blog.msurveys.com

TechCrunch has a post called "The New Focus Group", mentioning two companies offering "white-label social networks to consumer research": Mzinga and Networked Insights. These offerings let "companies create a place on their sites where customers can hang out and talk about their products".

While this sounds interesting in some ways, I do wonder how many brands out there would have a chance in hell of carrying this off. Perhaps I'm the only one feeling a certain social networking ennui - but I certainly would much rather engage with brands in my existing social networking context (if I felt like engaging with brands at all), rather than joining yet another site somewhere.

Now that pretty much all the social networking sites are starting to open up to outside content (see Facebook apps and OpenSocial), I do wonder why not more people are looking at taking advantage of existing social networks, rather than providing the tools for creating custom ones. While this is technically not too difficult, I think it's not easy to create a "community" top-down, so I do have my reservations about these kinds of corporate-driven "let's create a social network around our brand" efforts. I just can't see average people flocking to these places just for the benefit of "talking about a brand's product". Embedding this kind of community inside my existing social network surely has a much better chance of succeeding?

Following on from my post about Google's OpenSocial announcement I've finally sat down to play with it, and implemented a bare-bones panel management app in the same vein as my Facebook prototype.

Again, this panel management and recruitment functionality could (and typically probably would) be part of some more specific, interest- or community-based application, which can then be embedded into pretty much any social networking site, including MySpace and Bebo once they fully start supporting it (full list of OpenSocial partners here).

For now, Ning and Orkut have implemented sandbox areas for OpenSocial, so I've taken some screenshots of both - remember this is the same OpenSocial/NetPanel2 application, just embedded in different social networking sites. The actual functionality is the same as the Facebook prototype, i.e. when a user adds the application to their profile, they get automatically added to the panel in GMI's NetPanel2, and as panel owner you can then communicate with your users through the embedded app, including sending survey invites, handling and redeeming incentives, etc. etc.

Here's two screenshots showing the application on Ning, the initial screen telling the user that there's a new survey, and the survey screen with the list of surveys and the link to take part.



... and here's the exact same two screens, but this time embedded in Orkut rather than Ning:



So... the combination of GMI's NetPanel2 and Google's OpenSocial allows for market research panel recruitment and management functionality to be embedded inside specific applications targetted at pretty much all the major social networking sites. Am I the only one that thinks this could be powerful stuff?

Google announced their OpenSocial API yesterday - making it a competitor to Facebook in the API/apps stakes. This API makes it possible to build applications for most of the major social networking sites (see here for a full list of launch partners, including MySpace) without having to re-write things for each site.

In turn, this means we should be able to integrate GMI panel management and recruitment features into all these sites, using just one application (with some CSS and UI tweaks for each of the sites) in the same way my facebook prototype works.