Last night’s Letterman or 60 Minutes used to be a staple ofdinner party patter. These days, it’s just as likely to be: “Hey, did you seethat thing on Boing Boing today?”
Blogs have entered the nation’s media diet in a big way.They’re written and read by millions. The big ones are closely tracked byreporters (the dreaded “MSM”—mainstream media—in blogger argot) and have thusbecome an often vital link in the media food chain. Directly or indirectly,many Americans are now getting news and views on health topics from theseunmoderated and often anarchic fronts, where passion frequently stands in forexpertise and misinformation can abound unchecked. But as a gauge of popularsentiment, they can’t be beat.
“They can act as an early-warning mechanism,” says formerFDA PR head Peter Pitts, now an SVP at MS&L and author of Drugwonks.com.“They give you a sign as to what people are thinking out there. Ignoring the‘blogosphere’ is ignoring reality.”
Sneezers and leaders
According to search engine Technorati.com, which was, atthis writing, tracking 36 million blogs, there are more than 75,000 new blogscreated every day. The vast majority of these will be seldom, if ever, updatedand will never draw a regular audience you can’t count on one hand. But anelite few boast a higher average daily readership than some mid-marketnewspapers. Right-libertarian blog Instapundit gets an average 115,459 daily visits, while a left-wingcounterpart, blog/community hybrid Daily Kos, gets 465,525 visits. Gizmodo, apopular gadget blog, gets 335,777, and Manhattan media gossip Gawker pulls in234,538. (Blogs are also a model of transparency when it comes to basicreadership data, as most use publicly viewable trackers like Sitemeter.)
While most blogs are highly personal—essentially onlinejournals—the mega-blogs, for the most part, are highly specialized, focusing onpolitics or consumer technology or industry gossip. Forget the stereotype ofthe pajama-clad geek pecking furtively at a Commodore 64 in his mother’sbasement, says Steve Rubel, an SVP at Edelman specializing in blogs and aprominent blogger in his own right (micropersuasion.com). “These are the people[author] Seth Godin calls ‘Sneezers,’” says Rubel. “They tell people what tobuy. They influence those around them, and they go out and influence others.”
Their readers, too, are highly motivated and opinionatedinformation seekers; by nature they’re influencers and often bloggersthemselves, linking to other sites and driving traffic up and down the pyramid.As a result, even blogs with relatively small readership can have a bigcumulative impact. “You can build a deep level of engagement with 20 peoplethrough a blog that you never could through TV advertising,” says Edelman’sRubel. “The blogosphere makes people with thoughts thought leaders,” saysPitts. “Is a blog more powerful if it reaches 500 people, or if it reaches 50people who together reach 500? It would be nice to know that the pope read myblog, but I’d be just as happy to know that 500 priests read it.”
Moreover, insider policy blogs like Pitts’ are closelyfollowed by reporters and FDA officials. Pharma Marketing News editor JohnMack, whose Pharma Marketing Blog (pharmamkting.blogspot.com) draws around 133visitors a day, has gotten calls from The Wall Street Journal, The SeattleTimes and The Delaware Sentinel about his posts on ED drugs and other topics.“It’s typically beat reporters from local papers,” says Mack. But the nationaltitles are reading, too.
That makes monitoring essential, though with so many blogsout there, which are worth watching? That’s a question vexing manypharmaceutical communicators.
Weighing blogging
“There’s an awful lot of discussion going on online,” saysGlaxoSmithKline’s Mike Pucci. “How do we value that discussion? I spend my lifeon the road speaking and putting a face on the company. I don’t have a lot oftime to spend monitoring Web sites.”
Sitemeter can tell you how many visitors a blog is getting,but it can’t tell you much about those visitors. (A Sitemeter reading istypically accessible through an icon at the bottom of a subscribing site’s homepage.) A good measure of the influence a blog has is its relationship to otherblogs—how many other bloggers are feeding traffic to it through blogrolls orlinks to posts? Technorati can tell you how many inbound and outbound links asite has. Better yet, Technorati lets you search the blogosphere by keyword toget an idea of how much play a topic is getting. Search “reimportation” andyou’ll find several recent posts by Peter Rost, the former Genotropin marketerwho emerged as a would-be whistle-blower and industry critic before beingdismissed from his job at Pfizer last year. Rost now blogs atHuffingtonPost.com, the celebrity blog of the wealthy politico AriannaHuffington. The site gets 1.5 million unique visitors a month, Rost says, andsome of his posts have made the top five. “That surprised me,” says Rost, whosefulminations against Pfizer and greedy doctors have drawn readers. “I thoughtmy focus was a little narrower than most, but people really care abouthealthcare.”
Which leads to the question: If Peter Rost is out thereopining on evil drug companies, why shouldn’t drug companies be blogging, too?Answer: Legal says, “ROTFLMAO!” (Google it …)
There are adverse-events reporting requirements to consider.Should a commenter write that a company’s drug gave him high blood pressure,the company would be required to report that to the FDA. You can always turnoff comments, but doing so defeats the purpose, says MS&L’s Pitts. “It’sthe interactivity of it that makes it unique,” says Pitts. “Otherwise, it’sjust another controlled marketing resource.”
Perhaps, but what’s to say the scientists featured in GSK’srecent corporate campaign couldn’t write on a company site—however obliquelyand thoroughly vetted by PR—about their work, provided they steer clear ofproduct promotion? Readers are sharply attuned to an author’s authenticity, asPitts, who cautions against “astroturf” efforts, notes. They relish thegive-and-take, the parry-and-thrust, of a world of ideas in which there is nomiddle ground. But as the cliché has it, we are also all patients, with asurprisingly hearty appetite for health information.
“Blogs don’t have hard edges,” says Edelman’s Rubel. “Peopleblog about what touches them, and healthcare touches us all.”
From the June 01, 2006 Issue of MM+M - Medical Marketing and Media
