I Spy With My Little Eye
Image: seoulbeats.com
You may remember I wrote about V-Fluence, the PR firm whom have, amongst others, AstraZeneca as one of their clients. [Back Story]
Briefly the author of “Is Something Not Quite Right With Stan,” blog, clicked on a link on the V-Fluence website which took him to a database of some sorts, a database that showed how V-Fluence were monitoring blogs and websites where something negative was written about Astra Zeneca. It's basically a tactic employed by huge corporations - any bad publicity and they like to know about it. Quite strange considering AstraZeneca are masters of their own downfall if the recent $520 million out of court settlement for improperly promoting off-label uses of its antipsychotic drug, Seroquel, is anything to go by.
Anyway, as a blogger myself, I write because I believe a great unjustice has been done. In the main, my gripe is with GlaxoSmithKline and the MHRA but I also occasionally write about other issues if and when the need arises.
You pretty much know you are getting under corporate skin when they retaliate and when they do retaliate it has a nasty habit of biting them back - big time.
Today, prize-winning journalist Ed Silverman wrote about 'Stangate' here. I enjoy reading Ed's work very much - he writes brilliantly and is always impartial with his articles.
V-Fluence, I believe, dropped a clanger by claiming that Stan had hacked into their account. This story is now growing bigger by the day and the irony is that a PR company who scour the Internet for pharma are now getting the attention from prize winning journo's such as Silverman.
I'm sure V-Fluence have a collection of blogger rants in their database, I know they have visited this blog since I first wrote about them and the 'Stangate' scandal. I'm also pretty certain they are picking up on the other stories bloggers are posting about this matter too and any comments left by readers of such blogs.
It's real cloak and dagger stuff isn't it?
V-Fluence write about their online monitoring here.
And here they accuse Stan of hacking into their web server.
Stan bites back here.
I think it only fair that bloggers around the globe should now start gaining information about Vfluence and its employees - Hey, what's good for the goose...
Stan has a new post up on his blog now - I'm just off to read it.
This is for Stan.
Fid
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