I often come across clients that dread the thought of having to do any sort of marketing research since they assume it requires hiring an expensive marketing research firm or using precious, overworked, internal resources. While this is true for a comprehensive in-depth analysis, a quick online survey is a different story. If you haven’t yet heard of services such as surveymonkey or the new Facebook Polls , then please join today and start saving taxpayer money!
Surveymonkey allows you to create and design your own online survey in minutes. Once you are done the design (numerous templates are available), you are provided with a link which can be sent to your list or posted on your website. What’s more, basic analysis is automatically done for you. For those wishing to do a more comprehensive analysis, the raw data can be downloaded and analyzed in a program of your choice (Excel, SPSS, SAS, etc…)
Facebook Polls is explained in this excerpt from an article by Alicja Gulajski of Market2world.com :
June 1st, 2007, Facebook Polls was launched. This product creates great value for marketers: this tool can be used to create brand awareness and gather critical information about your brand from Facebook community members.
For example:
Facebook Poll users create a question (with up to 5 answer choices) and are able to target the poll based on age, sex, location and even profile keywords. There is an initial $5 insertion fee, but the poll creator chooses the bid amount – the amount the user is willing to pay per response. Depending on the bid, and the anticipated results, Facebook estimates the wait time before results are received. Currently bids range from $.10 to $1.00 per response, according to TechCrunch.
The advantage of using Facebook Polls of course, is access to the more than 24 million active users, and over 100,000 new registrations per day since Jan. 2007. Not only is this a significant audience, it is segmented for you! You can target specific groups based on geographic areas, psychographic characteristics, age, etc…
What are you waiting for? Get started!
I agree about saving taxpayer’s money! Only one problem with SurveyMonkey — they aren’t 508 compliant (which means visually disabled people can’t use them). Government agencies have to use 508 and WCAG compliant tools to follow federal & most state regulations. Do you have any suggestions?
Great Point. There are some website readers (for visually impaired)that can help users navigate through most sites that are , as you mention, WCAG compliant. SurveyMonkey is working on this as we speak, this excerpt is from their “help” section:
Are you compliant with federal standards for users with disabilities?
We are working on many upgrades to the survey tool and will be compliant with federal standards for the disabled in the near future.
At this time we do not have an exact ETA of when this will be available; however, this is one of the priorities we are working on upgrading into the site.
The other tool I mentioned, Facebook Polls, is compliant with WCAG from what I have been informed.
Thanks for your comment!
Might also want to try InstantSurvey. Similar price but better analytics if you want to drill in to the data. I will admit I’m biased since I work for the company that runs InstantSurvey, but you should try it out.
Facebook polls, I’m guessing, do not allow you to do multiple questions, so you can’t collect demographic information alongside the specific questions you want to ask.
erik…I will give InstantSurvey a test run for sure. However, personally for analysis, I always just export the raw survey data and analyze it using SPSS
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Check out zoomerang.com too. It is neat!!
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