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FDA warns pharma companies using “sponsored links”

Published by Eric April 9th, 2009 in Government and Healthcare. 0 Comments

It’s a shame the FDA hasn’t come out with clear rules on what pharmaceutical companies can and can’t do online when it comes to marketing their products. They have created an environment where pharmaceutical companies recognize the value of digital media and want to get involved, but need to act with extreme caution since they don’t know what might get them in trouble with the regulatory agency.

As PR Week points out, pharmaceutical companies have been buying “sponsored links” with search engines for years that show up when someone searches for a disease or medical condition. Usually the text descriptions of these links don’t or can’t give much information away, reading something like, “Learn about symptoms and treatments for (insert disease here).” Fair balance information, of course, would be included once someone clicked through the link.

In a somewhat confusing move, however, the FDA sent warning letters to many of the big players in the pharma space, claiming they failed to “provide the proper risk information.” This is an additional example showing that comprehensive rules for how pharma can legally participate online are long overdue:

But as more pharmaceutical companies become involved in social media, the FDA will have a responsibility to better define the regulatory parameters of the digital space, including paid keyword advertising, wikis, Twitter, and YouTube. Lacking a policy that detailed how to adopt these rules for the Web, companies followed the one click ad hoc system, which they’ve now been punished for and had taken off the table.

The fact that the FDA hasn’t adopted such rules isn’t fair to pharmaceutical companies, and isn’t helping patients, who may very well be missing out on valuable medical information they could use to educate themselves.

(Full disclosure: I work at Edelman, a PR firm, and do work on behalf of pharmaceutical clients.)

Blast from the past: Online newspapers in 1981

Published by Eric January 29th, 2009 in Journalism, Television and Web/Internet. 2 Comments

There’s a lot to love in this news report about online newspapers from 28 years ago. Dialing the rotary phone to connect to the modem, citing a whopping 2,000 - 3,000 computer owners in the Bay Area, waiting two hours to download the content of a newspaper (and paying $5 an hour for the privilege)… Still, they weren’t far off in predicting how most of us get our news today.

Who knows where we’ll be in another 30 years?

The sad, slow death of Detroit

Published by Eric January 1st, 2009 in General, Government and Writing. 0 Comments

With the recent auto bailout, we were treated to quite a few stories about the “future of Detroit.” In a sad story from The Weekly Standard, writer Matt Labash visits the city that was once a thriving metropolis but is now dying with no salvation in sight:

Over the last several years, it has ranked as the most murderous city, the poorest city, the most segregated city, as the city with the highest auto-insurance rates, with the bleakest outlook for workers in their 20s and 30s, and as the place with the most heart attacks, slowest income growth, and fewest sunny days. It is a city without a single national grocery store chain. It has been deemed the most stressful metropolitan area in America. Likewise, it has ranked last in numerous studies: in new employment growth, in environmental indicators, in the rate of immunization of 2-year-olds, and, among big cities, in the number of high school or college graduates.

Men’s Fitness magazine christened Detroit America’s fattest city, while Men’s Health called it America’s sexual disease capital. Should the editors of these two metrosexual magazines be concerned for their safety after slagging the citizens of a city which has won the “most dangerous” title for five of the last ten years? Probably not: 47 percent of Detroit adults are functionally illiterate.

What I like about this piece is that the writer doesn’t devote his space to slamming the city, even though that would be easy. Instead he talks to people who live in the city, from firefighters who battle blazes in the abandoned, dilapidated buildings that plaque Detroit, to a homeless man from the South who thought the job prospects in Detroit might be better than his former home in Alabama (he was wrong). They’re all fighting the same fight, hoping and fighting for a city that’s probably hopeless.

UPDATE: For a little more perspective on this story, Flickr user smooveb has a goal of photographing 100 abandoned homes in Detroit. At the time of this posting, he’s got 72 hauntingly beautiful photos in the set.

I broke down and installed Linux

Published by Eric December 18th, 2008 in Linux. 2 Comments

A few weeks ago, my Windows installation went kaput. It was so bad I couldn’t even boot up in Safe Mode. I was pretty upset, cursing myself for not backing up my important files more often (or, at all). It looked like I might have to re-install Windows. Problem is, when I bought my computer a few years ago, Dell didn’t actually include the Windows XP disc - I had to send away for it or some such thing, and never did.

Fortunately, I was finally able to get to a command line, and from there was treated to a bit of deja vu as I was able to reacquaint myself with all sorts of DOS commands I was so familiar with as a teenager. I copied most of my files to an external hard drive, and then had to figure out how to make my laptop work again.

Having no access to my original Windows license, I made up my mind to install Linux. But once you’ve made that decision, you’re overwhelmed with various distros, specialized distros, window managers, and so on. I settled on Kubuntu, a variation of the ultra-popular distro Ubuntu, which bills itself as “Linux for human beings.” As a human being, I figured, this was an ideal fit.

During installation, I was most nervous about my wireless card not being recognized, since without WiFi my laptop is about as useful as a paperweight. Luckily, Kubuntu had no issues with detecting my wireless card, accessing my network, finding my video card and even recognizing the buttons on the front of my machine that control audio and video playback, which pleasantly surprised me. The OS is not without its glitches, but for the most part the experience is quite smooth. Of course I’m still learning my way around the system, and haven’t had any reason to tinker around on the command line or really earn my geek cred.

As someone who’s used to Windows XP and OSX, Kubuntu doesn’t feel as “polished” (particularly compared to a Mac) but I can tell it’s well on its way. For someone who basically uses their machine for Web browsing and word processing, though, it’s a nice alternative to shelling out cash for Vista. As I’ve learned, if you feel like dipping your toe into the true realm of geek operating systems, Kubuntu seems like a decent way to go.

The most distasteful thing I’ve read in a long time

Published by Eric October 29th, 2008 in PR Disasters, PR Practice and Public Relations. 0 Comments

Sometimes I’ll see a press release or a pitch that is so distasteful, so crass, that my jaw drops and I’m rendered speechless.

This is one of those times.

(Link from the Bad Pitch Blog)

UK iTunes censors go overboard

Published by Eric October 28th, 2008 in Apple and Music. 0 Comments

Recently iTunes censors in the UK went a little nuts with the asterisks, non-nonsensically inserting asterisks into the names of anyone unfortunate enough to be named “Dick,” or, for some reason, “Johnny,” as well as other, seemingly random words:

While iTunes has always asterisked potentially offensive entries in its database, recently the UK version of the music retailer went on a censoring binge that blanked out hundreds of inoffensive song titles and artist names. The Dick Van Dyke song from Mary Poppins was changed to “The D**k Van D**e” song. Danny Kaye’s innocent little tune “I Thought I Saw a Pussy Cat” became “I Thought I Saw a P***y Cat.” Stranger yet, Johnny Cash and Johnny Mathis had their first names reduced to “J*****y” and Avril Lavigne’s “Hot” read “H*t.”

Is J****y - er, Johnny - used in the UK as slang for a body part? Seriously, I can’t imagine why they’d censor that. Then again, I can’t imagine why they’d censor the word “hot,” either, so we’ll chalk it up to an honest mistake.

How will Twitter make money? They’ll figure it out… eventually

Published by Eric October 9th, 2008 in Social Media, Web 2.0 and Web/Internet. 0 Comments

Slate has an interesting article about how (and if) Twitter will ever devise a strategy for making money. I’ve been asking myself this question for a long time, as it seems unlikely that any company will last without a way to pay for things like, oh, servers.

Twitter has been pretty stable lately, and the Fail Whale hasn’t made an appearance for me for what seems like at least a month. Even though the service has made great strides recently, and has attracted a lot of mainstream attention from news outlets such as CNN, @biz and @ev are concerned with the service’s “sustainability,” which is understandable. Although when I use ad-supported Twitter programs like Twitterrific for the iPhone, it makes me think that Twitter could include in-feed ads, charge for premium accounts (maybe with a raised follow limit?) or throw banner ads up without upsetting the user base.

Still, I appreciate that Twitter is devoted to getting its act together before figuring out how to make money. But with swelling numbers of users and investors breathing down their necks, how long can they afford to do so?

Say goodbye to Matt Millen - Is the Bobby Layne curse next?

Published by Eric September 24th, 2008 in Sports PR. 0 Comments

My family, having grown up a few short miles from the Detroit city limits, have always been die-hard Detroit Lions fans. Football fans who have paid attention over the last, oh, 50 years or so know that the Lions have been one of the worst franchises in all of professional sports over that time period, having only a single winning playoff game to show for it.

Matt Millen has been general manager for the Lions since 2001, and in that time the team has only won 31 games, set the record for the most consecutive road losses, have gone through a handful of coaches, and inspired a “Fire Millen” movement that included fan marches calling for Millen to be tarred, feathered and run out of town.

A few days ago I made a declaration on Twitter that I would not be rooting for the Lions until either Millen was fired or the sole owner, William Clay Ford Sr., passed ownership of the team along to his son. I now can cheer for my hometown team again, as this morning I was thrilled to learn that Millen had, in fact, been let go, after a dismal 0-3 start to the season and no hope of things getting better.

Might the end of the disastrous Millen era be a harbinger of good things to come? Most sports fans know about the infamous Chicago Cubs “Billy Goat” curse, which has supposedly prevented the team from winning a World Series over the last century. The Detroit Lions have their own curse, however, known as the “Curse of Bobby Layne.” Bobby Layne was a remarkably talented All-Pro quarterback who led the Lions to three championships in his eight years with the team. After he got injured, the Lions traded him to the Pittsburgh Steelers. As the story goes, Layne was so upset at the Lions the he vowed they wouldn’t win another championship “in fifty years.”

That fifty year deadline is up in 11 days. With the curse lifted, will the Lions be able to turn it around? I have my doubts, but even so, I’ll be rooting for them.

Google to release own browser, “Chrome”

Published by Eric September 1st, 2008 in Google, Technology and Web/Internet. 3 Comments

Google’s throwing a wrench into the IE vs. Firefox vs. Safari vs. Opera browser dynamic with it’s own offering, Google Chrome. They explain their reasoning behind the project in a very slick comic drawn by “Understanding Comics” creator Scott McCloud, in which they state they’re looking to create a browser for the way people use the Web today - watching videos, chatting, playing games, etc. - uses that weren’t possible in the early days of the Web.

Google has made great strides in creating applications that live on the Web, but the chief problem with that concept is that if your browser crashes (a not-infrequent occurance), you risk losing your work. It looks like Chrome will address this issue by minimizing memory leaks and allowing users to kill processes that hog memory via a task manager.

Of course, the project will be open source. I wasn’t able to find a release date for the beta, but if you know anything, feel free to comment.

UPDATE: Well, that was quick! Google released Chrome about a day after I put this up. Walt Mossberg has the definitive review.

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