The market research possibilities on Facebook are amazing.
- Need to ask a targeted demographic a few key questions? Run a poll for pennies a response. You'll have your answer in a few hours.
- Want to test an offer? Buy a flyer… again for pennies a response. Within a few hours, you'll have accurate click through numbers.
- Need some qualitative data? Forget about focus groups. Just ask a selection of people in your target audience via messages.
At one time in my career I ran a market research group for Microsoft with an annual budget in the millions. Testing product concepts, and advertising can easily cost tens of thousands of dollars to get the most basic results. For our FREE Conference Calling application on Facebook, we've done product concepts, messaging and offer testing for a few hundred dollars.
Innoculate, culture, and read the results… Facebook is a petrie dish… for marketers, that is.
Alec Saunders is the Vice President of Developer Relations for BlackBerry maker Research in Motion. This is his personal blog, with his personal viewpoints. Prior to this Alec was the CEO and co-founder of Calliflower — the easiest way to hold a meeting, online, on a conference call, or on the go. A double-decade veteran of product management and marketing, he spent nine years at Microsoft where he helped launch Windows 95, the first two versions of Internet Explorer, the Universal Plug and Play initiative, the push into home markets, opt-in email marketing and what might well go down in history as the very first direct email list ever.
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Don't tell that to the students who enjoyed Facebook in the last years as virtual extension of their campus where all the old and uncool people had to stay out.
What has become of Facebook? A Petri dish for marketeers?
"Screw you!", would be their answer.
They're the ones answering the questions Markus… seems they don't care!