LinkedIn Begins Market Survey Business

By Doug Caverly - Sun, 10/26/2008 - 01:05

Money and gift cards make the world go 'round

Tuesdays and Wednesdays tend not to be too special, but LinkedIn's having a profitable midweek. Yesterday, the company announced that it had received $22.7 million in funding. Today, it launched LinkedIn Surveys.

LinkedIn Surveys aims to let market researchers contact and question LinkedIn users. That means around 30 million well-defined professionals are on tap, and as LinkedIn's always happy to point out, these people tend to enjoy better positions and higher salaries than the MySpace and Facebook crowds.

Users will get offered gift cards from places like Amazon and Starbucks in exchange for their participation. Or, in a nice touch, they'll be able to make donations to charities. And LinkedIn should simply receive an undisclosed amount of money from researchers for facilitating the whole thing.

Now, for the ramifications. Since every company is in a perpetual state of wanting more money, this method of looking for income in a new place needn't be taken as a sign that the online economy is collapsing. Moreover, since LinkedIn has run tests with six firms, LinkedIn Surveys obviously isn't a spur-of-the-moment effort.

LinkedIn's sure to enjoy the fruits of the deal, though, and if you happen to have a LinkedIn profile, we'd encourage you to keep an eye out for survey offers so that you can do the same.

News Tags: Social Media, LinkedIn Surveys, LinkedIn

About the author:
Doug is a staff writer for WebProNews. Visit WebProNews for the latest eBusiness news.

5 Comments

By used acura nsx (WPN reader) - Fri, 04/03/2009 - 18:02

Users will get offered gift

By Peter Monroe (WPN reader) - Fri, 10/24/2008 - 13:31

Gah. I really don't want

Gah. I really don't want to be forever prompted to fill out surveys when I access my linked-in account. What a pain.

By Jennifer (WPN reader) - Fri, 10/24/2008 - 12:55

Linkedin is really a job site

Linkedin was included into the About.com Top 10 job site list but linkedin is still the only social network on the list though.....the newest 3 on the list are-

www.linkedin.com (professional networking)
www.indeed.com (aggregated listings)
www.realmatch.com (matches you to the perfect job)

Complete top 10 job site list here:
http://jobsearch.about.com/od/joblistings/tp/jobbanks.htm

By Danny Brown (WPN reader) - Fri, 10/24/2008 - 11:40

Are We Talking About the Same LinkedIn?

This is the same company that was looking for around $26 million to keep going, right? So they're still short?

I also think they'll find the survey to be a white elephant - the higher up a chain someone is, the less inclined they are to answer (or even read) such things.

It seems LinkedIn is falling ever further behind with relevance in the current social media-led world.

By Ian Hendry (WPN reader) - Fri, 10/24/2008 - 04:49