• by Tameka Kee , January 15, 2008

About 60% of all adults over 18 use the Web to find health and wellness info, according to new research from iCrossing. And while search is still the dominant channel for accessing that info, Americans are increasingly turning to social media sites--including Wikipedia, blogs, message boards and social networking groups--to educate themselves about specific diseases or conditions.

Over two days in December 2007, iCrossing questioned more than 1,080 adults via the Greenfield Online survey service, and found that 72% of respondents used social media sites "all or some of the time" to educate themselves about specific medical conditions. Some 42% said they used groups at various portals like AOL Health, Yahoo Health and Google to assess the benefits of a home remedy. Meanwhile, nearly a third said that they used such sites to research the reputation of a doctor or facility, when starting a new medication, or adopting a new course of treatment.

"The social media stats were some of the most interesting findings, particularly the degree to which users are looking to each other for insight around major healthcare decisions like choosing a doctor, a specific treatment or a medication," said Noah Elkin, vice president of strategy, iCrossing. "I don't think marketers have fully grasped the impact that social sites can have on the information-gathering process."

Jeremy Shane, vice president of business development at HealthCentral, agrees.

"People want to talk to someone else with the same condition after they get an initial diagnosis, to either validate or refute the info they received," Shane said. "We call it an 'aggregation of truth,' and for advertisers trying to reach them during this time, the relevancy of the message really matters."

Shane said that careful targeting and placement of a health-focused campaign can ensure that a post-op breast cancer ad, for example, reaches a survivor's discussion group instead of a just-diagnosed blog, taking advantage of the trend toward social media and incurring an effective return on ad spend (ROAS) at the same time.

Still, health-care marketers can face challenges when it comes to targeting social media sites, according to Ben Wolin, CEO of Waterfront Media (parent company of the Everyday Health network). "You need to reach as many people as possible who fit the criteria of the message, and not every niche health information site has the traffic to make it worthwhile," Wolin said. "You have to be able to bring the targeting together with tremendous reach, because one without the other doesn't work that well."

Wolin added that social media-oriented sites that featured input from medical experts would also serve to complement the 75% of survey respondents who said their doctor was their most-trusted source of health and wellness info.

Elkin said that in the midst of crafting a social media marketing strategy, health-care advertisers should not forget about search ads--because nothing beats the sheer volume of core search on an engine like Google, Yahoo, MSN or Ask.

Some 66% of respondents said that they used one of those engines to find health info in the past year, compared to the 46% who navigated to health portals like WebMD, and the even fewer 15% who said they'd used health-specific search engines like Meredith's Healia or Microsoft's Medstory.