Social Network Researcher to Pay Peanuts

A new US company will profile members of social networking sites and provide market researchers with access to them. The firm, Peanut Labs, says the approach will deliver the 'sought after, but hard to reach' 13-25 year-olds known as 'Generation Y'.

Co-founder and Chief Executive Murtaza Hussain set up social network firm Xuqa two years ago to provide a platform where researchers could conduct surveys among members. Peanut Labs offers an extension of Xuqa's survey technology, which the firm says can now integrate with any social network or online community site.

The company embeds surveys into other networking sites, and sells the resulting data to market researchers as well as to firms that sell market data.

Users complete an initial questionnaire to determine their interests, and from this, Peanut Labs targets them with relevant surveys which they complete in exchange for points or benefits ('peanuts'). They can choose how often they want to be notified of new survey and Hussain says that about 10% of users on partner sites take the initial questionnaire, with 25% of them taking the surveys.

The company already has 60 sites publishing its surveys, including LiveJournal, OkCupid, Second Life Google's OpenSocial and Facebook, and Hussain says it reaches more than 20 million users.

Based in San Francisco, Peanut Labs is a member of the ARF's Online Research Quality Council and is on the net at www.peanutlabs.com.