Is Twitter less troublesome than blogging?

Is Twittering "safer" than blogging? Apparently so, at least for Big Pharma. That's the conclusion Jim Edwards makes over at BNet Pharma, with a dissection of drugmakers' online media. Pharma company blogs are so tame, they're hardly worthy of the name. And even with GlaxoSmithKline's newly minted More Than Medicine effort, Edwards still counts only four blogs--two of which have already bitten the dust--to drugmakers' credit.

Conversely, the Twitter tree is full of trilling pharmas. Novartis [1], AstraZeneca [2], Boehringer Ingelheim [2] (whose Twitter avatar is, to us, a bit creepy) use Twitter, and the list gets longer every day.

So why should a quick-and-dirty, off-the-cuff online media format attract more drugmakers than a still-off-the-cuff-but-more-established form? Edwards has a perfectly plausible theory: That bloggers have plenty of space to braid enough rope for their own nooses, but Twitter's 140-character limit also limits the potential damage. What do you think?

- read the BNet post [3]
- follow @FiercePharma [4] on twitter

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Big Pharma grows online, slowly [7]
Online ad compliance isn't easy, pharma says [8]