25 Media People to Follow

Theresa Smith — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 13:00:55 +0000

One of the first things I tell people who are interested in learning more about Twitter and how to use it, is to find people on Twitter they already know of who they admire or are at the top of their industry and to start following them. I also believe you can learn a lot from the media people that are shaping the social media landscape. In that spirit, Ad Age Magazine has compiled a list of the top 25 media people to follow on twitter and they are definitely worth following.

photo credit: loop_oh

Here’s a partial listing of Ad Age’s top 25 media people:

Nieman Lab (@NiemanLab) The Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard — “Trying to figure out the future of news.”

Jennifer Preston (@NYT_JenPreston) just named the first social-media editor at The New York Times

Sree Sreenivasan (@sreenet) Columbia Journalism School professor and

Mark Cuban (@mcuban) – Owner of HDNet (and the Dallas Mavericks)

John Battelle (@johnbattelle) – Founder and Chairman of Federated Media

Chris Anderson (@chr1sa)- Wired Magazine editor

Jeff Lanctot (@lanctot) – Chief Strategy Officer at Razorfish

David Carr (@carr2n) – New York Times media columnist

David Berkowitz (@dberkowitz) – Emerging Media Director at 360i

Brian Lam (@blam) – Editorial Director at Gizmodo

Pete Cashmore (@mashable) – Founder/CEO of Mashable, the social-media blog

Fred Wilson (@fredwilson) – Managing Partner of Union Square Ventures

Who do you recommend that is not on the list?

Big Pharma Beginning to Join Social Media Party

Theresa Smith — Mon, 18 May 2009 17:48:14 +0000

Marissa Miley and Rich Thomaselli reported in Ad Age last week that “Big Pharma is lumbering into the digital realm, using a growing chunk of its $4.7 billion DTC dollars to reach patients and prescribers on blogs, Twitter and YouTube.”

While this might not seem newsworthy to most, according to the article “Big Pharma Finally Taking Big Steps to Reach Patients With Digital Media” is big news to anyone following the adoption of social media in the Pharma space. Miley and Thomaselli found that “Johnson & Johnson keeps a respected and popular blog; Novartis, Boehringer Ingelheim and AstraZeneca all use Twitter to deliver news about their respective companies; and most recently, Sanofi-Aventis and AstraZeneca each launched branded YouTube channels to reach certain patient groups.”

Why has it taken Big Pharma so long to begin to adopt social media? Mark Senak, senior VP at Fleishman Hillard and author of the blog, Eye on FDA is quoted in the article, “They’re late to the game because no one wants to get a warning letter.”

Miley and Thomselli write:

To further illustrate the complexities of a digital world without clear DTC guidelines, it took AstraZeneca more than eight months of meetings with a team of 15 to 20 company experts from the regulatory, legal, compliance, corporate, and brand management departments before it put up a YouTube channel for its asthma drug Symbicort. “The social-media space is very much a gray area,” said Dana Settembrino, senior brand communications manager for the drug. “In that sense it makes it challenging.”

The good news is that Big Pharma is taking steps to engage their customers that will hopefully in the end benefit their customers around the world that are suffering from health problems. You can read the entire article here.

Ad Age – Pathway Communications

25 Media People to Follow

Big Pharma Beginning to Join Social Media Party