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LinkedIn Launches Into Polls With Beta

Important Details: Last week, in a LinkedIn blog post, associate product manager Elizabeth Reaves announced one of the first LinkedIn Polls. The question, posed for and paid for by presidential candidate Senator John McCain, a LinkedIn member, asks “What has the most long-term potential to make gas affordable for Americans?”. The LinkedIn polling product, currently in beta, enables access to the site’s network of 23 million professionals. Those who answer a question are then shown a current summary of results, in addition to a breakdown of those results by user type (such as business owners, C-Level executives/VPs, managers, and general employees). LinkedIn is working with a number of partners interested in using the polling product to do research, and is also soliciting for partners during this beta phase via an e-mail link in the blog. The company’s plan is to allow everyone to be able to poll their own network, create, target and publish polls on LinkedIn.

Implications: Outsell’s recent report on Social Communities & Expert Networks in B2B (6 June 2008) cites LinkedIn as the best example of the power of social networks in the professional sector. The company has been rising quite fast in the professional sector (see Insights, 24 April 2008, LinkedIn Leaps Out). We have also noted the move of social communities towards polling products including Facebook’s polling announcement last year (see Insights, 14 June 2007, Facebook Polls Launched To Base of 24 Million Active Users).

Peanut Labs was one of the first online survey sample firms to use social communities and online communities as the core of the recruitment strategy for its online sample. Social communities continue to look for ways to monetize their networks and polling and market research is but one avenue. Although the polls are not necessarily statistically significant, they continue to deliver what we call “good enough” research, or research that would have never been done otherwise. They also provide an avenue of interest for their members as users love to take polls given their simplicity and the instant gratification of a quick answer to a simple question. We continue to see innovation in the market research and polling areas that are capturing this latest social network craze.

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