I’m trying this out and will write about the success/failure I experience.

For now, go visit http://BuyMyKamloopsCondo.ca and make me an offer

If you are doing any sort of market research or customer satisfaction study, you invariably need to conduct some sort of quantitative survey to provide you with measured data to drive decisions. For larger more complicated surveys, you really need to use Survs, a new player on the scene expecting to come out of beta this fall.

Survs provides the usual “build a survey” functionality that you find in the other applications, but where Survs stands out is in its beauty and sharing features. Building the survey is a snap, sharing the results with others couldn’t be easier. For anyone doing any serious amount of measurement, you can create channels to segment your respondents for later filtering etc. It’s still in beta and while it misses some features that the hardcore surveyor will notice it is very stable and more than enough for the hobbyist.

Little info, little time

Sometimes though you just need a small amount of info from a small amount of people and you don’t really care about all those extra features. Email might be fine for asking 1 or 2 people, but if you have to ask a group, keeping track of the replies can be a bit of a pain. Google Docs to the rescue!

You can create simple “surveys” in Google Docs very quickly and easily and best of all, for free.

1. First, fire up Google Docs (you will need a Google account if you don’t already have one). We’ll be creating a new Form.
   
2. Then start filling in the types of questions you want to ask. For my example I want to know people’s food preferences prior to a larger dinner party that I am hosting. You can add additional questions by clicking the Add Item button.
   
3. Once you are done, make sure the form is saved. Now you can send it to people and have them fill it out for you. We can do this a couple of ways, either via email, or by sending the URL to people. To email your friends just click the Email this form button at the top and enter some email addresses. To send the URL to people just copy the URL at the bottom of the form.
   
4. How do you see the results? Go back to you Google Docs page and you can find your new form in the Spreadsheets section of the Items by type panel on the left. The default is to display documents with the newest documents at the top, so your new form/spreadsheet should be at the top.
   
5. All the results from the form are stored as rows in the spreadsheet. This is handy because you can do some cool things like exporting, doing some statistics with spreadsheet formulas, etc. The form also provides you with a decent summary of the responses. Click on Form → Show summary and you will get a few graphs of your response data.
   

Painless and quick

So building a little survey like this is pretty easy, cheap (free), and quick if you need to get some responses from a group of people. Perfect to see what people want to eat at your next dinner party, or which location people prefer to have your next gathering at. But, again, if you need to do some proper analysis and segmentation you really need to use something like Survs which offers much more control.

Screencast

See a quick screen cast I created breifly explaining how to create a quick survey in Google Docs.

Thanks for reading.

It comes down to a few things really:

• The whole is greater than the sum of the parts (i.e. Trends give twitter value)
• What people say in your network are probably more valueable than what you say, so retweet what matters
• It’s so easy, even a celebrity can do it

Trending shows significance

British Columbia recently finished it’s provincial elections and voters turned out to exert their opinion in the democratic process we call voting.  Individually my opinion doesn’t matter and makes no difference to the outcome, but collectively the vote effects change.  So everyone should feel compelled to vote.

Except that unlike voting, we actually get to hear your opinion.  It makes no difference if you tweet that you “Just got back from Mexico and feel a flu coming on.”  But if thousands of people tweet this we may start to see a trend and can possibly enact some action (Note: ignore your opinion on the validity of reacting specifically to H1N1 and just think in a more general sense).  This trending is what is valuable.  The real-time aggregate trend provides value to society (for social issues) and to corporations (for brand/product issues) and to consumers (by providing an open and public channel for discussion).  Therein lies the beauty of the social web.  If you have a problem with something, you let it be known.  As consumers, we are exerting more voice and control over products simply because it’s incredibly easy to do so.

Real time pulse on the world

We recently took a trip to the Okanagan and the Naramata Wineries, on the trip we heard news on the radio about the fire in West Kelowna (Westbank). The news didn’t seem to be coming fast enough or up-to-date enough for my liking so I fired up Tweetie on my iPhone and searched for #kelownafire. There was a lot of useful info that people were tweeting.

Your network is valuable to me

I follow you because I feel that you have something important to say and I value what you say.  There is an implicit trust there.  So when you choose to retweet what someone says I give the value of that tweet more weight than the random noise I see.  If I find it interesting, I may make a connection or at the very least find a new source of valuable information to begin following.

Likewise, when you retweet what I say, you expose your followers to my thoughts.  This connects my message with them at a deeper level and, again, helps me make connections.

I can also view a conversation between people which often offers two sides to an opinion which adds even more value for me and enables me to better formulate my own thoughts on the matter.  However, twitter is not chat.

Ease of entry

Despite it’s memes and oddities, twitter is possibly the easiest tool of public self expression their is.  Blogging takes too damn long, lots of setup, and requires that the reader spend more energy searching the content out.  Twitter is quick, takes practically nothing to get going, and you are instantly viewable by the twitterverse.  Granted, what you have to say is probably of insignificant importance and will likely just get lost in the noise anyways.  But if you twitter about something of value to someone, they are likely watching/searching for that key word and will start following you quickly.

It doesn’t matter if you don’t get it, just that you use it

So it doesn’t really matter that you don’t understand what a hashtag is, or how to retweet, or any of it.  Just tweet what matters to you and it will create value for someone else.

So what’s been holding me up?

Procrastination for one.  I’ve always wanted to design the theme and look myself using the blog as a test bed for some usability ideas.  Of course, that takes time I never seem to have, so I never got started.  Some of the free Wordpress themes are pretty nice looking now and there are a ton of premium themes on various premium sites (e.g. woothemes) so I decided to just suck it up, take a canned theme and just get started on the content.  I can build up my own theme later.

Another holdup, time.  I really don’t have time to do any of this, and I still don’t really.  With full time work and part time MBA, any free time I have is usually devoted to trying to spend time with the people I don’t have time to see.  However, I feel that the opportunity cost of not blogging is substantial.  Ideally I want to increase my visibility in the community at large (both as a career objective and for glory!) but, more importantly, I want to expand my network of contacts and learn from them.  I feel that blogging will help me achieve those goals.

With that said, I’m ready to go.  I have a few house keeping things I want to do first around the setup of the blog, but hopefully I’ll be posting some useful (to someone) content very shortly.  I learn stuff every day and try things out so I might as well share those experiences.