J&J's New Corporate Blog: Is It Any Good?

A little over a month ago J&J started a new corporate blog, written by Marc Monseau, whom Brandweek readers will recognize as one of J&J's pr execs. It's been given the snappy title of JNJ BTW.

This effort came shortly after J&J hosted a dinner for bloggers to pick their brains about how the blogosphere works and how J&J should deal with it.

As I reported here, one idea was to give all 120,000 J&J staffer their own blogs on which they could berate and praise their employer as they saw fit.

Instead, unsurprisingly, J&J has given only Monseau a blog. (119,999 blogs to go then!)

So, is it any good?

Short answer: John Mack, Peter Rost, Ed Silverman, Jack Friday, and the folks at Internet Drug News won't need to worry about losing their jobs any time soon.

Long answer: Monseau's blog is turning out to be a revealing look at those topics that J&J refuses to reveal. The highlights:

"Anyone working for a large corporation will appreciate that there are many internal limitations on what we say and how we say it."

"We may not always be able to talk about product-specific issues, news from our operating companies or issues that fall under regulatory or legal constraints. But we’re going to do what we can to talk openly, directly and to the best of our knowledge."

"Johnson & Johnson is well-known for its aggressive acquisition strategy, and as such, there are often rumors circulating about whether we are going to make a bid for company X, or do a deal with company Y. When asked about these rumors, I almost always have nothing to say. We just don’t comment on rumors and speculation. Period."

"For those of you who have been following Johnson & Johnson, you know that we tend not to discuss the details around pending legal matters in the media. I’m extending the approach we have used with the MSM to this blog. Just as my colleagues and I generally don’t respond to specific allegations raised in lawsuits from the media, I’m unlikely to do so on JNJ BTW."

What good is a blog that focuses so heavily on discussing the things it won't discuss?

Well, true. But even a dribble of information is better than none.

Think of it this way: One of the reasons TASS and Isvestia were so closely read in the West during the Cold War was that the publications were as interesting for what didn't appear in them as for what did. If a rising star communist official's name suddenly stopped appearig in Soviet news accounts, Western intelligence could deduce that he had fallen out of favor with the Politburo. Or been killed. Judging by this item, Christine Poon won't be getting an icepick in the head anytime soon.

NJN BTW is similar: It's a handy guide to the topics that J&J finds so controversial it dare not speak their name: So far, that's lawsuits, acquisitions, and "internal" corporate matters.

There you have it: JNJ BTW is the Pravda of J&J.

Comments

[Marc Monseau]

Thanks, Comrade. I appreciate your thoughts, but I don't agree with your verdict. I do have more limitations than most bloggers and in some of these initial posts I wanted to help readers understand what those limitations are -- and to provide some insight into why I don't elaborate on lawsuits or speculation. Anyway, thanks for reading the blog -- I hope you are well.

Do svidaniya,

Marc

[Joe]

What is a blog? The insights of a caffeine fueled night-owl that need to be published no matter who reads them, or the musing of a PR exec at a major firm? I vote for the caffeine junkie, they might actually have something interesting to say instead of lawyer approved PR. A blog was always for ideas...