The QuestionPro Blog

Wanted to share a few updates regarding IdeaScale with everyone.



Tagging Upgrade:

We've revamped how we do tags. Tags now display the total number of times users have used a tag, as well as the ability to click on a tag and search all entries related to that tag.



Pending Items:

• Tag Cloud (or something that displays the leaderboard of tags)
• Integrating tags with search
  

Lots of great presentations today at the CASRO Technology conference. One of the themes today has been SMS marketing and research. I culled out some interesting notes from all the talks that I thought you might enjoy:

-Mobile phone market is exploding (presented with too many slides to make the point)
-23% of US mobile subscribers say they have been exposed to adverts or marketing on their phone
-Only way to reach people that don't have a landline (duh)
-Phones are deeply personal - must be careful about contacting people
-95% of phones can receive SMS/text messaging
-SMS can be used for: alerts, info, messages, coupons, surveys
-SMS research always has faster response times
-Better to execute short SMS interviews over time vs long surveys over short time
-Data plans are expensive and requires special hardware thus explains 20% mobile web adoption rate

We've integrated SMS polling within MicroPoll.com for some time now. Its interesting to see the myriad of SMS market research projects that companies have implemented already. Do you have a need for some type of SMS research? Is there a particular feature related to SMS research that you need or are unable to find? Submit an idea today - we'd love to hear your SMS related feedback/ideas.

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.

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.

The TSA is getting a lot of press these days for doing something very simple: they are blogging about their security practices. People can read about why certain procedures are implemented, and can comment back with additional questions/concerns.

Blogging isn't rocket science, and it isn't anything new. However, more and more organizations are realizing that blogging is the next step in the evolution of customer feedback. To that end, we are always looking for new ideas to innovate.

Surveys, in their current form, produce structured quantitative data. We have many customers, however, come to us looking for ways to collect qualitative feedback. The problem of course, comes down to sifting through all those open ended text questions for meaningful data.

Our latest incarnation, IdeaScale, attempts to marry quantitative and qualitative data together in a very innovative way. Through the use of Digg-style forums, anyone can post a comment/idea, and visitors vote the idea up or down. In addition (and this is my favorite), you can easily configure the tool so that visitors cannot submit a comment until they rate a predefined number of ideas. This is really handy for large organization as it provides a way to harness the wisdom of the crowd to communicate the most important information.

Ask your sales representative about IdeaScale to see if this tool would be the right fit for you.