estimates so that we can make decisions.

Now, I wouldn't say that drug companies should bypass the scientific method when developing new drugs. That would be criminal -- drugs can kill!

So, when Fard and Dmitriy cite the following benefits of their survey, I concur:

"The first benefit of participation is increased knowledge. You will help your fellow bloggers better understand who is blogging about healthcare and why they are doing it. More knowledge will benefit everyone who cares about the healthcare blogosphere."

NOTE: F&D claim that the survey will allow them to make "valid conclusions about the size and shape of this growing part of the global blogging community." I note that they stop short of saying "scientifically valid."

If you are a healthcare blogger who devotes at least 30% of your blogging time to healthcare, you are invited to take the survey:

Click logo to be directed to the survey