As a follow up to my recent blog post on “CNTO11 – Heading to the Dead Phlog Pool?“, you might want to listen to an interview on BlogTalkRadio that John Mack (Pharma Makreting Blog) did with Michael Parks, the creator of CNTO411 and former VP of Corporate Communications at Centocor.

Some of the great points that Michael brings up in conversation include:

• The need for Marketing and PR to move away from working in silos — instead, they should be sitting down together and working together to complement their campaigns.
• Why it’s important to engage with blogs and other social media, instead of missing out on a multitude of conversations that are going on about your therapeutic area.
• The need to work closely together with your regulatory colleagues and identify key questions about engaging in social media.
• The importance of a long term strategy before rushing into a social media initiative — making sure you have a strategy for when people leave the company (as Parks did), backup writers, appropriate breadth of writers to keep blog fresh and with new content, etc.

Parks also goes on to elaborate a bit on the launch of his new PR company, Pitch360, which focuses on giving top level PR communications support to companies that are not quite sure how to get there or what type of investments to make in that area; in other words, startups and smaller companies with less formal communications department.

Overall, the 30 min interview is a great listen and full of insights — I highly recommend it. And I’ll leave you with probably my favorite quote by Parks from the interview:

“A lot of people look at the launch of the blog as the hard part, but it’s the maintenance of the blog — Keeping the blog going, keeping people engaged, and finding content that will keep people coming back for more — obviously that has a completely new set of challenges.