Centocor launched itself into the blogosphere with the debut
of its corporate blog at cnto411.com.
Melissa Katz, a Centoco spokeswoman, told MM&M the
corporate blog aims to serve as a forum for discussion on issues relevant to
the industry and not a platform for sounding off on Centocor products.
“I plan on posting to the blog as often as I can on issues
that are relevant, hopefully a couple of times a week,” Katz said.
Michael Parks, VP of corporate comms and executive producer
of Centocor's unbranded feature length film Innerstate, will serve in the role
the blog's guest author.
“Around the time of Innerstate's debut about a year ago, we
realized that we weren't paying enough attention to the blogosphere,” Katz
said. “Since then we have been working with those bloggers to see how we can
better communicate with them.”
Centocor joins its parent company Johnson & Johnson,
which began corporate blogging with jnjbtw.com last summer.
Johnson & Johnson's blog, edited by spokesman Marc
Monseau, has taken a similar tack as a forum for discussion of non-product specific,
industry-related issues.
On the product blogging front, GlaxoSmithKline's Alli team
keeps a blog on the OTC weight loss treatment (alliconnect.com).
Novartis briefly experimented with an oncology blog,
melanomaperspectives.com, aimed at physicians and written by KOLs, toward the
end of 2007, but quickly pulled it.