Improve Online Surveys
“It should not take you more than 15 min to complete the survey”
In the last week I received 9 workplace online survey requests from internal teams, partners and suppliers that asked me for “just 15 minutes”. 135 minutes in total, that is almost $700 of my time if you were buying it.
If your elevator pitch is 30 seconds, why is your survey 15 minutes?
I ignore the majority of surveys unless they are likely to influence something I have a very strong interest in. If I don’t have time to update my blog regularly or go to Starbucks I certainly won’t tick though bloated surveys designed to cover every possible stakeholders curiosity with no clear benefit to my needs and with a distinct likelihood the survey data will influence nothing.
If I really care about something, I’ll have proactively contacted the service provider and given them a thumbs up or request for better service, but I still believe surveys have their place.
If you want busy people to fill out surveys, the survey needs to be less than 5 minutes and extract the respondent’s most powerful feelings about your product or service. Too many surveys demand volumes of data when a few simple high gain questions would suffice.
1. Will you use our service in 2009? (Yes / No / Don’t Know)
2. Why? [Free form answer]
3. Submit Button
Drop down lists and radio button scales are all there to help the survey team quantify responses but in the lust for measurement surveys usually miss the real nuggets of value.
The obsession with lists, values and predefined choices abstract respondents in such as way that you may as well fingerprint people with oven mitts on.
When was the last time you filled out a survey and thought, “Damn..They really got some usable valuable insights from me”, Most of the time surveys feel like doing lines in detention.
What is better? 15% of respondents telling you their favorite and least liked aspects of your service (time to collect – less than 90 seconds) or 0.9% of your customer base filling out volumes of data on every facet of your offering (time to collect – 15 minutes).
If you want to move management forward in most business and get fast decisions you’ll need to represent a large volume of user demand that cannot be argued with.
In a world where everyone has the bright idea of a 15 minute survey without immediate reward, your decision to get to the point and ask the 5 most important questions in less than 3 minutes is a distinct advantage. Less is more.
IP Location increasingly inaccurate as mobile Internet takes off
IP Address Location, often referred to as IP to Location is a powerful way to increase relevance of adverts and content by geo targeting but the accuracy of IP Targeting is declining as fast as mobile internet access is increasing.
Right now Google is offering me Swedish adverts on Google.com searches, the same goes for Google’s adverts on Ask.com.
Yahoo are appending “&fp_ip=SE” (he’s in Sweden) to my search string.
Only MSN Live seems to ignore my IP and annotates “&mkt=en-us” which suggests MSN is crudely reading my browser language setting and assuming I am a US user because I bought the laptop there.
Yet MSN is no less correct than Google, Yahoo or Ask on where I am.
While I may appear to be in Sweden based on IP, I am actually travelling at 225 Km/Hour through the English countryside on a National Express Train using Icomera Mobile System (IMS) internet.
Icomera are based in Sweden and using servers based in Sweden to power the mobile internet service. I may be looking East over the North Sea but as far as the IP targeted advertising servers at Google are concerned I am in Strängnäs, home to Sweden’s second oldest Gymnasium (population 31,152).
In 2007 500,000 train passengers used Icomera’s Wi-Fi on this route where it was provided free to 1stClass and at over $10 to Standard class passengers. In 2008 the train company changed hands and the new owner provides Wi-Fi free to all passengers.
All 500,000 users last year were shown miss-targeted advertising by Google if they carry out a search from the train Wi-Fi. I was incorectly targeted on every trip.
Today 52 trains equipped with the Icomera technology will travel in the UK, each with a minimum passenger capacity of 488 people. That is a potential passenger load of 25, 376 passengers. If every passenger was crammed on and used Wi-Fi, this would appear as if 81% of the Strängnäs population logged on.
From the Swedish advertisers perspective this is no gravy train for them, as most of today’s onboard clicks will be paying to confuse British rail passengers with Swedish language landing pages.
I log off Icomera and start using my Vodafone mobile broadband card. Suddenly I am shown UK advertising again. But now I am in Newbury according to IP location. Newbury is the HQ for Vodafone.Close, well, only 320 miles away, but no cigar.
Maybe I’ll stop off at Starbucks in Edinburgh and use their T-Mobile hotspot where I will suddenly be IP transported to Dusseldorf or Cologne in Germany.
While adoption of mobile internet is still relatively low this may be an acceptable statistical error, but soon it will become a noticeable headache. Those using mobile internet are typically higher income and in highly desirable e-commerce demographic that is becoming harder to geo-locate while search engines deliver irrelevant advertising to consumers and expensive lost opportunities to retailers.
Top Blogging Cities; Austin, Portland, San Francisco and Seattle
Austin, Texas, Portland, Oregon, San Francisco and Seattle are the US leading cities for blogs.
15% of Austin’s online population (defined as Adults who have accessed the Internet within the past 30 days) have read of posted to a blog in the last 30 days. This is closely followed by Portland at 14%, San Francisco at 13% and Seattle at 13%. All the cities have a strong tech community and young populations.
According to Scarborough Research who commissioned the Blog Usage Study, bloggers are over three times more likely than all Internet users to download Podcasts. Twice as likely to use online video and 25% download or listen to audio clips versus 8% of all other online adults users.
Bloggers Versus All Internet Users are:
76% more likely to be in a household with at least 1 PDA
54% more likely to have an MP3 player
37% more likely to have a satellite radio subscription.
And in addition are:
66% more likely than the national average to be between of 18 and 34.
20% more likely than the national average to have an annual household income between $50k and $100k per year.
Adapted from Source: Scarborough Research
