Pfizer Asks Media Members: How Are We Doing?

(MoneyWatch)  Pfizer is polling about 250 members of the media to find out whether its PR operations are any good. The move appears to be part of Pfizer PR chief Ray Kerins' drive to change Pfizer's image from a Kremlin-esque castle of puzzles into a more communicative, forthright enterprise.

Kerins recently complained about Pfizer's now-discontinued "unwritten rule" of not returning reporters' phone calls.

UPDATE: As if to underline the point, Pfizer has just announced that it will publish a database of all physicians who receive payments from the company, "for consulting, speaking engagements and clinical trials." The data will be online in 2010. Editors and reporters covering Pfizer and healthcare should expect calls on the PR issue over the next few days. The company is hoping for a better than 30 percent response rate. (Disclosure: BNET cooperated with the survey. We're suckers for that stuff!)

Reporters are given the option of keeping their answers anonymous or not. BNET understands that some respondents have not kept their answers anonymous, raising the question of how pointed their critiques of Pfizer PR are likely to be.

More fun, however, is the part of the survey in which media members are asked to rank Pfizer and a handful of its competitors -- Novartis, Wyeth, etc -- against each other in terms of how well their PR units perform. That should give Pfizer an amusing league table to look at. Please, please let that list be leaked! The remainder of the survey covers predictable territory: how well does Pfizer perform in terms of access, providing experts, executives, responding to deadlines, and the comprehensiveness of its web site.

The results of the survey, and whether changes are made because of it, is up in the air right now following Pfizer's acquisition of Wyeth. Combining the two companies will probably produce one of the largest sets of internal drug PR teams on the planet; and an even larger set of outside agencies. As Wyeth management is leaving and the company's name disappearing, one would presume that Kerins -- and his survey results -- gets control of the whole thing.