With my plane delayed and my wireless down, I found myself subjected to a few minutes of Fox News last week at JFK. The two cheerfully dimwitted anchors were debating the merits of gathering health-related content online after relaying the “news” that 7 out of 10 people now look for health info online. While doing their best to scare people from searching even reputable sources, one of the anchors acknowledged that it wasn’t a terrible idea to do some homework before visiting a doctor. No #@&* Sherlock! Clearly, Fox News is not my source for expert advice, “fair and balanced” or otherwise.
Regardless of how some doctors might like to roll-back time, the cat is out of the bag. Consumers are information hungry and are taking to the web by the droves to learn everything they can about their particular ailment. Many are walking into doctors offices armed like never before with questions, self-diagnoses and even treatment options. This seismic shift in the balance of power between patient and doctor is part of the greater trend of consumer empowerment, a trend that a new website called People Jam.com hopes to leverage and encourage.
MediaPost reported about PeopleJam last Friday:
Fusing two of the hottest trends of the last 10 years, digital media
vets Robert Tercek and Matt Edelman are about to launch a self-help
social networking site named PeopleJam.
“PeopleJam is a place for individuals who want to get ahead of
life,” said Edelman, who is acting as the company’s CEO. “We’ve
built the first social media company that provides Internet users
with the means to figure out how to fit together the seemingly
disconnected parts of their lives.”
Since the sight hasn’t launched yet (maybe September?), it is a little tough to determine right now whether or not this site will truly *engage* consumers. The notion of aggregating experts from various fields and making them available to a specific interest groups makes a lot of sense to me. I can also tell you that their promise has Marketing for Good written all over it:
Our simple belief is that everyone deserves a great life. Our
ambitious goal is to provide the most comfortable place on the
Internet where that’s possible for you.
Marketers in a whole range of categories from financial planning to health care, fitness to travel, career planning to religion would be smart to check out PeopleJam.com. It also sounds like it will be a very advertiser friendly experience:
We look forward to doing business with you. When PeopleJam launches
publicly, we will offer a variety of programs for advertisers and
sponsors, but why wait? We’re in discussions now with leading brands
interested in being one of our exclusive launch sponsors, so if
you’re interested, let us know. Please complete our short form and we’ll contact you.
Good advice, medical or otherwise, is hard to find. Maybe the “experts” at PeopleJam will have the right stuff. Maybe not. We’ll see soon enough.