Social Media Surveys - Not Too Social
Recently I got a survey request. It was for understanding how people use internet and specifically, social media. What struck me the most, was that the surveys we use to understand “social media” is still playing catch up with the concept of social media. You see polls being conducted on social networks, but they are like any other poll that would be conducted through any other medium. It only leverages the easy and instant access of the social media and not the interactivity or consumer content generation aspects of it.
One of the innovative ways to conduct a survey is to keep the options open in the beginning and as users fill out the survey, convert the answers into options. This serves two purposes, when defining a survey one goes through several steps and one of them is talking to/running a sample survey with a few real customers to understand if the options you are suggesting are accurate. With the above idea, it takes away a couple of steps in the process.
Another interesting idea to experiment with could be to let people suggest improvements to questions and answers, enabling the users to judge the improvements and finally, keeping the ones with the most votes/comments/readership.
What do you think, what are some interesting ways to conduct social media-usage surveys? I shall keep updating this list as I come across/think about more ideas…feel free to post yours.
