corner
Healthy Skepticism
Join us to help reduce harm from misleading health information.
Increase font size   Decrease font size   Print-friendly view   Print
Register Log in

Healthy Skepticism Library item: 16896

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

 

Publication type: Electronic Source

Edwards J
AstraZeneca's New Blog Is Slammed by Critics
BNet 2009 Nov 6
http://industry.bnet.com/pharma/10005180/astrazenecas-new-blog-is-slammed-by-critics/


Full text:

AstraZeneca (AZN) has launched a blog – AZ Health Connections – and the critics don’t like it. There have only been five posts on it since Oct. 16, but already PharmExec has declared that the blog “falls flat” and Eye on FDA says the posts “leave little upon which to engage.”

The criticisms are harsh given that AZ blog editor Earl Whipple has still got his training wheels on.

However, the haters do have a point when it comes to pharma company blogs generally: Firms shy away from controversy but controversy is the blogosphere’s raison d’être. unable to overcome that central contradiction, pharma blogs are often pallid affairs.

Companies also find them difficult to keep going. GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) abandoned a blog for its diet drug Alli, and Centocor (a unit of Johnson & Johnson (JNJ), walked away from its CNTO411 blog. J&J still does J&JBTW;, and GSK maintains More Than Medicine.

Here’s PharmExec’s take:

Strict corporate control by pharma companies engaged in social media essentially destroys what makes the space so dynamic: the ability for users to express controversial information and personal opinions. Therefore, it’s no wonder that company-controlled blogs struggle to develop active communities, especially as they are pitted against private blogs and message boards where users can freely express their views.

Eye on FDA was a little more detailed:

A visible indication of possible multiple authors is the fact that the postings each have different fonts and spacing, indicating that they were drafted in Word somewhere and cut and pasted into the blog without stylizing consistently first. AZ indicates it is their desire to engage with the blog, but the early postings leave little upon which to engage.

Readers beware: AZ Health Connections has a strict, and somewhat unwelcoming, comments policy.

… any comments, questions, data, ideas or know-how, shall be deemed to be non-confidential and shall become the property of AstraZeneca, without compensation to the provider of such submissions.

This blog is not the place for your questions or comments about our specific products and we will not publish comments about AstraZeneca products.

PharmaGossip already found a way around that: There’s already a sidewiki for the blog.

 

  Healthy Skepticism on RSS   Healthy Skepticism on Facebook   Healthy Skepticism on Twitter

Please
Click to Register

(read more)

then
Click to Log in
for free access to more features of this website.

Forgot your username or password?

You are invited to
apply for membership
of Healthy Skepticism,
if you support our aims.

Pay a subscription

Support our work with a donation

Buy Healthy Skepticism T Shirts


If there is something you don't like, please tell us. If you like our work, please tell others.

Email a Friend








Far too large a section of the treatment of disease is to-day controlled by the big manufacturing pharmacists, who have enslaved us in a plausible pseudo-science...
The blind faith which some men have in medicines illustrates too often the greatest of all human capacities - the capacity for self deception...
Some one will say, Is this all your science has to tell us? Is this the outcome of decades of good clinical work, of patient study of the disease, of anxious trial in such good faith of so many drugs? Give us back the childlike trust of the fathers in antimony and in the lancet rather than this cold nihilism. Not at all! Let us accept the truth, however unpleasant it may be, and with the death rate staring us in the face, let us not be deceived with vain fancies...
we need a stern, iconoclastic spirit which leads, not to nihilism, but to an active skepticism - not the passive skepticism, born of despair, but the active skepticism born of a knowledge that recognizes its limitations and knows full well that only in this attitude of mind can true progress be made.
- William Osler 1909