Monthly Archives: June 2012

Can Metrics Help Understand Twitter “Influence”?

Twitter has become all the rage, and yet its value is still largely misunderstood. No research has clearly stated how well Twitter acts as an agent of your company, or whether using it as a marketing or customer satisfaction tool can provide you with the popularity boost you’re looking for with your company. Read more…

Interesting Article on the Spread of Beliefs and Information

Whether companies can take advantage of this remains to be seen. It does appear that often this information spreads by accident. But it’s possible that a company could essentially become their own “10% opinion holder” and try to create a buzz that way, using communication tools to spread the idea around. Either way, this type of behavior should be interesting and relevant to researchers and marketers, who often wonder how to spread a message across society. Read more…

Can You Defend Your Survey Results From Scrutiny?

As a company, if you cannot defend your survey against scrutiny, then your data has less value, because it’s possible you introduced problems that make your conclusions completely inaccurate. Any time you decide to run any sort of study, make sure that every decision you make can be defended. You can also contact us about your questionnaire design, and allow us to provide you a consult to make your survey defensible. Read more…

Are You Sure Your Questions Are Valuable?

They could either change the question to a multiple choice about whether or not the company was in their field, or they can leave it off altogether to cut the survey down further. Either way, that served as a good example to the types of questions that are likely not providing you with the information you think they are, and could otherwise be cut from your survey. Read more…

Are You Using Survey Logic Correctly?

At Survey Methods, we routinely look at the surveys that we receive in our in boxes and see if they can’t be completed better. One of the most common problems we’ve found with a lot of these surveys has to do with the way the survey utilizes survey logic. Read more…

Bad Polling and Bad Survey Research

it’s great to see journalists finally calling out organizations that are reporting bad data – a practice that should probably happen more often since it makes a good story. It’s important that as a company you make sure that you’re not contributing to incorrect data. It’s the fault of both the media and the organizations that release this research that so many people are being led astray in their beliefs. Read more…

How to Use Survey Results to Market Your Company

As a company, you ethically shouldn’t try to make more of these results than they appear, and realistically it would be foolish of your company to make business decisions based on this type of data, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t ample opportunities for you to research for data that suits your marketing needs. Just make sure you use that data ethically. Read more…

The Secondary Effects of Determining Your Target Market

Every decision you make with your company has a positive and negative impact. There is very rarely anything you can do to your company that is 100% beneficial. But you can reduce the negative effects by continuing to expand your research, exploring other potential advantages and never limiting yourself to your discoveries. Read more…

Boring Topics and Questions: Are They Affecting Your Data Collection?

There is no real right or wrong answer. Don’t forget that you have the option of inserting boring questions into shorter, more exciting surveys, and you can always run smaller studies to support boring decisions while saving the larger studies for the more exciting surveys. But really, it largely depends on your company’s own preferences and how you’re going to work with the data. Either way, our company’s platform will always be available. Read more…

Are You Getting Feedback When You Need It Part 4 – Follow Up of The Follow Up

This is a much better method of collecting data and treating the customer with respect than the one that PayPal originally implemented. It immediately asks for feedback, and it directs the customer to the appropriate links if they did not feel their question was answered, so that they can get help from other avenues. This is the way PayPal should have run their customer service, so kudos to Elance for doing it well. Read more…