Bad Science, Gillian McKeith and a PR disaster – another lesson in how not to use social media

As a growing list of public figures are learning through harsh experience, the days of foolproof reputation management are over. It’s become clear that with an unmonitored voice through the medium of Twitter, the smallest misjudgment by a well-known name is done in dangerously full view of the public, with often far reaching consequences.

The latest to fall foul of the tweeter’s first rule  - think before you type - is self-styled holistic health guru Gillian McKeith. For those unfamiliar with her work, McKeith is a prime time TV celebrity and successful author who has made a name for herself advising the overweight, under-exercised and nutritionally challenged. Her herbal supplements, cereal bars and powders are sold in health food shops throughout the country, and it is the questionable claims made about these products that first brought her to the attention of Ben Goldacre: a London-based science journalist on a mission to expose bad science in whatever forms it might take. Goldacre has had McKeith firmly in his sights for a while and his book, the aptly named Bad Science, devotes a chapter to a detailed challenge to her scientific credibility.

So persistent has been his campaign to expose McKeith, that in 2007 a reader of Goldacre’s blog (www.badscience.net) complained to the Advertising Standards Authority about McKeith’s use of the title ‘Doctor’, as her PhD was obtained via a correspondence course from the non-accredited and now obsolete American Holistic College of Nutrition in Birmingham, Alabama. Having been strongly positioned by Channel Four as ‘Dr Gillian McKeith, Clinical Nutritionist’ her star somewhat fell when it became clear that her certified membership of the American Association of Nutritional Consultants was essentially meaningless, as demonstrated by her old adversary Goldacre buying the same membership online for his dead cat for $60.

Last week’s adventures began innocently, with a woman called Rachel Moody tweeting that she was about to start reading the McKeith chapter from Bad Science. Her remark triggered a series of angry reply tweets from McKeith, accusing Goldacre of being a liar and Moody of being anti-American, in reference to criticism of McKeith’s PhD qualification.

 
Being new to Twitter and perhaps realizing the seriousness of her accusations McKeith then deleted the tweets, unaware that nothing can ever truly be erased from the internet – not least because there are those among us with the foresight to take screen shots of such salacious events as they unfold  (the one above comes via http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2010/07/gillian_mckeith_does_not_have.php.)

There then followed another series of tweets written in the third person, as if to suggest that someone other than McKeith was at the controls. Those tweets were then also deleted. Finally, and most bizarrely, the last tweet, which remains to this day: “Do you actually believe this is real twitter site for the GM (sic)?” Sadly the answer is a definite yes, as the Twitter feed was linked to her official website and Facebook accounts. Those links have since also been removed, seemingly in an effort to leave no trace of this unpleasant and potentially damaging episode.

Goldacre’s potential libel case against McKeith is a very real possibility, but in the meantime he has offered to discuss directly any concerns about his accusations via an unedited podcast. No response so far. And the flurry of activity on @gillianmckeith seems also to have ground to a halt, the final word from 14th July being ‘the moral of the story: Love your neighbour and your enemies too’.

One other moral that Gillian should bear in mind – use Twitter with care.

To find out how GraceDigi can help your brand to use social media to its advantage, email makesomenoise@graceagency.co.uk

PM Society Annual Lecture – Margot James MP

Margot James cuts an impressive figure. I’ve had the privilege and pleasure to have worked with her and known her for a number of years and when I first heard of her ambitions to become an MP, I had no doubt that she would make it.

She pitched her talk on Thursday night at just the right level: emphasizing the overall thrust of the new Government’s healthcare policies, especially greater patient empowerment and reduced layers of bureaucracy, without getting bogged down in detail.

Despite the stifling heat of the room, it was an enjoyable evening and very worthwhile attending. So why was the pharmaceutical industry so poorly represented? We now have someone able to champion our industry’s cause sitting at the top table - at the very heart of government - yet only nine pharmaceutical companies decided to attend. Honourable mentions go to Lundbeck, Amgen, Napp, GSK, Takeda, Sanofi Pasteur MSD, AstraZeneca, Wyeth and especially Sanofi Aventis who were well represented.

As usual, the service sector was well represented, but clients really shouldn’t leave it up to their agencies to keep their finger on the pulse of the healthcare climate.

I do think the pharmaceutical industry needs to show more leadership.

Written by Neil Dickinson (@neil_dickinson)

A potential PR opportunity for the Pharmaceutical industry that will probably go begging

An interesting nugget of pharmaceutical research news was released last week - http://bit.ly/d7G9PD - that could have very profound implications for the pharma industry. In short, in MS patients it may be possible to identify the likely efficacy of beta-interferon therapy in advance: some patients will respond to it, but for others it may actually worsen their condition.

This is a multi-billion dollar global market and the beta-interferon players must be very nervous if this research is validated. I don’t know the % of likely non-responders, but imagine if it was say, a third. That’s potentially nearly a billion dollars wiped off Avonex sales for a start. Of course for Biogen, it may not be such bad news as they have another non-interferon product in their MS portfolio, but Teva may be jumping for joy at the news as many IFN-non-responding patients would possibly be switched to Copaxone.

But imagine if this finding could be expanded to other therapy areas? Oncology is the obvious example, but what about more common diseases such as hypertension or diabetes? It could be argued that pharma companies enjoy the uncertainty that inevitably surrounds the absolute efficacy of their drugs: after all, if a doctor has to prescribe in the hope that a drug works, rather than in certainty, then there’s bound to be more prescribed than necessary.

So I hope pharmaceutical companies, especially the beta-interferon players themselves, embrace this research wholeheartedly for the good of all MS patients. It would be a massive PR boost for our beleaguered industry if companies freely and actively helped to refine the technology and put it to use as soon as possible. It might wipe the odd billion dollars off their bottom lines, but so what? These drugs are pretty old medicines now and likely to be superseded in the medium term, but of course, if I were a shareholder I might not be so cavalier.

So do I think they will do it? I have serious doubts, but I would love to be proved wrong.

Written by Neil Dickinson (@neil_dickinson) 

The GDR Retweet Challenge Review

We recently launched our Retweet Challenge for Sport Relief.  As well as raising money for charity, our aim was to demonstrate the power of Twitter and its huge potential within the pharmaceutical world. Here’s how we did it.

We launched our first ‘tweet’ at 2pm on Tuesday 16th March with the words; “The Grace Digital Relations Retweet Challenge: Exercise your thumbs for Sport Relief here: http://is.gd/aSM6i please RT.”  This link took visitors to a simple landing page that pledged a penny a click donation, made by Grace DR to Sport Relief.

By the end of the first day, 358 people had visited the link.  Wanting to exploit the growing volume of traffic, we added a Twitter 'follow us' button to the landing page and by the end of the day, our following doubled.  We also gave a link to Sport Relief itself and showed a constant counter of the donation amount.

The next day we released variously worded tweets, reminding our followers of the purpose of the challenge and by the end of Wednesday, numbers had reached an impressive 732 unique visitors.  

As the week progressed and Sport Relief increasingly dominated TV and airwaves, things really took off on Twitter.  At 10.15am on Thursday, BBC Radio 1 DJ Scott Mills ‘retweeted’ our link to his 96,234 followers.  The ‘Mills Effect’ meant that by the end of the day we had added an incredible 29,894 visitors to our site. 

From that one tweet, we later managed to attract the attention of other high-profile tweeters including Emma Freud, Chris Evans, Lorraine Kelly, Simon Mayo, Kirstie Allsopp and Claudia Winkleman.  The following day – Friday – another 32,513 people clicked through to our site. 

At the time of writing this article (just 8 days since our first tweet) we have seen a combined total of 86,195 visitors click on our link.  That is £861.95 accumulated for Sport Relief, in just 7 days. Which we doubled for the sake of charity.  Below is the final donation page, which we're really proud of.

And we only launched our campaign on Twitter.

Just think what that sort of power could potentially do for your product.

Imagine what would be possible if you made more of what social media has to offer. 

Consider the facts:

If Facebook were a country it would have the world’s 4th largest population between the United States and Indonesia.

The fastest growing segment on Facebook is 55-65 year-old females.

The second largest search engine in the world is YouTube, expected to be number one in 6 months.

There are over 200,000,000 Blogs. 54% of them are updated daily. 34% of bloggers post opinions about products & brands.

78% of consumers trust peer recommendations.  Only 14% trust advertisements.

The Retweet Challenge gives an insight into the power of social media.  Why not let us help you harness that power for one of your brands?

Written by Chris Wilson (@clutterances) 

Thank you to Erik Qualman (@equalman) for the statistics

Introducing....Grace Digital Relations!

The Grace Digital Relations blog is up and running, and this is it.  Not all of it, obviously, but the adventure begins here.  We are the digital arm of Grace Agency, a healthcare communications agency based in the UK.  We are fully aware that the nature of communicating is changing, and that the pharma world is considered by some to be a long way behind many other industries.  Our aim is to help bring it into the new era, the digital era.  To find out more about Grace Agency, please visit www.graceagency.co.uk                 

We have a strong combination of pharma and healthcare knowledge and innovative creative minds and have already generated many successful campaigns.  This blog is designed to update anyone who may be interested on our thoughts about the industry, and our take on current, relevant, affairs.  We will look to discuss anything that interests us with regards to the healthcare and pharmaceutical industry, but also the wider world of digital marketing and what the online marketplace can do for business. 

The growth of social media has been nothing short of incredible and seems not to be slowing down.  In fact, numbers are steadily growing as more and more people are realizing it is not a ‘fad’ but a genuinely important means of networking and promotion.  There are many restrictions, many taboos and many unanswerable questions, but there is a world of opportunity out there that the healthcare industry is just waiting to conquer, just as we are.

Our blog will attempt to offer advice, help, insight, reviews and discussion on a variety of healthcare and digital related subjects.  We welcome all comments, whether they agree, or disagree with us.  However, we retain the right to remove any contribution that we consider to be distasteful or inappropriate. 

Opponents of the power of social media suggest there is little evidence to support the claims that one can reach a potentially huge audience.  We decided to put this to the test using Twitter, and we have proof that will silence the doubters.

If you are a tweeter - if you’re not, perhaps you should be? - follow us at @gracedigi and find out when the evidence is released.

If not, just come back here soon to find out what we're on about, exciting isn't it?

Written by Chris Wilson (@clutterances)