WikiLeaks – PR Departments Take Note


By Betsy Raymond Stevenson, posted December 3, 2010

It’s time to update your crisis communications plan.  Before the holidays.

In case you missed Andy Greenberg’s recent interview with WikiLeak’s Julian Assange in Forbes, Assange says he is turning his sights on corporate America.  High on his list? Pharmaceutical companies. Assange says he has unpublished, damaging documents and he refers to the companies in the plural.

I love how Greenberg describes Assange as “the prophet of the coming age of involuntary transparency.” Love it or hate it, involuntary transparency pre-dates WikiLeaks (although it wasn’t so easy), giving you a resource. This is a good time to study how other companies have handled such leaks in the past.  Note who put their customers first and how they did it.  Note who is still trying to pull their feet out of their collective mouths.  Think about how you would handle it differently. Better.

How much is reputation worth?

Infinitely Meta – a 10,000-foot view of clinical trials


By Betsy Raymond Stevenson, posted October 1, 2010

By Sally Church

There has been quite a lot of noise in the media recently over the results of meta analyses of various clinical trials following the FDA committee meeting on Avandia in diabetes.

In modern medicine large scale studies are often limited in that they are designed to prove that a drug is generally or broadly safe and effective in order to gain approval in a wider population. We must remember that patients in the trials tend to be more motivated and have a better performance status than those in the general population, so extrapolating data from one to the other is fraught with difficulties.

One of the challenges is that sometimes a relatively rare (<5%) but fatal side effect may not show up in a short term trial, but will eventually emerge with more chronic use in a broader population. Of course, a relationship between two variables does not imply causation, therein lies the rub – how do we differentiate between spurious correlations and a real effect? Read on …

Trusting Pharma


By Betsy Raymond Stevenson, posted March 2, 2010

Last week’s post, “Curing Pharma,” struck a chord.  Not only with the public relations and marketing execs who are RS Snapshot’s primary readers, but with researchers, investors, sales professionals and corporate strategists who shared their thoughts here, and on LinkedIn, on what it will take to rebuild public goodwill towards the pharmaceutical — and biotech — industries. Read on …
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