Tom H. C. Anderson - Next Gen Market Research

What if John McCain was running against Sarah Palin and you had to choose among just one of them? Whom would you choose? A somewhat silly/dumb question, but because of social networks like Facebook it can be answered rather easily, albeit perhaps not very scientifically.

The poll above was asked last night among n=100 random Facebook users. The margin of error then is technically +/-9.8%, but there are some other serious considerations. I would definitely not call this a scientific poll. Instead it was used to win a friendly wager with someone about how popular Palin is vs McCain..

Though I won’t go into more detail about the bet, the interesting thing is that Facebook can make these kinds of convenience polls rather quick and inexpensive. However, in my quest to understand social networks better and more importantly to understand different ways they can be leveraged for marketing and market research I’ve discovered some serious problems with the polling tool available on Facebook. I plan on blogging in more detail about these findings very soon.

For now let me just say that if you are planning on running a serious poll (like the GenX2Z poll I posted about the other day), I would suggest using more carefully recruited sample.

Has anyone else experimented with Facebook for MR?