Sunday, November 8, 2009

A very painful day, as I didn’t go to sleep until about 10 in the morning and only for four hours.  It’s an atrocious idea to do detail-oriented tasks (such as mass-survey mailings) when you can hardly remember you own name.  Next time, sleep first.

1. Upgraded SurveyMonkey account to pro
2. Sent out 1st batch of the “Self-Identifier” survey (to some 1,000+ people, got about a 10% response rate so far.  Really wish there was more representation from Africa, Asia and the Middle East.)
3. Asked Lillian to find out with whom I should talk with at God’s Love We Deliver (they deliver meals in NYC to bed-ridden patients) about getting professional Volunteers
4. Researching and pulling together financials for the foundation’s operations
5. Wrote to Clive from One Brick (a non-profit in the US that provides volunteers for other non-profits to gain a better understanding of the operational and financial aspects involved in running a non-profit
6. Talked with Maureen (friend in Toronto) about getting help from some of her friends (one who works as a human-rights attorney and another who had non-profit and grant-proposal writing experience.

Saturday, November 07, 2009

Thought I would give myself the day off, but the problem about having an idea you really believe in is that it really sucks you in sometimes.

1. Thought more in detail about the “slice of life” segment and registration forms
2. Saw the SocialVibe widget on WordPress and e-mailed them about the possibility of partnering up
3. Added more pages to the blog (“Get involved” and “Rate this blog”)
4. Created customized payment page for Paypal
5. Created and posted the “Donate” button
6. Updated notes on website components
7. Edited foundation business plan presentation
8. Updated to-do list

I really wish I had seen this before I collected 500 survey responses about our ordering system WITHOUT being able to connect them to an order number.  It turns out you can pass a custom value into the URL of a SurveyMonkey survey:

SurveyMonkey Help Center – Answers

To customize them, create a unique ID ending for each respondent by adding “&c=” at the end of the link followed by the ID number.

EX: &c=00001
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=v8MbvURxoHkWfvud7Or3Cg_3d_3d&c=00001

When I tried to register for the first time in the site www.surveymonkey.com I come across a few interesting UI pattern.

www.surveymonkey.com registration form

Few interesting things about this form design,

• Labels are bold, prominent and right aligned.
• Input box blue border and light yellow background attracts the user’s eyes towards the where they to act on.
• Clear inline help messages (Up to 50 characters, no white space).  It’s for better than allowing people enter data with white space and then while submitting the form giving an error message.
• Font size clearly show the importance of the text.
• The horizontal gray line is guiding the user that the to portion is the area where the user has to enter data and the bottom area is to act (Click).
• Links are prominent, clear, bold and blue in color.
• “Create a new account” button is definitely have more importance than the cancel button. The yellow color is playing its role to convey the importance to the users.

One more interesting helping mechanism is, if you try to click anywhere on the page (without entering data in any of the form fields) it immediately changes the text box border color to red.

One more interesting helping mechanism is, if you try to click anywhere on the page (without entering data in any of the form fields) it immediately changes the text box border color to red.

Ik ben al volop bezig aan mijn GIP. Onlangs typte ik een artikel met de vraag op welke manier je het liefst de actualiteit volgt. Aangezien mijn GIP onderwerp “media & Journalistiek” is, dacht ik dit onderzoekje te houden voor mijn GIP en dit nog een beetje uitgebreider te maken. Vandaag stelde ik een enquête op. Aangezien ik vele antwoorden wil om mijn onderzoekje zo representatief mogelijk te maken, heb ik zojuist de enquête op het net geplaatst. Nu wil ik met een heel lief en smekend gezichtje vragen of jullie die enquête ook eens willen invullen. Ze telt maar 9 vragen, dus héél snel ingevuld. Alvast bedankt!

Hier is de link:

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspxsm=L078antvzBux4UjRIafSpA_3d_3d

Here are the surveys that were made during the workshop:

interest in swine flu vaccine

Taking additional English courses at TS

CLIL in Primary

Shopping strategies

and one more:

Working across cultures

Our annual survey of Volunteer Managers is now under way. If you involve volunteers please will you spend no more than 5 – 10 minutes to complete the seven questions in the survey:

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=JW7Pzo_2fo8GR2SA29kCXdsg_3d_3d

If you have already completed the survey, a big thank you for helping us to improve our service to you.

We will be making contact with everyone who has asked us to on the survey form, but please don’t wait for us to call you; get in touch with the Volunteer Centre team on 01283 550163 or by email.

Karen E. Klein of BusinessWeek Online writes about How To Use Social Media To Promote Your Business. She mentions running polls for customer research, prospecting and promoting special offers using Web 2.0 applications such as Facebook, Ning, Twitter and SurveyMonkey.

The article describes how businesses can combine traditional marketing communications techniques with Social Media to promote products and services.

Businesses can also use Social Media to extend their ’servicescape’ (create an alternative place for consumers and businesses to experience their brand) to build relationships, learn more about their customers and drive product and service development as part of their overall competitive strategy.

I conducted the interview with Brent yesterday. It was a real eye-opener for the things he had to say both agreed and disagreed to the “laws” of semiotics. on top of that, the location of where we were interviewing was fairly loud and that gave me a discreet opportunity to question the communication models i’d been looking at for my essay.

anyway, i will write up the interview tomorrow or over the weekend when i have a nice space of interrupted free time.

within this post, i just wanted to write for me. i was told today by AK that i had a unique learning ability. that i pick up and learn things fast and run with it… i think that was kind of the jist of what he meant. Do i? after Brent’s interview yesterday i thought to myself maybe yes.. maybe no. no in the sense that this course isnt going as planned to my gantt chart. yes in that what i learnt and interviewed Brent on yesterday; i’ve done some surfing online to find out more of. but then again, i could’ve done this a while back when i first noticed this but didnt get around to it.

what was it that i was rooting around for? subtitles.

because i asked if he watches tv with subs or not and if he’d noticed the various colour usage? so here it is:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subtitle_(captioning)

it’s a lot to read through so i’m going to do that tomorrow if i can.

in a way i like these short bursts of motivation that i get from my surroundings. reading to write the essay at the moment and it’s made me concentrate all my energy on finding models of communication but at the back of my mind, i’m constantly worried that 1) i’m behind schedule big time and 2) i’m constantly thinking about the project but not pro-actively doing anything physical aside from blogging.

so these little ‘moments of inspiration’ really help keep me back on track and i’m thankful for that.

hopefully my hibernation/procrastination period wont last much longer. i’m hoping that after the essay, i’ll pull myself away for a week from work and spend that time conducting interviews for my MA and dedicating time on actually creating. even after Brent’s interview, i was scribbling non-stop on the tube a list of “to-do’s” for the project.

yes.. a week off to do work for the MA sounds good.

well done me. hahaha

i guess nothing can be done without looking inwards first. it starts from yourself and then u draw outwards.

oh.. and i’ll also be putting up an interview at surveymonkey and forward onto as many deaf forums as i can find. hopefully i’ll collate a decent amount of responses that will provide me with the sufficient conclusions that i need to draw upon before i start the animation process.

Hi everyone. This is going to be an awesome update. I’ve recently come across 2 great new free tools called Polldaddy.com and SurveyMonkey.com. These are 2 websites that you can access for free and integrate with your webpage or blog.

Polldaddy.com allows you to create polls and post them on your website for people to vote on. You can use this for customer feedback, to get suggestions, or just for fun. Here is an example:

How cool is that? It’s easy to setup and I think it’s not only cool but can be extremely useful. 

The next resource is a site called surveymonkey.com. It’s somehwhat similar to Polldaddy, but it allows you to gather qualitative information such as Tell us what you thought about the presentation. This can be extremely useful for customer feedback, suggestions, or a survey. The site is also really to use. If you goto my Market Insider page and click on the link, you can see an example there.

So there are 2 examples of free and very useful tools out there. So what are you waiting for, get out there and start getting some customer feedback and ideas!

Overview & General Disclaimer:

The following article compares FluidSurveys (Pro) with SurveyMonkey (Pro). This information is accurate to the best of our knowledge as of June 30th, 2009. This evaluation was done from a review of what was available on public websites. It is possible that these tools may have other versions and features, unbeknownst to us, which have not been mentioned here.

Polling Options

Publishing Options

Results Analysis

Over the past few weeks, I have been speaking to clients about the ins and outs of blogging. And the question I always try to answer first is, “Why start a blog?”.

For businesses, a blog is a place to begin building relationships with your audience. It’s a place where transparency, honesty, and relevancy all meet.

Blogs allow your business to:

• provide relevant information regularly
• receive feedback from readers and engage them in discussion
• distribute content more widely through search engines, online communities, and so on

Blogs allow your readers to:

• receive regular updates from you when they want, where they want
• easily share your content
• find you through search engines via keywords and tags

Content is key, of course, so create useful content and publish regularly and consistently. Consider using audio and video in your posts. Different people interact with content differently. A podcast or video post might be exactly what your audience is looking for, and it may deepen the relationship if you are the voice/face of your blog. The Flip video camera is a favorite of mine. It is simple to use and with an editing program like iMovie for the Mac, you can create short video segments (vlogs).

Polls, surveys, and contests are also a great way to engage your audience. And they can be fun too! PollDaddy is a great polling tool and WordPress has a plugin that allows you to create and manage your polls through the admin area. WordPress also has a survey plugin, SurveyGizmo, and SurveyMonkey is a great tool as well.

Promote discussion on your blog with commenting and be sure to follow up with your audience. Participate on other blogs as well…it’s a good opportunity for exposure and linkbacks to your site.

David Meerman Scott of Web Ink Now offers some insight on the top five corporate blogging mistakes and how to avoid them.

Any other ideas, tips, suggestions for starting and maintaining a good blog? Let us hear them.

I was thinking about loyalty the other day. I had just sat through a company presentation where we talked about the almost 2 years of experience we have with Net Promoter Score. In the same meeting we also talked about our new Web site and how we were going to start capturing visitor data via our Web analytics tools and then incorporate that data into our CRM system. And at the end of the meeting, the topic even began to cover the piloting of capturing social media data and putting that it into CRM. Wow, that’s a lot of data. But what’s the connection between loyalty and data.

In the past, I’ve written about two distinct ways that connect data and loyalty. First, by applying what I call Closed Loop Marketing, a company can create endless loops of communication between consumers and companies. By opting in, a company can track a Web site visitor’s behavior, match with data captured from offline interactions like events, retail transactions or customer service. Then if intelligence is applied to understand the needs and wants of the customer, a company can reach back out to the customer to advance to dialogue, drive incremental transactions or take care of service incidents, closing the communication loop and advancing the relationship and by extension increasing loyalty.

In other contexts, I’ve made arguments about how companies can begin to use a mix of behavioral data captured online, demographics from CRM systems and transactional data from line of business systems to enable predictive analytics that will optimize response rates, close rates and ROI in general.

But today I had an epiphany. The missing piece has been the role of market research. Traditionally we think of market research as focus groups, qualitative and quantitative research and endless cross-tabs slicing and dicing every possible sort of data. And more recently, market research has been turned upside down with the advent of online surveys like Zoomerang and SurveyMonkey. But what is still in its infancy is the pairing of market research analytic expertise with social media influence monitoring.

So what does it all mean? For over a decade we’ve been hearing about the 360° view of the customer. And this has for the most part meant getting more individual data about a customer to be able to sell them more. But what it lacks, besides the fact that virtually no one has achieved it, is that we need to stop talking about data and start talking about intelligence. Capturing transactional data from online and offline is valuable, but only if someone is looking at that data and gaining insight from it.

CRM is primarily a tool of sales people and sales people do not have the time, the background or the motivation to analyze data and turn it into insight. Campaign or brand managers are only interested in their slice of the customer and aren’t really the best choice to be the customer’s advocate.

My choice is to call upon the market researchers. Their skills lend themselves to be good listeners and good ones have the ability to synthesize and extract patterns, critical keys to gaining true understanding of behavior.
So to all of those fellow travelers in the market research space who are seeing their budgets being stripped, there traditional approaches being usurped by self-service tools online and are wondering where their next career move will take them. Start looking at yourselves as the customer advocate and make sure everything you are doing advances your understanding of customer behavior and that you are able to translate that for your businesses or your clients. That will be where you add the most value and this is the key to loyalty.

In SurveyMonkey, I hid old courses, added new courses (4 GAVIEW courses, Respondus), hid former trainers (except Sid), and added Twitter as an answer to “How did you hear about our workshops?”.

Interactive classrooms are the way to engage your students. In larger classes or lectures, it can be difficult to get all students involved in a discussion.

By using surveys and polls, it is easy to gain an immediate instructional response. Student are more apt to participate with the learning material through short questions & quizzes in a large group setting with new online resources.

Quick assessments help students learn material, review important concepts, itemize learning outcomes, prepare for assignments/tests and help the educator understand how much has been learned. Here are just a few surveys & poll resources that I have tried for the classroom, seminars, workshops and research collection:

• Survey Monkey
• Survs
• Zoomerang
• Poll Daddy
• Classroom Clickers
• ProProfs
• Twitter Search & Tags

If you have others you like/prefer… please share!

Listen to this article as a podcast.

I have been consulting for some time now and it seems to me that small business are in the driver seat in being able to cherry pick from some of the best systems and tools about there (many free) to drive their marketing.

Here are a list of my top tools and resources that would be useful to invest in today.

1. Build your blog – this is a way to connect with your target audience in an interactive way. It is also a great way to optimise your web by linking your blog in it. The best tool I have found is wordpress because it has the best widgets (applications to enhance your communications). Blogger and typepad are also good but I have a preference for wordpress. It has more functionality.

2. Build your webpage – I think the key thing for small business is to have a web page with a content management system built into it. I use citymax but there are many software programs now that are web based that can give you a basic template and tools to build your website. A word of caution, make sure that the content management system is easy to use, provides all the services you might need, hosting, web optimisation – key words, meta tags and layout formats and will support you as your business grows ie shopping carts, pay per click options, search submission, adding extra domains and pages. You can purchase great templates for wordpress and use it as a website which is a low cost way of getting started but unless you host it on your own domain and use your own CSS tools it is hard to get all the functionality of surveys, forms and product sales online.

3. CRM – a basic database that collects your customers information. I use officeautopilot (sendpepper for SMB) for the base for my customer segmentation and I can use it to send campaigns from, and create landing pages. There are many tools out there that will give you this capability for little investment. 4. Autoresponder – I use aweber. Really great tool for setting up a series of emails to subscribed customers. Not a spamming tool. People need to opt in. It gives great tracking capabilities and allows me to launch many campaigns to different segments with ease.

4. Form creation – I am using Wufoo and finding it excellent. I was using surveymonkey but I think Wufoo has surpass this tool because of its great intergration with paypal and merchant services. Not only can you create a form or survey (great templates) but you can sell using a template.

5. Sell on-line – I have found Paypal to be great and easy to set up but there are many more including shoppingcart. I think you just have to see what works for you best in your country. 6. Tracking tools – Google analytics is the best for me as it tracks information in more detail than some of the other tools but compete is a great one for looking at your competitors. Website grader is also another good one to see how to optimise your website.

Next steps: So if you are not sure how you stack up or the right questions to ask, take my online survey to help you audit your online marketing strategy.

Survey Monkey has now been in existence for over 10 years and has allowed a wide range of people and organisations to carry out market research they might not have otherwise been able to afford. Although the software definitely has its limitations I have successfully used it for relatively simple surveys up to around 20 questions in length.

Below are 10 tips for getting the best out of Survey Monkey in terms of making your surveys as respondent friendly as possible. The more your surveys are designed with respondents in mind, the higher the rate and better the quality of response.

1. Subscribe to the Professional version of Survey Monkey. It costs a bargain $19.95 a month (less than £15 at current exchange rates) and, amongst other features, allows you to include skip logic in your questionnaires, add a logo to the survey template and cross-tabulate the resulting data. In any case the Basic version only allows a maximum of 10 questions and 100 responses so any serious research will need the paid for version. You can subscribe on a month by month basis so you only pay when you are using the software. (By the way, I have no connection with Survey Monkey and, unfortunately, do not get any commission on any sales I may generate!).

2. Improve the look of your questionnaire. It never fails to amaze me that large companies who have all their communications professionally designed with a consistent feel are happy to send out questionnaires designed in Survey Monkey that look awful and reflect badly on their organisation. Questionnaires should be as clear, uncluttered and as easy to read as possible.

Although you don’t have full flexibility to make the questionnaire look exactly as you want within Survey Monkey you can edit the themes available to you if you subscribe to the Professional version. You can change a number of aspects of the way your survey looks including the font size and background colour. You can also add your company logo to the top of each page. If you have some basic HTML knowledge you can also format text within a question, for example underlining or emboldening certain words within a question.

You can find the “Edit themes” button if you click on “Edit Survey” when within the “Design Survey” area.

3. Split your questionnaire into different pages. I see a large number of Survey Monkey questionnaires where the survey is presented on one page and the respondent has to scroll down to continue with the questionnaire. As well as putting the respondent off, answers to questions may be influenced by respondents looking down the survey at future questions. Ensure that the questions on each page fit onto a screen so that respondents do not have to scroll down. As a guide no more than 3 questions should be on each page.

When designing your questionnaire you should see a button called “Split Page Here” after each question. Make sure you use it. This feature is available in the Basic version of the software.

4. Use Skip Logic so that respondents only answer questions relevant to them. Something else that infuriates me is a long questionnaire that includes instructions such as “If you have answered No to Q5 then go to Q7”. Respondents should be concentrating on answering the questions not guiding themselves through the survey. These sorts of instructions are likely to confuse respondents causing them to answer irrelevant questions, miss out ones they are supposed to answer or to close down the questionnaire completely.

The logic you can use within Survey Monkey is relatively unsophisticated. Questions, or blocks of questions, can only be filtered from the previous question. Combinations of answers from one or more questions cannot be used as filters at any time.

Splitting the questionnaire into pages means that respondents can skip pages without ever seeing the questions they should not be answering.

You can add skip logic for each question when designing the questionnaire. Skip Logic can only be used by subscribers to the Professional version of the software.

 5. For open-ended questions increase the size of the box where respondents type their answers. By default the box that appears when adding a “Single Textbox” or “Comment/Essay box” question is fairly small. Small text boxes encourage respondents to give short, shallow answers.

Clicking on “Edit question” for an individual question presents you with a number of options. Scroll down to the “Change question size and placement” option and check the box next to it.  This brings up a number of options. Using these ensure the box is as wide as possible (100 chars wide) and increase the number of lines to a reasonable amount, I would suggest 5 or 6. This feature is available in the Basic version of Survey Monkey.

6. With a few exceptions, make each question a must answer question. If this is not done respondents can skip questions as they wish making the data incomplete. However, it may be the case that you are happy for respondents to skip some questions where they might not have an answer i.e. is there anything else you’d like to tell us about product X?

Clicking on “Edit question” for each question allows you to check the box “Require Answer to Question”. The default is for this box to be unchecked. Again, this feature is available in the Basic version.

7. Include a “Thank You” page at the end. Once the respondent reaches the end of the questionnaire they should reach a page that thanks them for completing the questionnaire and provides details for someone they can contact if they have any queries about the survey. Including a “Thank You” page is good manners and reassures respondents that the survey is a genuine piece of market research.

These contact details should also be provided in any introduction to the survey either in an email invite or at the start of the survey. The introduction should also explain the purpose of the survey in order to maximise response.

To create a “Thank You” page add a new question and choose the question type “Descriptive text”. You can then type text as you wish.

8. Make sure the survey links to a relevant site on completion. By default when respondents finish the survey they land on the Survey Monkey website. Professional subscribers can change this within Survey Monkey to any website of their choice. This is a great chance to guide respondents to a relevant website and, at the very least, increase traffic to that site.

The facility to change the end page link is available in “Change Settings” when in the “Collect Responses” area.

9. Unless there are good reasons not to, allow only one response from an individual PC. This will stop rogue respondents going into a survey a number of times to complete it. Respondents may be tempted to do this if the survey has some sort of incentive e.g. entry into a prize draw, or if an individual respondent cares so much about the subject of the survey that they wish to bias the results in some way. However, if you expect different respondents to complete the survey from the same PC then you should allow multiple responses from one PC.

 In “Change Settings” within the “Collect Responses” area there is “Allow multiple responses”. By default this does not allow multiple responses per computer but it is worth double checking this before sending out a survey.

10. Test, test and test the survey repeatedly. Mistakes in questionnaires reflect badly on the organisation associated with the survey and impact negatively on response rates.

Go through the survey many times yourself before allowing real respondents to access it to check everything makes sense and is working as it should do. You will need to temporarily allow multiple responses from one PC to do this. Also, get others to go through the survey, preferably, those for whom the survey is relevant e.g. if you are sending a survey out to football fans, get a handful of football fans to go through it before you send it out.

Once you are happy with the survey make sure you clear any data you have collected through testing (an “eraser” button is shown next to all of your surveys when you are in the “My Surveys” area. Click on this button to clear data for a particular survey). Also, make sure that multiple responses are not allowed from the same PC before sending.

You can access a short , simple example survey which has incorporated these tips by clicking here. This survey does allow multiple responses from one PC so you can go into it as many times as you like.

It should be remembered that these tips are specifically related to Survey Monkey and do not cover the specialist areas of sampling, questionnaire design and data analysis. If you do not have expertise in these areas then it is unlikely that any survey you design will meet your objectives and probable that resulting data will be useless or even dangerously misleading. If you do not have market research expertise but budgets are tight consider hiring a market research consultant who can help design your survey (perhaps someone like myself – details at www.austinresearch.co.uk!).

Some economic indicators are starting to turn positive and suggest that the worst of the recession may be over. Even so, companies continue to cut their marketing budgets and this is perhaps the very worst time to do so. Cutting marketing expenditures at this time in the economic cycle is akin to stopping contributions to one’s investment portfolio during a bear market – in each case, one stands to miss out on the rebound.

Right now, marketing research is more critical than ever. Yes, business is still slow. But marketing research can be used ever more strategically right now. Your margins might still be tight, and you may still have some cuts to make. Many travel-related industries, especially hotels, are making use of marketing research to identify which amenities they can either eliminate or charge extra for, without negatively impacting customer satisfaction and/or loyalty. You should consider doing the same.

Marketing research can also be helpful in gauging the optimism of your customers and prospects, so that you can plan ahead for the future. Conducting marketing research right now can also inform you of what your target customers are substituting for your product or service to cope with these hard times. This information can help you accommodate them and/or find other ways to fulfill their needs.

You can also do marketing research relatively inexpensively with survey tools such as SuveyMonkey, Zoomerang, Survey Gizmo, etc. As long as you understand survey theory and sampling, you should be able to use these tools without compromising research integrity. You may even be able to reduce the size of your typical samples without sacrificing much accuracy. And you may be able to rely more heavily on secondary research. You can even track your competition with online tools like Compete.com.

Whatever the case, don’t abandon marketing research, especially now. Some carefully thought out, informal research is better than no research at all. Marketing research is the compass that will help you navigate out of these hard economic times.

What role do various social media websites play in your life?

After deciding that my proposed video consumption research was more suited to gathering quantitative data rather than qualitative, I partnered with Larissa, whose idea about social media websites and their impact on our lives seemed like a better fit for having an online questionnaire.

Click here for online questionnaire.

UPDATE: After revisiting SurveyMonkey in the hope of reading and sharing the findings of the questionnaire on here, I can now say, with some pride, that we’ve had a massive total of one (!!!) person complete the survey. Success. Twitterspamming the link constantly obviously didn’t work. Social media, you play an important part in my life, and you’ve failed me