LinkedIn is the best universe for executives for research because almost everyone has a LinkedIn profile. We also verify someone's business e-mail address against their Linkedin profile. For high value B to B research, it is the only way to be a 100% certain that a VP or a CXO is who they say they are. Traditional quality measures are valuable, but often times companies limit open-ends in B-to-B studies precisely because they know the open-end will show quality problems that would not otherwise be revealed. These are also the kind of respondents with whom you would want to do depth interviews on the back end of a quantitative study. We have a platform that sits on top of LinkedIn that allows us to laser target based on company name, industry, title, # of employees, etc. While LinkedIn recruiting is expensive, blending a few targeted respondents from LinkedIn with legacy high-quality B to B sources can pay big dividends. In B-to-B research, a single company may account for the disproportionate amount of the category spend. Because of this, the inclusion of that company may make or break the credibility of that data set. Depending on the study, we may be able to ensure representation from targeted companies of interest, and this can be a key source of differentiation for you in selling B to B studies.
We will allow respondents to paste their LinkedIn profile URL in our survey or pre-screener if the client is programming and our technology will put the respondent in one of 3 buckets. Red means the job responsibilities of the respondent are too different from their LinkedIn profile. Yellow requires manual review. Red means they are excluded from participation. On average, over half of respondents are excluded from B to B panels when panels allow us to use the technology.