• by Wendy Davis  @wendyndavis, March 10, 2005

Web users who seek medical information from message boards, forums, e-mail group chats, or other forms of consumer-generated media are twice as likely to research prescription drugs online as their counterparts who don't turn to fellow consumers for information, according to a Jupiter Research study released this week.

The survey of 2,240 consumers, conducted in December, found that 37 percent of those who had sought health-related information from other consumers at least once in the last year also used the Internet to research prescription drugs, compared to 19 percent of consumers who did not use message boards, forums, and the like for health information. Overall, 492 respondents--about one in five-- said they had sought health-related information from consumer- generated sources in the last year.

Twenty-two percent of those who used consumer-generated health media also reported reading pharma-sponsored e-mails, compared to 10 percent of those who stuck to more institutional media.

For marketers--at least those who want to reach consumers now getting information from Internet forums and chat rooms--the message is clear, said Jupiter Research analyst Monique Levy. She advises that targeting those consumers involves maximizing search spending, sending direct e-mails, and making sure that branded sites contain complete information.

The survey also found that readers of consumer-generated health information went online more frequently and used more search engines than did their mainstream-reading counterparts. Forty percent of the group that went to consumer-generated media used more than one search engine, compared to 24 percent of the mainstream readers. And 34 percent of the consumer-generated reading group went online for health and wellness information weekly, compared to 14 percent of the mainstream group.