Is there anyone out there who is leveraging social networking technology for research? It seems like there’s a lot of research out there on it, but who’s taking advantage of it? With a little imagination, it doesn’t seem hard to find some uses. Let’s start with an easy one: Twitter.

Where I work, we’re doing a study where we monitor a group of participants for 4 years. They come to the clinic every 4 weeks to have their blood drawn and fill out a survey. We also monitor their symptoms. It’s a study on mononucleosis. None of these participants have been exposed yet. We’re waiting to see when they are exposed. We want to see how sick they get and what the risk factors are.

Now every 2 weeks I send them a reminder to log in to our website and report any symptoms they may be having at the time. (It’s a simple little homebrewed application I developed. Thank you very much.) The process is fairly painless and once you’ve done it once, you can generally complete it in under a minute.

What if we used Twitter (or a Twitter-like tool) to do the same thing? Study participants follow a department profile. Once every two weeks a tweet goes out that says, “Have a sore throat? Fatigue? Swollen or Tender glands? Reply ‘d @truetone yes’”. We’d reach participants wherever they are instantly. No waiting until they are tethered to a computer.

In this case, the immediacy is not all that necessary. But I’m sure there is research out there where it could be beneficial. Doing marketing research? What better way to instantaneously compile data? What better way to instantaneously disseminate data? See where I’m headed?

There’s a lot of talk in marketing about engaging consumers. What if we frame research in marketing terms? I know of at least one department at The Big U that already does mass mailings. Let’s bring that into the 21st century. I’m just saying, with a little imagination, we can take advantage of some really fun, cutting edge technology. It may be more than just novel. It may be important.

Last week, I went on a total spree signing up for sites in beta. A lot of new social media sites and other sites I thought might be cool or useful. Then I went to openpeople.us and signed up. (I’m not linking to them, because I don’t want anyone who may read this to actually sign up. Do so at your own risk.) It seemed like just another social networking site. It had the typical “friend finder” application that lets you enter your Gmail account info to see if any of your contacts have accounts at the site. But instead of allowing me to opt in to invite my friends, the application just sent a message to every…single…contact I have inviting them to the site and signed the e-mail as if it came from me.

Today it sent another message to all of those who had the nerve to ignore the original request. I can only guess that it will probably do so at least one more time before the invite “expires”. I logged in today and could find no way to stop it or delete the invitations.

Sorry to all my friends who I’ve inadvertently spammed. That was not my intent. I’m going to be much more careful where I point my betas from now on. Lesson learned.