#Pharma100: A Ludicrous, Leveraged Popularity Contest

"Stop using #pharma100," says Andrew Spong. Spong says it's "a ludicrous popularity contest... that degrades the health conversation on the Social Web." Quite a few commenters to his post (here) agree with him.#pharma100 was set up by Henry Gazay, CEO and founder Medimix International, to supposedly identify the "top 100 influencers in Pharmaceutical Social Media" through a voting process: between July 4th and July 14th 2013, any one could nominate someone they considered to be among the top 100 influencers. All they had to do was post on twitter "I nominate @xxxx for #pharma100 top100 influencers in #pharma social media".As a popularity contest, this is innocent enough. As I said in a comment to Andrew: "Awards and community recognition are common incentives for doing a good job. I have criticized trade publications for handing out awards to their advertisers because that clearly does not reward the best but the wealthiest (i.e., able to purchase ad space; see "Awards. What Are They Good For?"). But nominating someone for recognition via a Twitter hash tag is more democratic and can help call attention to interesting people who you may want to follow on Twitter."But I see Andrew's point: Many people are just adding #pharma100 to their Twitter posts even when NOT nominating someone. So many, in fact, that #pharma100 is a "trending" hashtag that attracts unsuspecting followers to relatively worthless Twitter posts.But does #pharma100 actually identify "influencers in Pharmac...
Source: Pharma Marketing Blog - Category: Pharma Commentators Tags: Awards social media #Pharma100 Klout Source Type: blogs