Member-only story
Social Media
Why Are You Working for Free?
Through social media, personality quizzes, product reviews, and opinion polls, corporations are profiting off your labor
How many times have you gotten an email asking you to rate your experience with a customer service rep? How often do vendors ask you to evaluate a product or service? After you visit a hotel, doesn’t management invariably follow up with a short survey about your stay?
These activities are marketing research, and it’s a job. Whenever you participate in this research, you become an unpaid asset to the company that made the request.
In the 1920s, a psychologist named Daniel Starch came up with some methods to measure advertising effectiveness. Starch hired people to go door-to-door and ask folks if they remembered seeing a particular newspaper advertisement and, if they had, what their reaction to it was. This process allowed advertisers to find out what kinds of ads were most effective.
Starch’s method would be impractical today, but it did create jobs. Jobs that companies can now get you to do for nothing. Even better, in the comfort of your LazyBoy recliner, you’ll be more likely to answer longer surveys with more questions that can take up five or ten minutes of your time…
