Tom H. C. Anderson - Next Gen Market Research

Facebook and Linkedin to Offer Market Research? 

It seems like the natural second monetizing scheme many dot-coms think of. First Advertising then Market Research. That was the case for me back in 2000 at the beginning of the dotcom boom. I was hired by Snowball.com (now IGN.com) to help start a market research vertical Iquestics.com. It was to be a new profit center, and we had about 1 year to do it before the VC money ran out (that was my own financial analysis which was off only by about a month). Snowball.com had 14 million 13-30 year old unique visitors per month then. It seemed to make sense to add market research on as a second revenue source after advertising. While we were able to get a few clients like AE, Visa, Microsoft, it wasn’t enough, fast enough. However, marketing research takes time to implement correctly.

Last week someone from Linkedin asked to set up a call with me to discuss market research on Linkedin. They were interested in speaking to a few of the better connected consumer insights professionals in the Linkedin group “Next Gen Marketing Research“. It seems they may very soon be making a “market research” (polling) function available much like what Facebook has been offering now for nearly a year.

For those not aware of Facebook polls it allows users to pay per response to ask a single question. You are limited to 5 answers. There are no other question types. You can filter sample by interests, gender, age, or location. Even these few filters are limited and you can not apply multiple filters. For instance, it is technically not possible to select females and age 13-17 at the same time. Also choices like location are limited to individual states or smaller countries (Luxembourg, Sweden). You can not select USA for instance.

Therefore this polling tool is not useful for actual consumer insights projects I work on. Though I have found it useful to flush out some ideas for proposals, or prior to giving a talk/speech on youth research (GenX2Z).

I think it will be interesting to see if Facebook and Linkedin will be able to provide more robust consumer insights tools to us in the future. For now though Anderson Analytics and other research firms will need to continue to build their own panels which contain users of these systems. There are a few ways to do this including advertising, or working with application developers (on Facebook).

Has anyone else used the Facebook polling? Do you think Linkedin and Facebook will be able to provide useful market research products to us? If so, what would you first most like to see available?

-Tom

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