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Nip, Lift and Talk
Concordia University Magazine - March 2002 Issue - Alumni Profile
Talksurgery.com is where (mostly) women go for online advice on cosmetic surgery
Does size also matter at Talksurgery. com? For the Montreal-based cosmetic surgery info site, not as much as you might think. Noses, breasts, tummies and, yes, penises all can be altered, but Talksurgery doesn't blindly promote going under the knife. It tries to help readers make informed decisions about whether or not surgery is right for them. Eimile Robertson, BFA 93, together with Afsun Qureshi and Dejan Macesic, founded Talksurgery.com in 1998 to provide the patients' perspective of cosmetic surgery, something decidedly lacking on the web until Talksurgery hit the scene.
"The users who come to our site are essentially getting all the information they need, and this is an area that we felt really had to be addressed, " says Robertson. "There wasn't a lot of credible information out there on the web, and then there were a few places where you could get very technical, very medical stuff, but very little in between," she says.
Talksurgery provides a very readable mix of articles, doctor's advice and procedural information, as well as personal stories from people who've been through it, and a helpful pain- o- meter. Readers - 80 per cent of them female - find everything from run- of -the - mill facelifts and breast reduction to more exotic procedures like penis enlargement and calf implants (for those who've run out of body parts to work on). The information provided for each procedure is thorough and understandable, letting potential patients know exactly what they're in for.
Of course, Talksurgery is still a business and still depends on drawing traffic. It needs the numbers to sell advertising space and web marketing services to physicians and companies in the industry. Traffic is the reason that picture-perfect icons like Faith Hill and Elizabeth Hurley appear on the home page. "People are really interested in celebrities," says Robertson. "That's our common reference point. Everybody knows who Catherine Zeta-Jones is, and there's a certain mass appeal that's important. " Robertson adds, "We don't talk down to our users, but we don't think it's bad to have an aspect to our site that's like People. Making it fun, making it light; it doesn't have to be really serious." To make sure it gets the search engine results it's after, Talksurgery even managed to work a picture of Osama bin Laden onto its homepage. But no, he's not considering an eyelift.
Talksurgery's comprehensive and entertaining approach to content caught the eye of one of Canada's top portal sites, Canoe.ca, which now features Talksurgery in the health section of its web site, providing Talksurgery a big boost in visibility.
Did the dot-com crash scare them? Robertson is philosophical. "The Internet's not going to disappear, and this is good information that we're offering," she says. "People are still going to go online, and health has outpaced porn and sex as sought-after online topics.
Rhonda Mullins
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