Peanut Labs Offers Social Media Surveys For Peanuts

Peanut Labs is a one-year-old company that offers a survey marketplace for social media services. Peanut Labs matches companies looking for data with their user profiles and can send the survey to the right people on Facebook, MySpace, etc. The company claims they are the largest supplier of surveys to the Gen-Y market. What's interesting about Peanut Labs is that they are basically a middleman - they don't create the surveys, nor do they own the social media sites, they just connect the two.

I spoke with Peanut Labs' CEO, Murtaza Hussain to learn more about the company. He began by explaining that Peanut Labs works with 25 of the top 50 market research firms and over 60 of the Fortune 500 companies. Last month over 1 million users took a survey that they brokered.

What's interesting about the way Peanut Labs works is that the user who completes the survey never receives cash - only "peanuts". Peanuts are electronic items like Facebook gifts , iTunes giftcards, etc. Murtaza and I spent a lot of time discussing cash versus gifts as a payment method for completing a survey. Murtaza noted that his company has run many tests to see whether cash or gifts work better in terms of data research. What he found is that when cash was offered, all of the surveys resulted in lower data quality than when they provided users with a gift. He went on to say that when an online survey pays in cash, it drives massive fake entries. He explained that massive survey factories are setup in China just to have the employees sit and fill in fake surveys all day to appear as Americans to get the cash.

Peanut Labs has 50 full-time staff (wow) with 30 in the U.S. and 20 offshore. The company has raissed $4.5 million in venture capital to-date.