Tom Anderson’s blog reports on LinkedIn’s decision to discontinue its B2B sample product. Tom puts the blame squarely on the MR industry’s lack of innovation - the margins just weren’t there for LinkedIn, and that’s because researchers weren’t willing to compromise their long 30 minute surveys for LinkedIn’s higher quality sample and innovative product.
I suspect this is only half the story. My evidence is only anecdotal, but I talked to a couple of people who’d used - or tried to use - LI samples at the ESOMAR online conference last year and they were sceptical: LinkedIn exercised a LOT of control over the questions asked, the formatting, the type of questions, and so on - not simply over length. The LinkedIn product offered apparently excellent sample but also very little flexibility.
Tom asks - “what serious business person has 30 minutes of time to waste on a survey for an Amazon certificate?” and of course he’s quite right. Which is why pretty much all the good B2B researchers I know rely on the in depth telephone or F2F interview. No serious business person is going to dick about for 30 minutes on a survey but I’ve also never met a business person who didn’t love talking about their work and who didn’t feel passionate about it. But to get to that passion you have to be able to ask the right questions and feel your way to the ones that aren’t working, A 30 minute survey is a desperately blunt instrument for that: a 5 minute one, tightly circumscribed by the sample provider, is even blunter.
So LinkedIn Surveys’ doom is as much down to it being the wrong product as to MR’s lack of innovation. But there’s a wider picture here. The reason LinkedIn exercised tight control over its surveys was a very sensible one - the only product a social network has is its users (and the data and networks they create). But selling this product directly - i.e. in a way that compromises the user experience or creates a reluctance to provide more data - is a disaster. It has to be exploited indirectly. Survey-based research is dangerously close to the ‘direct’ area and (unlike advertising) the money isn’t worth the risk. Market Research that uses the dynamics of social networks well won’t look very much like surveys.
