Surveying your customers is a good way to get constructive feedback about your products, and also gauge the state of the market, and the likelihood of any new product or service you launch being a success.
However, the value of a survey depends on the way that it is written, and the number of people that answer it. Many companies focus on the technical side of things when they’re implementing business surveys, worrying more about web development issues than they do the kinds of questions that they’ll ask inside the survey. If you ask the wrong questions, or confuse your users, then the data you gather will be next to useless.
When you’re building business surveys, consider the following:
- Keep your survey short, so that people answer all of the questions
- Decide what you want to learn through the survey. Focus on one or two topics per survey.
- Keep the language in your surveys simple and conversational.
- Start with general questions, and narrow them down to more specific ones.
- Rephrase important questions and repeat them during the survey to ensure that the respondent is answering consistently.
- Avoid leading questions. Instead of asking “How much do you like our coffee”, say “Do you think our coffee is…” and offer the respondent a sliding scale from “Poor” to “Very good”.
- Be consistent with your scales. Don’t change from a one to five scale to a one through ten later in the survey.
- Free text fields for people to explain their answers can be useful, but don’t rely on them. It’s hard to make bar charts out of lots of freeform text!
- Test the survey on a small group of people (even if they’re friends and employees) before you run it for real. If anyone expresses confusion about some of the questions, re-phrase them.
Once you’ve put together your survey, you will need to find people to answer it. This is the part that your web development team can help with.
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May 10th, 2012 





Blogging as a Part of Your Online Marketing Efforts.
Blogging is the latest craze in Internet marketing and SEO circles. User generated content now rules. This article gives six good reasons that you should consider blogging as part of your online marketing efforts. The rise and rise of blogging as part of the web 2.0 phenomenon has taken the Internet by storm. Savvy web marketers are now using Blogs as an additional weapon to generate leads, add credibility and improve their search engine rankings.
Blogging is great fun! Yes, blogging can be great fun. Just open you posting window and go for it without the restrictions of corporate style guides and other impediments to creativity . Got something to say? Just say it. The other fun aspect of blogging is that people can post comments about your blog posts. You posts plus reader comments all become valuable food for the search engines.
Blogging is cheap. The most powerful blogging systems are free. Word press seems to be the blogging standard and now comes standard with many cheap web hosting packages. For less than $100 per year anyone can get their own domain with blogging included.
I wouldn’t use one of the free blogging services unless you are really desperate.
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