Sixty million executives can’t be wrong
Jinfo Blog

7th April 2010

By Tim Buckley Owen

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It sometimes seems as if LinkedIn can do no wrong. But it’s just received a small setback that, once again, raises questions about how best to harness the power of social networking for business. Just as the FT recently quietly pulled the plug on its semantic based news aggregator Newssift (http://www.vivavip.com/go/e28229), now LinkedIn has apparently done the same to its business-to-business market research sample offering. Reporting the news publicly, the Research-Live website of MRS – the United Kingdom based society for market researchers – spoke of LinkedIn originally ‘boasting of its ability to provide researchers with easy access to IT and business decision-makers’, who were ‘much in demand for survey purposes’ (http://digbig.com/5bbjqw). But it clearly hasn’t happened, and market research consultant Tom Anderson of Anderson Analytics, who originally broke the news on his blog, suggested that, for LinkedIn, the money to be made from surveying wasn’t worth the effort (http://digbig.com/5bbjqx). However another market research blogger, Tom Ewing of Kantar, stated that LinkedIn had exercised a lot of control over how the surveys could be carried out, providing apparently excellent sample but very little flexibility (http://digbig.com/5bbjqy and navigate to 26 March). Perhaps LinkedIn was right to do that. At the other extreme you have Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg at the Davos World Economic Forum a year ago, demonstrating how near instant polling of thousands of Facebook members might sidestep the cost of commissioning market research or the logistics associated with setting up focus groups – but without any apparent regard for whether the results were representative or the sample appropriately weighted (http://www.vivavip.com/go/e16446). Responsible market researchers would run a mile from such a crudely fashioned tool. But the polling organisation Harris has successfully collaborated with LinkedIn on executive surveying and produced some extraordinarily valuable market data as a result – so it can be done (http://www.vivavip.com/go/e22830). Infogroup’s market research subsidiary Opinion Research Corporation certainly believes it can. Earlier this year it teamed up with Mzinga, a ‘leader in social software, services and analytics for business’, in a bid to jointly deliver market research online community solutions (http://digbig.com/5bbjrb). The partners do talk of cost savings. But they also speak of complementing more traditional research initiatives, indicating that their joint reputations will rest at least as much on the quality of their results as on their ability to exploit social media. Clearly, use of online communities for surveying purposes will continue to grow exponentially – and it may also be tempting for bosses and the information managers who support them to come up with do-it-yourself solutions. But perhaps LinkedIn’s strategic withdrawal should serve as a timely warning that, convenient as your LinkedIn connections may appear to be as an instant survey group, traditional principles of polling still apply.

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