As many of you know I’m starting a company called Federated Media Publishing, we’re hoping to build a way for site authors to thrive by matching their sites to endemic, high quality sponsors. As part of the initial process of starting up, we’re asking our Authors to run surveys on their site, asking pretty standard questions of their audiences, so we can make better matches between marketers and an author’s sites. We did this a while back on Boing Boing and really learned a lot. Searchblog will be the first site to try the survey, which means you guys get to be our first testers.
Will you help us out and take this short survey, and let me know more about you? It’ll help make Searchblog and FM more successful – without reader input, there’s not a business in the first place. Thanks in advance, and please let me know if you have any trouble or input.
Translating the figures in $ into pounds or Euros might help some of us feel included. As would a blank space for comments at the end of the questionnaire either about the site or about the survey.
I am sorry, this is a long survey, not a short survey. Ten screenfulls on 800×600. Complex decisions (the list of industries), highly personal questions (exact year of birth instead of giving a range og ages, asking for income, number of kids), and open questions that require typing instead of all-closed questions that can be answered by clicking.
Plus a question that can be interpreted in many ways (“In the past 12 months, how much money have you spent on cutting-edge technology and/or consumer electronics gadgets, toys, or other products?”) Is this what you personally spent, or what you spent of your company’s money? Is a PC “cutting edge”? What about non-cutting edge toys like teddy bears?
You may get some answers from your own website if it mainly has highly committed readers, but in general, the response rate will suffer and you will get an unrepresentative, biased sample that won’t represent average users.
For additional arguments, see my article Keep Online Surveys Short.
If you are surveying the audience of a website with many readers, consider splitting the survey into pieces and only showing a few questions to each respondent. Response rate will go up, bias will go down, and results will be much more valid. (At the penalty of not being able to do crosstabs between sections, but I prefer validity.)
In response to the previous comment, sure, maybe they will only get responses from dedicated readers – but isn’t that what they want? This goes towards traffic of good intent. It should matter more what the most dedicated and active readers think, and less what the people just passing through think.
I think some marketers are making it too easy to provide feedback, and as a result, skewing the results.
I answered based on usage of battellemedia.com and not the actual domain hosting the survey, hope that’s the intent. My main feedback is the list of titles and industries is really out of date, especially for a web 2.0 company. Where would you put FM or Google, web development? There should be a web services choice.