Preparing our Survey – Review of the Technorati State of the Blogosphere 2009 Survey
Posted on 22. Sep, 2009 by Mike Olaski in Surveys, The Connection
I received a few invites to participate in the Technorati State of the Blogosphere 2009 Survey. I don’t often participate in these surveys, but since I am designing one at the movement for Sport Fan Connect, and since it is certainly relevant in context to our Blogging and Social Media, I decided to give technorati some of my time and opinions. Here is the invite:
We think you’ll find the survey interesting. It should take just 15 minutes of your time, and of course your answers will be completely confidential. Please feel free to send this link to other bloggers you know. And be sure to check back on Technorati in October for a summary of the results.
While taking the survey I trying to learn lessons along they way. By the time I got to question 57 I was too tired from the long day of travel, customs, lost baggage, baseball, shake shack burgers, peanuts 4 beer in the stands on the way home too continue. I guess that was lesson #1. Keep it short. Even though they said it would only take 15 minutes, and when reading the words 15 minutes you think, oh, that’s not so bad, but when you get into it it sure does, especially after a long day.
The length perhaps might be more tolerable if there was some sort of signpost to let me know how far down the rabbit hole I was currently. Pagination of some kind would have been nice. “You are 67% complete”, or even some sections to the survey that you can opt-in for –which would also provide a nice little additional data point.
The questions in the survey were well organized and insightful, and I did draw some insights from it as to how to not only structure ours, but also regarding some topics and questions in particular to address. They types of questions ranges from a simple yes no, to a more elaborate, and now common survey question style where you rank from strongly agree to strongly disagree.
Some of the questions led me to believe that they might have some sort of Logic Tree system that would branch off into alternative question lines depending on the answers I gave. I would guess they weren’t using a system like that, but it made me recognize a potential problem (opportunity) in our design.
The system they were using was PSBSuveys.com and the survey was hosted at a URL using a domain called opinionguru.com –although I couldn’t get a website to come up on that domain. I am going to look into that service myself for our survey.
Tell us what you think.
- Have you heard of this survey system?
- Are there other survey systems out there we should consider?
- How long is too long for a survey?
- Should we compensate for our survey? (you will be entered to win our Sport Fan Connect Tour 2010 Contest prize)
