Why Social Networking is Killing the Traditional Survey

TechCrunch announced today that LinkedIn is going to begin its own ad network. Non-personally-identifiable information about users' age, income, education, etc will be placed into cookies that will be shared with partnering sites to help target certain ads based on a user's profile.

This is quite similar to the idea that I discussed last month about advertising based on financial profiles. The premise of my idea is to develop an exceptionally "sticky" personal finance website that would make assumptions about its users based on their financial transactions and then advertise appropriately.

Networking sites are starting to understand that their users are spending an incredible amount of time online, entering terabytes of their personal information in hopes of developing a new life-changing business or social relationship. The more useful features that these sites develop, the more information they'll be able to obtain about their users. For instance, if Facebook were to place a mapping feature on their users' photos albums (like Picasa has), they could see where their users travel and sell that information to local advertisers.

Back in the 90s, companies would try to obtain this kind of information by sending its customers index cards that asked questions about income, address, etc. Retail stored would ask for a zip code or area code to find where its customers were coming from.

Today, social networking sites are becoming Survey Central, and their users may not even realize it. By sites developing new features that are perceived as useful/fun/cool for users, they're opening a door into yet another dimension of personal information. By providing users with a useful or fun product, sites can collect the honest, accurate information that traditional survey adminstrators couldn't dream of. Take LinkedIn for example. As many join the site in hopes of being discovered by the Donald or at least scoring a lucrative business deal, their descriptions of their work experience are likely to be pretty accurate. Just as most people place reasonably accurate and verifiable information on their resumes, the professionals on LinkedIn will enter similarly accurate information into their profiles.

Social Networking sites should work with their key advertisers to figure out what information would be the most valuable to them and develop "back-door" applications and features to try and extract that information. Bars in New York City may be interested in advertising to Facebook users that are between 21 and 28, live in NYC, and have listed their interests to be "partyin" "drinkin" "gonig out" or "chillin." A government contractor looking to fill a handful of positions might ask LinkedIn to advertise the positions to users that log in frequently, are interested in job offers (a metric tracked on LinkedIn), and have at least five years of experience working for the federal government.

Because of user-created content on social networking sites, the way that companies collect data is doing a complete 180. Instead of asking 20 specific questions in a survey and deducing a conclusion about the participant, companies can inductively analyze a collection of user-provided data and target groups and demographics based on a predetermined strategy. Because of the nature of social networking sites, potential customers are already answering unasked questions. Now all advertisers need to do are figure out how to ask the questions and fill in the answers accordingly.

The death of letter writing

Every once in a while I'll hear a friend, family member, or colleague bring up the fact that letter writing, a once beautiful communication platform, has since been slain and replaced by email and instant messaging. I myself remember hand writing letters to my best out-of-town friends when I was a kid, mostly those who had moved away from Cooperstown or caught my eye at summer camp. A trip to the mailbox in my adolescent days certainly had a different feel than it does today. But I dare say that even though today's peer-to-peer messages don't have the ink smears, stickers, lipstick prints or the other qualities that we loved about letters, our social relationships with one another continue to thrive and our understanding of each others' thoughts, feelings, and plans for the future has only improved.

Though handwritten letters may have gone the way of the milkman, our capacity for communication has scaled proportionately with our improving infrastructure and technology. As the internet flourishes, so do social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook, adding thousands of new users daily. And with more people to talk to, our personalized messages to one another have transformed from elegant & personal to lowercase & efficient. But I don't necessarily view this as a bad thing.

When I wrote letters to long lost friends and family members, a majority of their content comprised of updates about my everyday activities: who I was hanging out with, where I had gone on vacation, where I was working, and what music I was listening to. These details weren't customized for the recipient, but they were nonetheless important. Today, those "Scott-specific" life details that I want to share with everyone are delivered by a single Facebook profile instead of by dozens of of individual letters.

Because of the inherent redundancy of the essential common, non-personalized details, letter writing was an inefficient way of meeting our "keeping-in-touch" communication needs. It was a time consuming process that forced us to either make extra time for writing or pick and choose our recipients. Now, the substance of our messages can be more relevant and customized for each friend, as much of the overhead is handled by our online bulletin boards. This lets us keep in touch with more people with less effort.

A criticized downside of our current forms of electronic communication is the degraded quality of individual messages; we don't write with the same beauty and prose as our ancestors. However, I believe that our beautiful, prosaic writing has simply shifted to another platform. As technology enables me to share my photos, status updates, profile information, and efficient instant messages with my friends, I am able to concentrate my real writing elsewhere. The way I see it, real writing is far from its death. And the capabilities of electronic socialization combined with our ability to communicate with more people compensate for potentially lower quality language and grammar in our personalized messages.

After all, why do most of us communicate with our friends? To impress them with acrobatic linguistics? Or to tell them what we're up to, consult them for advice, and remind them that we care?