According to an article written by Stuart Elliott in the New York Times, a study by comScore Inc., a company that studies online consumer behavior and digital marketing, revealed that out of the 212.6 million web users in the United States over a one-month period, 45.4 percent (96.6 million) searched for health information on the Internet. The study also revealed that the top two health information web sites were Everydayhealth.com and WebMD (Elliott, Web Site to Offer Health Advice, Some of It From Marketers).
Starting today, another web site they may be able to add to that list is Sharecare.com, an interactive health information web site that allows people to post health related questions, which will be answered by experts such as the American Cancer Society, the American Heart Association, the American Red Cross, AARP and Dr. Oz (Elliott).
However, Sharecare will also allow “knowledge partners,” such as Colgate-Palmolive, Ortho-McNeil-Janssen Pharmaceuticals, Pfizer, Unilever, UnitedHealthcare and Walgreens to answer questions and become official sponsors in exchange for paying Sharecare around $1 to $7 million (Elliott).
If that doesn’t cause you to be concerned, perhaps that fact that Dove will answer questions about the importance of good skin care and Pfizer will answer questions related to fibromyalgia and how to stop smoking, when two of its leading pharmaceuticals are Lyrica and Chantix, will change your mind (Elliott).
According to Sharecare, all answers supplied by the knowledge partners will be clearly labeled with both their names and logos (Elliott) to avoid confusion of consumers about which answers came from who, so that takes care of the transparency issue and more presence online through the use of social media does help foster an organization’s relationships with its publics, but I’m wondering if any of those Public Relations departments are worried that this behavior may be deceptive.
I am very curious to see what these knowledge partners’ ROI will be from participating on Sharecare; could there be a direct correlation between the number of questions they answer and their sales? It would also be interesting to conduct an experiment of Sharecare users to see if consumers can in fact tell the difference between questions answered by the experts and the knowledge partners. While the companies’ names and logos will appear on the screen, it may look very similar to online advertisements that show up in the banners and sidebars of many web sites.
What do you think? Is a company’s participation in Sharecare deceptive to consumers?
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