The QuestionPro Blog

A small community here in Seattle of tech geeks are working hard to plan their upcoming conference. They are called the "Six Hour Startup" -- the basic premise is - they want to create a startup -- you guessed it -- IN SIX HOURS.

The Six Hour Startup (or SHS) is a tight knit groups of technology geeks, design dudes, marketing folks that get together once a month (on a Saturday) and launch a new startup!

They are currently trying out IdeaScale -- Check out some ideas that people have proposed:

• http://sixhourstartup.ideascale.com

This example reflects crowd-sourced feedback in a very distinct way -- Typically most users would have done a survey -- but the issue here, when you run a survey is that users cannot really "collaborate" -- in the Web 2.0 world, what is life without collaboration?!

If you are in the Seattle area, you should checkout their site : http://www.sixhourstartup.com and more importantly, if you are a tech geek or thinking of starting a company, you should check out their conference : http://www.sixhourstartup.com/conference.

If you want to setup an IdeaScale for your blog, company or cause -- Fire up an account @ IdeaScale and get rolling!

• http://www.ideascale.com

BTW - If you are wondering what the title means ("Unfortunate 5 Million") -- We all know and talk about the Fortune 500 - Well, we think there are a lot of tools and services that others need, but don't have the kind of cash to blow - I call them the Unfortunate 5 Million. I am not sure who coined that term, but I've decided to use it.

I still see lots of if ideas for QuestionPro coming into my inbox. While we have our own tracking system for reviewing ideas internally, I find myself going to our own IdeaScale portal and checking for new ideas there instead. I love seeing our customers make suggestions that I haven't even had the time to think about!

Got an idea for QuestionPro? Submit it today at http://questionpro.ideascale.com.

The fascinating thing about launching new services and products is the adrenalin rush we get when we see our tools being used -- Seriously -- as tech geeks, we _love_ the fact that our customers pay us money (well some of you at least) -- but equivalently important is the fact that new concepts and ideas are used in the real world -- not just in our heads. Fortunately for us, we are in a financial position now to try and develop new/bleeding-edge ideas without worrying too much about monetizing them.

As many of you who've been following the blog know -- we've been harping about IdeaScale for some time now. There is still a lot of work ahead of us, but we feel really confident in the underlying conceptual model of crowdsourcing feedback now -- If you are still on the fence about this model I would urge you to think again -- Why? - Read on below...

One of our early adopters was John Thompson from Choice Hotels. They had some unique (well in hindsight not really that unique) requirement that ideas and topics get moderated -- they get "approved" by the moderator(s) and then the ideas show up on the website. The good news about working with customers in solving these issues is that -- usually someone else down the road has the same requirement. John was patient enough to give us some breathing room and time to develop his requirement. He even offered advice and worked with us as we talked through his requirements and needs and designed a solution.

I think this represents a shift in the traditional Vendor/Client relationship model -- where clients usually think of vendors as their adversary rather than a partner. Generally there is a lot of mis-trust (at least at the enterprise level) between clients and vendors. Both of us understood where each of us were coming from, we had an idea of the challenges each of us face and respected each other's position and basically relied on each other.

John went live with his IdeaScale portal yesterday -- within 24 hours he had over 60 new ideas, 20 or so comments on his ideas and about 1500 votes on a various ideas and topics. Thats the power of IdeaScale. A great success -- no doubt.

I remember when we started QuestionPro about 4 yrs ago, we worked with a few key clients in the exact same way as we are working on IdeaScale today. I am glad that a few of our customers are willing to try new tools and concepts and are thinking outside the box -- along with being patient and understanding.

I know there are a lot of clients who would say -- I wish QuestionPro did "X" -- and "I can't believe they don't do "Y" -- All I have to say is -- most companies (including questionpro) have finite and limited resources. We are software developers -- we can do _anything_ but we definitely cannot do _everything_!

Want to give IdeaScale a spin? - Goto http://www.ideascale.com

Everyone wants to do branching, but it can be a little confusing to figure out! We threw together a quick help video that should clear up a lot of the confusion. Check it out on our YouTube Channel, or below.

A new web application in this day and age wouldn't be complete without a few widgets. Of course we threw in a widget for IdeaScale! You've probably noticed the widget we have on our blog in the right nav, for the QuestionPro IdeaScale portal.

IdeaScale widgets let you display hot ideas, and ideas that are currently being worked on within your portal(s). Its a great way to drive traffic to your IdeaScale, and thus, get more ideas!

Had a great time last night at nPost, demoing IdeaScale. We met lots of talented and interesting people, and gathered gobs of feedback. We managed to make it into semi-finals of the "clap-off", but we ended up losing to ResueTime!

Thanks again Nathan!

nPost puts these events and mixers together for the Seattle tech./startup crowd pretty often. If you are in Seattle and want to get involved in the tech. scene, just subscribe to his blog (blog.npost.com) or follow him on twitter @npost.

As we see companies embrace more open feedback models and get into a user and customer centric feedback model, one of the challenges that comes up consistently is the notion of the Wisdom of the Crowd Vs. The Mob.

We've talked a many clients, and this is one of the consistent themes that come up that needs some attention and thought as we all navigate this open-feedback and open-access model.

I attended a talk by Annalee Newitz about the various strategies different public sites, Blogger, YouTube, Digg, WikiPedia have used to prevent the destructive efforts of Mob from hijacking your community.

Couple of comments and thoughts for everyone from the discussion:

• Censorship Vs. Terms of Service : Violating the terms of service for a community is different than censorship. Having a human understandable and easy to digest community guidelines can go a long way in establishing the "rules of the road" -- instead of putting these in complex legal terminology, we are better of explaining these in terms of how we explain our products and services to companies.
  
  
• Flagging/Reporting Violations : Use the crowd to report violations and flag content that is objectionable. However, make the process involving -- Explain _why_ (Choose from a list of granular reasons) why content is objectionalable and/or needs to be reviewed.
  
  
• Have "Levels" of degrading content -- Allow users to have thresholds -- Have systems in place to allow users to create thresholds of objectionable content. That upholds the right of users to post as well as receive in a reasonable manner without stepping on each other.

More info can be found in her blog - Techsploitation

I am here at the Web 2.0 conference in SF and sitting in and listening to Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff talk about their book - GroundSwell. Very fascinating. They talk about defining objectives before looking at technology for your social strategy.

Their key message for community development is :

What is your objective? Define your objective and make sure you can get executive buy-in. Dell has Micheal Dell personally buying into Dell IdeaStorm and of course Howard Schultz himself was pushing MyStarbucksIdeas -- With a killer PR effort.

1. Listening
2. Talking
3. Energizing
4. Support
5. Embracing

Tips for success:

• Know your customers
  
• Measurable Objective (Choose one the items above)
  
• Start Small, but think Big -- get a pilot going, and then think about rolling it throughout your company
  

More information at

• http://groundswell.forrester.com
  

Today morning, we put out a press release (Do folks even read press releases anymore?) -- Anyways we are now officially in Public Beta -- What does that mean? -- Nothing except that you don't need to email us/contact us to get access to IdeaScale:

Couple of quick notes:

• All users (including existing customers, free account holders etc.) have access to IdeaScale
• If you are a current customer, you can try out IdeaScale by clicking on IdeaScale (Top Left Corner) when you login
• If you are a new user -- Goto http://ideascale.com and create an account.

A couple of news/blog outlets have covered our release: (click on the logo to see their coverage)

We've received great interest in the private beta of IdeaScale.

I wanted to post an update on IdeaScale and some information on how to get access. If you need more information, you can always contact me, but please read this entire post before emailing me.

• Click here for a Video Explaining IdeaScale

Couple of quick housecleaning items:

• IdeaScale FAQ: (We'll be updating the FAQ as we get more questions)
  
  http://www.ideascale.com/application/ideascale/faq
  
  
• New Account Signup (If you already do not have a QuestionPro/MicroPoll/ContactPro account)
  
  http://www.ideascale.com/application/ideascale/signup.html
  
  
• Suggestions/Comments/Feedback:
  
  http://questionpro.ideascale.com (Post topics under the IdeaScale category) -- yes we are using IdeaScale for IdeaScale (if that makes any sense)
  

Now, over the last week we've been receiving great interest on IdeaScale -- from a "frown" to "wow you guys nailed it" to one editor arguing "how are your customers going to make money here?" -- I've talked to a few of you and I am open to talking more. Based on the limited feedback, we noticed we had to polish up a few things even before we could go into public beta:

Here are some of the enhancements/upgrades that have been made over the last week:

1. RSS Feeds
   
   We are personally big fans of RSS feeds so we jazzed up the RSS Feed model. We now have 2 global RSS feeds for each IdeaScale portal and individual RSS feeds for each Idea.
   
   
   
   Detailed Help Item : http://www.ideascale.com/help/496.html
   
   
2. Enhanced Security Settings
   
   One of the consistent feedback we got from our enterprise customers was enabling this for an "Employee Only" or a "Partner Only" scenario. We did not think about this initially, but after talking to a few customers, we were convinced that we should have different security models depending upon the context. If you want to run an idea-portal where you want your employees and partners (selected) to participate, then a public facing Idea Portal does NOT make sense here. We have included options for enabling a "Login/Authenticated Only" option:
   
   
   
   
   
   Detailed Help : http://www.ideascale.com/help/497.html
   
   
3. Support for "Tagging" and "Related Ideas"
   
   The other feedback we got was to find a way to somehow "collate" similar ideas and create an IdeaCloud -- basically concepts that are similar. We've implemented a simple "tagging" system and co-relate ideas based on tags.
   
   
   
   Detailed Help : http://www.ideascale.com/help/498.html

Now, the BIG question that I got repeatedly is -- What about Single-Signon/SSO/SAML support? Well, here's a post related to that (below.) We are working on it, but we don't think it's an uber-priority right now. Moreover SSO/SAML integration needs work on _both_ sides and is not a "point/drop/click/integrate" solution (is integration ever a point/click/drop solution?)


Post about SSO:
http://questionpro.ideascale.com/akira/dtd/88-393


If you are interested in SSO, please comment on the topic. I am watching that topic closely.


The next big question everyone had surrounded around pricing and cost. Well the good news is that it's obviously FREE when we are in beta. I know -- if you are a company that really does not help you -- No one wants to spend a ton of time on a tool that may be cost-prohibitive to run in the long term. Unfortunately I do not have a concrete plan setup yet -- but I can assure you that pricing will be based on the following factors:

• There _will_ be a FREE personal/blogger/small biz edition.
• There will be a Monthly billed Corp/Enterprise edition -- for users who need stuff like:
• Subdomain (ideas.mycompany.com) mapping
• Single Signon
• SSL, Closed IdeaPortals (Employee, Partner Portals etc.)

Pricing will most likely be similar to our QuestionPro tool.

Finally -- the last question I got asked was when do we plan to get out of Beta? -- the current plan is run the beta program through the end of May and launch out of Beta June 1st.


Lastly -- If you have feedback for IdeaScale, please post your feedback here:

http://questionpro.ideascale.com (Under the IdeaScale category)


You can also contact me directly if you have specific questions that are not answered in the FAQ or on the site (I can then add them to the site or FAQ.)

blog [@] surveyanalytics [dot] com

Heard about Dell IdeaStorm? My Starbucks Ideas? -- Want to do the same thing for your company? See the video below:

We are currently in private beta and will going into full launch mode in a couple of weeks. If you are interested in previewing it under the hood, please email me at :

blog [at] surveyanalytics [dot] com

Many of you who've been on the RSS or the email list for the blog have probably been hearing us talk about IdeaScale for a couple of weeks now. We are getting ready to enter private beta.



What is IdeaScale?

IdeaScale is a tool that allows you to create your own "Idea/Suggestion/Feedback" portal for your company/blog etc. It allows for your customers to come and suggest ideas and give feedback to you. User post ideas and using the crowdsourcing model, users also rate each other's feedback and ideas.

The highly rated ideas automatically bubble up to the top. You can then mark ideas as "Accepted", "In Progress" or "Under Review" -- To communicate with your users that you are actually taking their suggestions seriously and are acting upon them.



Why IdeaScale Works:

Transparent and Collaborative Feedback

Too often users are dissuaded from giving feedback either because they believe that giving feedback will not affect change or feedback is solicited at an inopportune time. The IdeaScale portal allows users to provide feedback in a collaborative model where they can see the kind of feedback other users are providing. They can then improve upon the suggestion using comments and ultimately quantify the feedback by voting the ideas up or down.

Integrated Participation
By integrating points (points for posting ideas, points for voting and points for commenting on other ideas) with the transparent feedback model, a sense of ownership and kinship can be achieved with the participants that is simply not available using other feedback models like surveys.


Unsolicited Feedback Model
Surveys typically are a very intrusive feedback model. Users generally get invited to take surveys via email or a website link. While the website link is not as intrusive as the email invitation, the question of timing is paramount.


Automatic Categorization and Quantification of Open-Ended Text
One of the biggest challenges of surveys is that when soliciting unintended feedback on concepts, they are generally bucketed into open-ended comments. There is a fair amount of "data" in these open-ended comments and it is nearly impossible for researchers and administrators to gather actionable results. The IdeaScale model turns the table and uses the crowdsourcing strategy to allow other users to quantify ideas.


Who's doing this:

We @ QuestionPro have been using IdeaScale ourselves (eating our own dogfood) for about 3 weeks now. You can see it in action here:

• http://questionpro.ideascale.com

We've piloted IdeaScale with a few key clients and so far the response has been very very positive. Here is what some have to say:


The crowdsourced feedback model provides a community setting for customers to share their ideas and expand on the ideas of other customers. The IdeaScale incentive and voting process is extremely important in harnessing this flow of customer ideas and and making it an integral component of product innovation strategies
Romi Mahajan, Director @ Microsoft


We are always on the lookout for innovative research methodologies that provide new insights into the way we deliver our services and believe that IdeaScale has the potential to help us engage and listen to our customers in ways we've never been able to do in the past - and thereby gain significant competitive advantage.

Tim O'Conner, Senior Vice President Marketing @ Unisource






If you would like to participate in the private beta, please email me @ : blog [at] surveyanalytics [dot] com and I'll enable your account to have access to IdeaScale. We'll be going into full-scale launch mode in the next couple of weeks.

If you'd like to learn more about IdeaScale, click on the link below.

• http://www.questionpro.com/ideascale/

We just added a new feature into the IdeaScale portal for QuestionPro -- RSS feeds of recent ideas and suggestions posted for QuestionPro.

• http://questionpro.ideascale.com/userimages/8/ideascale_393.xml

If you are not into RSS, here is a quick Wikipedia definition of RSS. We all here @ QuestionPro all use Google Reader as our RSS client, although Mac Fanboy Rob Hoehn uses the integrated reader that comes with the Mac email client. It's good that we do not have "corporate" guidelines on the RSS clients that we can use.

If you are not into RSS, I highly encourage to get on that train. I was not convinced about RSS and a few months ago discovered Google Reader and since then I am addicted to my RSS feeds. If fact, if some site is not in my RSS Reader it's lost.

The sheer volume of information that you can process via RSS is simply mind-blowing. I subscribe to about 30 different feeds (from tech, to market research and for competitive intelligence) -- and with my RSS reader I can easily keep a pulse on what is going on all the time. One of the first things I learned in Engineering school was to "optimize the item that takes most amount of time" -- in other words, I spend a _lot_ of time on the Internet, assimilating information -- that simply is part of my job. With an RSS reader, you can accumulate and assimilate information much more efficiently than by going on the web to each of the sites -- not to mention that you don;'t have to look at annoying banner ad's while reading through the RSS reader!

One of the most elegant features within QuestionPro is its collaborative nature. Via dashboard and sub accounts, an organization can control how results are shared and to whom. Unfortunately, it takes a little while for people to understand how powerful it is. We've published a video piece that provides a great overview (below).

Thanks everyone who came the the short webinar. I felt that the webinar flew by really fast. I am used to giving detailed webinars, but since most of you were existing users, I think I cut through most of the fluff I usually talk about.


Anyway, some interesting questions that came up:

Q: Webinar Recording:
A: Hmm -- Well, the GotoWebinar recording is not exactly stellar. Maybe we should pony up and pay for LiveMeeting? We'll try to doctor up the recording and see if we can post it in the next week.


Q: What Question Types can be used with TURF?

At this point, the Select All that Apply -- Multiple Choice (Select Many) question type is integrated. We are planning on integrating
Matrix Questions also with the tool so that you can specify a "criteria" within a matrix to represent a selection (checkbox)


Q: What about Line Optimization and Price Modelling?

Line Optimization and Price Modeling are used when you have extraneous factors (like cost of each of the options) etc. At this point, we do _not_ have too much documentation around it. I'll see what we can do to beef that up.


Q: Can we combine data across multiple surveys for running TURF?

No. The current "combining" tool only works with regular Frequency analysis and combines them. If we get a lot of requests for running combined TURF (where you want to combine the data across multiple surveys) and then run TURF analysis on them, we'll probably do it. For the most part, regular frequency analysis combining works pretty well in that situation.

Q: Can TURF be combined with logic like Extraction etc.?

Yes. The logic has not bearing on TURF analysis. You can run Extraction AND TURF on the same question.

Q: Can I get some more information on survey analysis (general)?

Yes: Here is a link :http://www.questionpro.com/akira/showArticle.do?articleID=survey-analysis


Q: Next Webinar Topic?

GAP Analysis: Measuring Importance and Satisfaction: Click on the link below to register: It's on Tuesday May 6th.

• https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/559427488

Kevin Battey (the other Co-Founder of QuestionPro) will be presenting this.



As usual, thank you guys for taking the time to come over. Just so that everyone knows, I know of at least two attendees as far away as France and Italy who joined us, other than our favorite clients from Southern California and the US.

Hopefully this was helpful. At this point, we'll stick to our Once-A-Month Webinar Schedule. We might change things around (increase frequency) later if we are launching new tools/services.

Obligatory PLUG:

Everytime I talk to clients, I get at least a few good ideas (TURF on Matrix, TURF+ Combined Reports). If you ever have suggestions and Ideas for us, please feel free to post it on our IdeaScale Portal here:

• http://questionpro.ideascale.com

This is a reminder that we'll be hosting a webinar on TURF Analysis @ 11PM PST.

• https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/416874667
  
  
• Conference Call Information: (616) 883 8055, access code 288-565-484
  

Believe it or not, the easiest way to analyze open-ended comments is
(you guessed it) reading them! This is the primary reason we have the
"Open-Ended Text Report" within QuestionPro. If you have a ton of
responses, it may make more sense to download the Excel report and read
through the comments. For ease of use, the Excel Report is broken down
by different sheets and each open-ended question has its own sheet.
Reading through the comments while having the analytical data in the
back of your head, gives you a complete picture of how to interpret the
overall survey.



It is generally prudent to support the analytical data with
representative quotes from some comments when preparing an executive
summary. This allows for a personal, impact oriented analysis and
summary of the survey. Which is why journalists typically quote an
established figure – to personalize or put a face on the survey data.

This technique can be used if users are specific about a particular
topic. The big question here is: what to search for? Since open-ended
comments can be "all over the map" you need to know what kinds of
phrasings your respondents will be using. A classic example here is a
satisfaction survey given to all the attendees of a conference. They
had the basics of conference surveys – Did you like the schedule, the
speakers, hotel accommodation etc. Turns out that one of the big issues
was that the toilet was all dirty and there was apparently a huge line
there as attendees shuttled between presenters.



We were able to search a standard set of keywords ("toilet", "restroom"
etc.) and determined that over 60% of the comments had to do with that
one issue. This is a good example of having context and the only way
out there is to read the first few comments and decide if the issues
can be framed using a set of keywords. If that is the case, then the
data can be analyzed in the aggregate and deeper insight can be
extracted out.



Text Categorization:

If you've been in the Market Research business, you would call this
"Coding" – this is where you pay someone to analyze each text response
and categorize or code them into a set of pre-defined buckets. Quite
frankly, we do not believe this is a reasonable cost/efficient model.
There are numerous flaws associated with this methodology and the model
is very cumbersome. The first issue being that someone (either within
or outside your company) needs to get trained to understand the
categorization model. This is not cheap and really does not scale (it's
a linear cost model). For example the cost to categorize 1000 comments
would be 10x the cost to categorize 100 comments. The Web, is all about
exponential scaling not linear scaling. You would not be doing online
surveys, if you didn't buy into the exponential scale concept – would
you? This model fits in with the "Paper survey" or "phone survey"
model, where the cost to conduct a survey is linear – simply because
the costs associated with them are time based – where human beings need
to spend time as data-entry operators.



I am sure there are many valid arguments for using a text
categorization model, in certain situations – when you are paying
through your nose for a niche target demographic (doctors, IT decision
makers, CxO's etc.). In such cases I think it makes sense to spend the
time and effort to analyze the comments using a text categorization
model.



We at QuestionPro have thought about developing a tool to facilitate
the text categorization model, but so far have pushed it to the
back-burner simply because we don't think users would use it. If you
think otherwise, please feel free to post a comment or reply to blog
[at] surveyanalytics [dot] com.



Crowdsourcing:

This is HOT new buzzword of the Web 2.0 economy. If you've not heard of
crowdsourcing you should climb out of the rock you are in! (just
kidding!) – We just got introduced to the concept about a couple of years ago.
OK – So what is crowdsourcing and how does that apply to open-ended
comments? Crowdsourcing is when you "source" or ask a group of people
to complete a task. Instead of relying on a single "expert" you
basically rely on a "crowd" to come up with the correct answer. To
learn more about crowdsourcing I highly recommend the following:



• The Wisdom of Crowds (Book by James Surowiecki)

• Amazon.com's Mechanical Turk (Google "mechanical turk") - http://www.mturk.com/mturk/welcome

• Translation of Facebook.com to Spanish. (instead of hiring translators to translate their site,
they simply asked their users to translate different parts of the site
etc.)



OK, now that we have a quick primer on crowdsourcing, the question is
how can this be applied to open-ended comments? The answer is really a
two part strategy that we think can change the way comments are
solicited and surveys are conducted. Today, the world of surveys is a
uni-directional communication model. It basically means that only the
respondent and you (and in most cases only the researcher) has access
to the comments posted by a respondent. We think this is a wall for
crowdsourcing and serves as an inhibitor to capturing these comments.
We think, a better model for soliciting feedback is a Digg style
open-access paradigm where you let the crowd post comments and then
vote these comments up and down. This basically involves having a
"portal" of some sort where users can browse other comments and cast
their votes on the comments themselves (this is the crowdsouring part)
or post their own open-ended suggestions (this is the feedback part.)



We at QuestionPro are currently in beta mode with a few select
customers on this crowdsourcing paradigm. We're calling this IdeaScale.
You can find (not a whole lot but a little more) information on this
paradigm here:


http://questionpro.ideascale.com

Those days are long over and so are the days of charging for usage on many things on the internet. Like surveys... As you may have noticed, QuestionPro now offers UNLIMITED survey responses for every single license level, including our Free license. Charging per survey complete is really an artifact of the days of snail mail paper surveys when there was an actual hard cost to paper, stamps, etc. In a hosted model, there is obviously some sort of cost to the volume of surveys that we field, but the cost of a request to our servers is too minuscule to base a pricing model. So, everything should just be free? right?...well, no.

Fundamentally, our pricing model is based on a couple factors, one of which is, of course, the cost to support a user. This cost comes in the form of email, phone, and chat support. As a customer moves up through license levels, they are exposed to more complex functionality which require more support which costs more, plain and simple.

The next factor in the model is the utility or value that a customer may gain through accessing certain features at certain license levels. We think the easiest way to measure utility for our customers is the amount of time (headaches) we save by delivering features that help you get your job done. The indirect cost to us for features is normally in the development and testing of complex features. For example, the delivery of TURF took many more developer man hours than the delivery of a simple mean calculation. BUT, trying to do that calculation using some other method (outside of other stat packages) will likely end up as a massive drain on your time...and time, well, time is money, as they say.

Now, this is our simplified take on things. There are a million other pieces that make up the true cost of a customer. But, we use these factors to guide our pricing and distribution of features across license levels. We don't actually have any MBA's on board here, so this admittedly may fly in the face of traditional pricing theories.

One thing is for certain, charging for usage is a thing of the past. Charging for more users or large amounts of disk space may make sense, but if you're paying for simple posts to a server and small bits of data, then you should ask yourself, "What am I actually paying for?"

Why not unlimited email invitations?? Well, the spammers of the world have prevented us from opening up the email system. They've ruined that part of the unlimited model, but sending limitations are set reasonably enough via our system, and you can always use your own website or email system to collect more responses.

We'll be talking about TURF Analysis -- Not how about your lawn (although that might be an interesting subject in itself), but the Market Research Term (Total Unduplicated Reach and Frequency Analysis) this Thursday 11AM PST. We are hosting a short (1/2 hour) webinar to educated users on what TURF is and how it can be applied to online surveys.


If you have comments and ideas on what we should cover and specifics on what we should talk about please feel free to post your comment on our IdeaScale portal here:

• http://questionpro.ideascale.com/akira/dtd/37-393

To register for the webinar click on the link below:

• https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/416874667

We also welcome feedback on what you'd like us to cover in the next webinar. Feel free to post comments on our IdeaScale portal on what kinds of webinars you'd like to see us delivering.

The blogging world is an interesting and infectious space of information sharing. It's obviously a disruptive technology -- what used to be the old media stronghold of a few publications delivering news, now is replaced by hundreds of blogs that distribute information.



Case in point is MarketResearchTech -- Hosted by Mark Kupferman. I've been following his blog for quite some time -- As a CEO in the research space, its obviously my job to keep a tab the market and who is influencing and who is writing about what. Many times I also go an comment on blogs even when they are critical to QP. Mark used to blog regularly but then stopped for a while -- I think he's back on track and blogging regularly. I would highly recommend that you subscribe to his blogs feed:

• http://www.marketresearchtech.com (you'll see links to the RSS feeds on the right)
  

He recently blogged about our QuestionPro Blog - And he got it right away. We use the blog for two broad purposes:

1. Deliver information about products, services and enhancements. This is important because we are enhancing and upgrading services constantly. One of the great things about SaaS (Software as a Service) is that we do not really do product releases as with traditional software. We make changes as and when we think it's necessary and deliver solutions in Internet time.
   
   
2. Educate and share information with users about the Online Research world. We learn a lot, primarily based on our association with different researchers and clients and see many different implementation strategies. We'd like to share this with our customers so that you can learn from items that work and things that don't.

BTW, one of the best (and funniest) posts from Mark is this one about Fake Software Reviews of SurveyMethods (ResearchThink) here:

http://www.marketresearchtech.com/fake-survey-software-reviews.htm
http://www.marketresearchtech.com/researchthink-fake-surveymethods.htm

The funny part was not that he caught them, but the Ad-Sense ads on that blog post -- One of them was for ResearchThink!! (The Fake Review Site!!!)

OK - Seriously here are some good posts that I think are relevant:

• Using Pre-Survey Incentives to Increase Survey Response Rates
• PSOL Boosts Response Rate +23% with Prizes

Thanks Mark for keeping everyone honest!