J&J last night treated about half-a-dozen pharma and medical device bloggers to dinner and drinks at Beppe, a small Italian restaurant on 22nd Street in New York.
The aim of the meeting was for J&J to learn about pharma bloggers, who we are, how we work, and whether the company should get involved in blogging in any way. I made it clear that I have absolutely no idea what I’m doing, and they still wanted me to show up.
They wisely hosted an open bar.
Biggest surprise of the evening: One idea floating around New Brunswick is giving all 120,000 J&J employees their own blogs on which they could bitch and whine about management. I'll believe it when I see it (more on this later).
Attending from J&J: Heidi Youngkin (executive director/global marketing group), David Swearingen (vp corp comms), Mark Monseau (a director of media relations), Jeffrey Leebaw (Monseau’s boss) and Ray Jordan (vp public affairs and corp comms). There were other J&J execs there too, all mainly from the corp comms division, but I didn’t get a chance to say hello to them all or nab their business cards.
Attending from the blogosphere: Fard Johnson of Healthcare Vox, Nicholas Genes from MedGadget, Peter Pitts from DrugWonks, Steven Palter from Doc in the Machine and Ed Silverman from Pharmalot. And me.
John Mack from Pharma Marketing Blog was invited but cancelled at the last minute, thus insuring that we gossiped about him behind his back.
Silverman turned up fashionably late and was clearly the belle of J&J’s ball—Pharmalot in a short time has come to occupy a high profile in the drug blog area because of Ed’s prolific posting. Turns out Ed is now blogging for the Star-Ledger full time, works from home, and doesn’t do any more reporting. (Mack has previously speculated he has a team of bloggers working for him.)
At dinner I was seated across from Heidi Youngkin. J&J really got their money’s worth from Youngkin last night—she lives in Pennsylvania, commutes to New Brunswick and somehow managed dinner in New York also. She indicated that the J&J acquisition of Pfizer’s Consumer Health Care brands was going smoothly and the culture clash between the aggressive Pfizer culture and J&J’s more family-friendly culture was overblown.
Next to me was Jeff Leebaw, who ate the biggest steak I’ve ever seen.
On the other side of me was Adriana Lukas, a consultant to J&J for the past year on blogging. (That’s her pictured.)
Lukas told me that she’s trying to get J&J to give all their 120,000 employees a blog, on which the workers could write whatever they liked. When I put it to her that this was a journalist’s dream and a brand manager’s nightmare, she asserted that the power of the internet will essentially grind all businesses like J&J into a sort of mob-driven series of collaborative networks run by empowered individuals who answer to no one but themselves. Ray Jordan “totally gets it,” she said.
Lukas was one of the most combative, self-confident people I’ve ever met. Having a conversation with her is a bit like being stuck in an argument-hurricane. She made Peter Pitts look shy.
I look forward to the day that J&J devolves into an anarchic, Ayn Rand-style free-for-all, but suspect that Wall Street might have something to say before Lukas gets her wish.
To conclude: A fascinating evening all round. Despite J&J’s image as being a drug company that’s so safe and conservative your mother would approve of it taking you to the prom, the company appears to be grappling substantively with the future. Look at where it’s putting its money, for instance. And besides, which other drug company would host such a meeting?