Blog, Interrupted: Tales from Inside Pharma Facilities

Feb. 23, 2007
I've been conducting a little test this week, which has confirmed what I should have known all along: that frequency of postings is directly proportional to traffic.  But if a blog shouldn't be an unbridled  ego trip (I won't name names), it shouldn't be a news feed (or video feed), either.     In the absence of sophisticated site metric tools and the like, I'm looking forward to the results of John Mack's Blogosphere survey.  Nobody outside of the small pharma blogging world may care, but it will give us insights into what our audience wants. There are many wonderful blogs out there, with different models, and the survey introduced me to new ones.  But none of the pharma blogs so far has taken the model that has been used so successfully, and devastatingly, in the legal and the stock trading professions:  to have someone from inside the industry write about what he or she sees every day and to discuss typical problems...in an effort to clear the air and perhaps get folks to think about how things could be improved. Two years ago, I'd started a blog that aimed to do just this. We recruited someone from a major pharma company to write anonymously about issues.  Some of you may even be able to figure out his identity. I'd wanted the entries to be a bit sarcastic but biting and very much to the point.  What emerged was way too "sincere" in tone, and sometimes a bit preachy.  It deserved to fail, yet it still contained the germ of something interesting.  (One of our esteemed competitors then took the whole idea into print and now runs it as a successful column. No names mentioned, but you know who you are. -:>) But what killed it, in the long run, was lack of input from the pharma community.  In the hopes of persuading some of you to open up, I'm including a link to the "ghost blog," and posting five or six of the old entries individually today. Any anonymous 'insiders' available to write in? You'll find all of the old "Sound Off" entries here. AMS
I've been conducting a little test this week, which has confirmed what I should have known all along: that frequency of postings is directly proportional to traffic.  But if a blog shouldn't be an unbridled  ego trip (I won't name names), it shouldn't be a news feed (or video feed), either.     In the absence of sophisticated site metric tools and the like, I'm looking forward to the results of John Mack's Blogosphere survey.  Nobody outside of the small pharma blogging world may care, but it will give us insights into what our audience wants. There are many wonderful blogs out there, with different models, and the survey introduced me to new ones.  But none of the pharma blogs so far has taken the model that has been used so successfully, and devastatingly, in the legal and the stock trading professions:  to have someone from inside the industry write about what he or she sees every day and to discuss typical problems...in an effort to clear the air and perhaps get folks to think about how things could be improved. Two years ago, I'd started a blog that aimed to do just this. We recruited someone from a major pharma company to write anonymously about issues.  Some of you may even be able to figure out his identity. I'd wanted the entries to be a bit sarcastic but biting and very much to the point.  What emerged was way too "sincere" in tone, and sometimes a bit preachy.  It deserved to fail, yet it still contained the germ of something interesting.  (One of our esteemed competitors then took the whole idea into print and now runs it as a successful column. No names mentioned, but you know who you are. -:>) But what killed it, in the long run, was lack of input from the pharma community.  In the hopes of persuading some of you to open up, I'm including a link to the "ghost blog," and posting five or six of the old entries individually today. Any anonymous 'insiders' available to write in? You'll find all of the old "Sound Off" entries here. AMS
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