Éirinn go Brách! It’s about that time of year: time for everyone in the US to guzzle green beer, pin shamrocks to their lapels, wear green (or get pinched), and quite possibly get very drunk. Lab42, an online market research and survey company, took it into its own hands to determine what social networkers were doing for this upcoming St. Patrick’s Day.

They only managed to survey 405 people, an extremely low population for the type of information they’re gathering, so the results are rather questionable—however, they’re still quite fun. So what do people who use social networking sites think about St. Patrick’s?

90% of them intend to celebrate the day dedicated to Ireland’s patron saint—the 10% who don’t expect to see drunken masses, don’t really consider it a holiday, or may simply celebrate by purchasing a shamrock shake from McDonalds. Of the surveyed, 61% love St. Patrick’s Day, leaving 36% who simply like it, and only 3% who actually don’t really like it—nobody seems to hate it. And, almost 94% will at least try to wear green.

My grandfather always told me that Irish is dominant—any Irish and you’re 100% Irish. 53% of the respondents to the survey consider themselves Irish nationality. (I myself am well over half-Irish ethnically.) Almost a third of whom have 1/3^rd Irish ancestry with almost a quarter with more than a half, and finally near a sixth who are almost full blooded Irishmen and Irishwomen.

It looks like out of t-shirts, those supporting being drunk and displaying shamrocks will be the highest in volume—whereas the Irish flag itself receives the lowest support in total.

Social networks are largely becoming a barometer for culture, especially for the United States, and the ability to mine them for information can be a huge boon for marketers. A multitude of survey companies have cropped up who promise to give a cross-section of audiences there. Many of the social networking sites take this to heart—in fact, Facebook is well known for the amount of spam they deluge their users with—and the best way to get that information is to survey the users.

I wonder how statistically relevant the information gathered would be if it came out of one of those viral online quiz gimmicks. I swear, those are an untapped gold mine of ethnographic information; although, when the quiz is obviously a marketing ploy, users seem to sense that and shy away from them.