Freelance Consultant's Diary

It is pretty obvious that Merck management is getting ready for winding up the firm's operations. That does not come as a surprise. Most analysts (and media headlines) have been questioning if Merck will survive the Vioxx recall mess. It could have survived if the management was willing to take a more conciliatory approach. In the opinion of iProceed , there are several fundamental flaws with Merck's approach to handing recall of Vioxx: No matter what, you never antagonize your customers (which in this case are patients, and not healthcare companies as Merck might like to believe). By taking a very hostile approach and telling Vioxx customers that something was wrong with them rather than Vioxx, Merck is essentially telling its customers that it doesn't care. As the cases go to trial, a lot of ugly details will come out that will show that Merck knew as early as 2000 that Vioxx was a problematic drug but it continued to aggressively advertise it to consumers, rather than de...

Yesterday we had discussed the success story of the Vioxx recall blog. We were very delighted to report that based on pure hard work and high-quality content development, we were able to get premium ranking in organic search results on Yahoo. But it looks like a lot of crooks out there do not like this. Sometimes when we go to Yahoo to check how we are doing, the search results can be different even in the course of a day. The reason is that crooks are trying to manipulate results by using tricks. Several websites pop up on page one and when you click on them you end up on just one website that is apparently owned by two law firms: Waters and Kraus, LLC and The Peterson Firm. We would not expect a law firm to engage in such dirty tricks unless someone is doing it without their knowledge. In any case, this is our advice to those of you who want to get higher ranking in organic search results: It is much better to develop good content than to use dirty tricks. We did not spend a million ...

You are probably looking at how the Vioxx recall controversy has evolved over last couple of weeks and wondering what a bunch of morons run Merck. Do not forget, however, that Merck used to be a great company and as recently as last month was ranked among the best for innovation. So what happened? Rather than going outside to find out what is wrong with other corporations, just walk to the product development group in your company and chat with some of the engineers. American corporations have always been known for making defective, poorly designed products. Since speed has always been more important to us than quality, we often commercialize products that have not been fully designed. We don't want to wait till we perfect the product. No wonder customers have so many problems with products made in the United States. We are good at R&D but horrible at commercializing them and whether we want to admit it or not, this is the way of life in most American corporations. This is not ...

Just last week we were discussing in the ebusiness blog how content is being leveraged for lead generation by the law firms. It was around that time that we ourselves decided to jump into a new area for us: commentary on a very hot topic as it was developing. Or in other words, we decided to create content on the Vioxx recall controversy. We have addressed the issue of what was the right format for discussing Vioxx recall (Related article: Website or blog ?) and in the case of Vioxx, since things were happening in real time, there was no better way than to launch a blog. The success has been remarkable. Of course, we worked extremely hard to keep up with the developments and tried to bring news and analysis in a way that it makes sense to a victim of Vioxx. Vioxx recall blog has already reached very high in organic search results in Yahoo and MSN and we are working hard to get a good ranking in Google . What did we learn from developing content related to Vioxx? Move fast when you see...

While iProceed is saying that we typically do not support mergers and acquisitions, and definitely not of this magnitude. The reason: Study after study has suggested that mergers simply destroy value most of the time. AT Kearney has found that 58% of mergers and acquisitions did not result in a stock exchange price increase. Robert W. Holthausen, a Professor of Accounting and Finance and Management, says, "Various studies have shown that mergers have failure rates of more than 50 percent. One recent study found that 83 percent of all mergers fail to create value and half actually destroy value. This is an abysmal record. What is particularly amazing is that in polling the boards of the companies involved in those same mergers, over 80% of the board members thought their acquisitions had created value." Why Sears and KMart marriage might work? When two desperate companies come together they might work harder to make it work. Bain & Company’s survey of 250 global executives...