Just how useful is the new LinkedIn polling feature?

LinkedIn recently added a new polling feature to their business social networking site. While LinkedIn’s own blog touts this new feature as a way to finally tap into the minds of the highly coveted business professional segment, its seems to fall significantly short of this.
I have been hearing about Linkedin’s upcoming polling feature for a while now and was looking forward to the launch of this new application. After taking several polls and going through the features and capabilities, this tool lacks the ability to truly gain much insight into a business or delve into the minds of business professionals within a targeted segment. Allowing only one question to be asked simply does not provide any real opportunity to gain much insight. Instead, similar to Facebook’s polling tool, it seems to be less of a true research tool and more of a glorified general market surveying tool to which questions must be generic, similar to that of an MSN or CNN poll.

The major limitation of this tool is being sure those taking the survey are truly qualified. Even if you utilize the targeting features that are provided (which are job function, seniority, industry, gender, age and geography – all very nicely presented and easy to use), you have no way of being sure your poll is being answered by qualified respondents since there is no ability to ask pre-qualifying screening questions (i.e. correct company size range, has decision making authority for your product or services, etc.) . This type of feature is definitely needed when you consider surveying current or potential customers within your business market and therefore limits the type of questions you can ask.

As Tom H.C. Anderson pointed out in his blog on social networks and market research last year, this type of tool is not truly useful for gaining specific insights about your customers. Walking through the “Browse Polls” tab anyone can see that this tool is being used for exactly what its capabilities have allowed – selling services (i.e. Do you need flash design on your website?) or generic questions (i.e. What has happened to the value of your house this year?). I am not sure how either of these really gives you any special insight into any of the rich and robust information that business professionals have to offer. And as a LinkedIn member myself, these type of polls do not motivate me to participate and do not utilize any business knowledge I have gained over the years.

As more social networks move toward providing tools for companies to gain insight into target customers in the future, I hope they consider the true purpose of why people would want to poll these individuals, which is to gain real insight into your customers wants and needs so you can offer the best product for them, and how it relates to the customer segment they represent. In a time where online surveys pop up on almost every website, there needs to be a compromise between not overloading members with lengthy surveys but also allowing for truly insightful and valid surveys that can tap into the knowledge base their community has to offer.

With that being said, LinkedIn is sitting on a goldmine of respondents that are most likely very qualified and vetted given their LinkeIn profile. Using this source is most likely going to reduce the number of “bad” or “fake” business respondents and give one high quality respondents. What is lacking now is the tool to ask meaningful questions to these high quality respondents. I hope to see this come soon!

Have you used the LinkedIn polling tool? Has it been useful to your company in gaining insights into your customers’ actions, wants or needs?

Broader and bigger is not necessarily better

By the end of 2007, global active memberships in social network sites were expected to hit 230 million. Experts expect this growth to continue through 2008, peak in 2009, and then level out in 2012. Furthermore, it has been calculated that revenue generated from social networking sites will reach $965 million by 2007 and grow to an estimated $2.4 billion by 2012.

Currently the social networking market is dominated by MySpace (consisting of 57MM US members or 45% of US social networking members) and Facebook (consisting of 22MM or 17% of US social networking members) who comprise 62% of the US market.

Given that MySpace and Facebook have a virtual choke hold on the marketplace, and experts. Given the strength of MySpace and Facebook, experts believe that social networking will continue to grow and maintain its momentum; the opportunity in social networking will be in vertically aligned niche sites that have specific audiences and a specific mission. These vertically aligned sites will need to integrate into the more broad-based sites like Facebook and MySpace, thus using these as a platform and not an end result.

I think the reason for this is that broad social networks like MySpace and Facebook are so big and so general; it is hard for the user (let alone the advertiser) to find the type of content that is really compelling to them. Sure, there are search capabilities on the networks and people create groups, but the overall sites have so much content and such a broad basis simply due to the number of people on the social network that specific vertical niches often get lost, which inherently de-values the impact of the people within those niches.

A vertical niche can be very powerful as well for advertisers as it provides them with a much higher quality lead as they have already shown an interest in the advertiser’s market. In these cases, I believe advertisers should not be so hung up on the pure numbers, but rather the type of content and the crowd effect of having ALL the members interested in the same topic.

For instance, my family is a horse family. My wife rides, my daughter rides, my sister-in-law trains horses, my mother-in-law owns a tack shop, and my father-in-law is on the board of the Texas Hunter-Jumper Association. All of this and I am severely allergic to horses. So I could be a part of my family’s passion, I decided to do something I know about, I started a social horse network (not going to plug it though as this is not the point).

The site was meant more as a hobby and to potentially connect a few horse enthusiasts (try not to say horse lovers as that brings some very unusual sites to the top of the list on Google). However, with nearly no budget, the site has grown to be 1100+ members in just a few months. Most of these come from Facebook as they were made aware of the site via some very cheap ($5/day) advertising and a Facebook application. Now my users spend more time on my horse network than they do on Facebook (according to the members). The reason for this is that the site is totally dedicated to their passion, which should be the highly motivating to advertisers.

So, from my perspective, going out and trying to compete with a Facebook or MySpace is a stuff chore these days, however, if the social network is vertically aligned and narrowly focused, there could be a lot of room for growth in the network.