Last fall, I listened to Dawn of Midi‘s Dysnomia on repeat as I drove, as I wrote, as I cooked. I found it via the RadioLab podcast. I loved the sense of driving seemingly-electronic music slowly morphing, and I loved to hear that it wasn’t electronic at all, but humans playing to sound like machines. The layering of sound and story was what caught me, but the music kept me.
This summer and fall, I’ve been listening to the xx‘s two releases on repeat. I discovered them via the New Yorker’s profile, Shy and Mighty.
Two different artists and sounds, but both triggered my play daily on repeat response and I thought I’d share. Both are good as foreground or background, which is a hard thing to do.
I know making music and getting paid for it these days is tough going, so if you like these songs, go support the artists and buy their music!
I just completed some go-to-market research for a scientifically-oriented business-to-consumer company. In this research, one of my tasks was to assess consumer sentiment and project possible customer loyalty for a new product launch. Things like customer-lifetime-value, ecommerce conversion rate, and loyalty would be wonderful to have from our competitors, but these KPIs are closely-guarded secrets.
While I loved spy novels as a teen, I am not up for corporate espionage. I do not need to break into competitor website analytics to uncover insights into consumer behavior. I asked consumers about their buying habits and loyalty directly, online.
My research on online consumer surveys turned up two options – Survata and Google Consumer Surveys. I believe I had heard of Google Consumer Surveys and then found Survata by searching for competitors of Google in the consumer survey space.
Similarities
Both show a short survey to give a reader access to gated content. Both offer a handful of questions for a buck or two a completed survey. Both help publishers monetize their visitors. Both offer geographic, age, and gender targeting, which happens, I imagine based on the target demographic of the content on the gated sites.
Both survey engines offer visualization help to understand your survey answers, including visualization of subsets within your answers. Both survey engines provide some sense of statistical significance of any trends in the data. Both require prepayment to run the survey.
Differences
Qualifying Question – Advantage Survata
When I started earlier this summer, Google Consumer Surveys did not offer the chance to have a qualifying question. So if the website visitor met your demographic criteria (say a certain age, your specified gender, maybe your region of interest) they answered your surveys. If you wanted males under the age of 45, great. If you wanted males under the age of 45 with small dogs, not so great.
Since then, Google has added a qualifying question option. The survey client (me in this case) only pays for respondents who answer the qualifying question correctly (e.g. people who answer yes to having a small dog).
Google’s restriction is they need the qualifying question passed at a minimum amount, otherwise they bounce the survey back to you. Apparently, my qualifying question was too stringent. Google kept my payment for the survey and issued me a coupon in lieu of a refund. However, since I don’t want people who don’t meet my criteria to answer my survey, I’m a little stuck as to how to use the coupon.I would have preferred a full refund, so I can get my questions answered at Survata! [edited 10/22 – Google issued me a refund for the incomplete survey].
As far as I can tell, Survata does not have a minimum response goal for the qualifying question. In fact, I used the same qualifying question for both the Survata and the Google Consumer Survey so I anticipate its success rate was similar in both environments. Survata did not bounce my survey.
Cost – Advantage Survata
The two survey engines are both inexpensive, but Survata is less expensive. For a 5-question survey, I paid about $1/response for US respondents from Survata. The qualifying question was not included in the question count. Google Consumer Surveys includes the qualifying question in the count, and I paid about $2/response for US respondents for 4 questions after the qualifier.
Support – Advantage Survata
I had a great experience with Survata. Prior to each survey launch, I got feedback on my questions and setup from a survey analyst. The analyst edited my survey, and I got to see the before and after version and approve it before launch. My analyst was available to me via email, in my survey dashboard, and via IM throughout the process. I also had a follow up call so that I could understand the survey results and get a quick orientation to their visualization engine when the survey was complete. I ran a handful of surveys and was able to work with the same analyst rather than starting anew each time.
Survata – Analyst review before and after
Google Consumer Surveys did a review of my questions ahead of launch as well, but the experience was less caring. I got a basic email detailing what was wrong with my survey and telling me what to do to fix it.
Google Consumer Survey edit request email.
Survata’s help was more helpful – they did the work for me and asked for my approval. Google made me their admin.
Data/Results Visualization – no Advantage
I liked the user interface, question previews, and results analysis engines for both survey vendors.
Publisher Network – Advantage Google?
I imagine with Google’s reach and reputation, Survata has stiff competition. I have not encountered a Survata survey on a website. I did see my first Google survey yesterday, on the Christian Science Monitor website. In case it’s not obvious, this is not my survey, though it is relevant to my home state, Michigan.
Google Consumer Survey encountered on the Christian Science Monitor website.
I prefer Survata
The survey engine (user interface, options, everything) for both Survata and for Google Consumer Surveys changed during my project. So, this review is a snapshot of an evolving set of features. Right now Survata has a strong edge in customer service. I had a good relationship with my survey analyst and a positive experience with the company. My experience with Google was more at arm’s length (only email, always from someone new) and ultimately unsatisfying due to their rejection of my survey after taking my money. [edited 10/22 – Google issued me a refund for the incomplete survey].
Short version: I strongly preferred my interactions with and the results I got from Survata.
I’ve long loved Flickr. I’ve been a pro member for years and I have so far resisted the lure of Instagram, mostly out of loyalty.
Yet, as I’ve switched from taking photographs on a digital camera to taking snapshots on my phone, I haven’t been updating Flickr as much as I used to. Somehow the cell phone photos didn’t feel as Flickr-worthy, and I was sharing them in other ways (via email or via G+ now and then). And, for those who know my love of knitting, my vehicle to upload photos to my Ravelry projects used to be via Flickr (hence all the photos of yarn and partially knitted items in my Flickr feed) but I now use Ravulous on the phone to populate my Ravelry photos. Ravulous meant that my only remaining reason to use Flickr (to get photos into Ravelry) went away. Plus, every application on my phone (Dropbox, G+) wants to auto-archive my photos for me, so saving them “up” to Flickr felt less urgent.
Anyway, I’ve decided to shed my reluctance to showcase the more informal cell phone photos (cell phone cameras are actually quite good these days) and get back to posting on Flickr (and yes on this blog).
It’s my 2014 New Year’s Resolution. Share a little more, take more photos. Post more in this blog. I am happier when I’m doing these things. So if you don’t see me doing these things, prompt me. It’s for the good of those around me ;).
Edit in January 2019 – now that flickr has been acquired again and changed the membership again, I’m moving my photos to Google Photos and removing them from this site, including this post!
Zappos.com CEO Tony Hseih has released Delivering Happiness: A path to profits, passion, and purpose. I have followed Zappos CEO and several others Zappos team members on Twitter for a while now, and I’ve enjoyed learning from him about his studies specifically on happiness. Since my title at my day job is Director of Happiness, it seemed a matter of professional commitment to keep up with Hsieh. By following him, I learning of The Happiness Hypothesis and commented on it here in my blog.
My Review
Delivering Happiness cover
I enjoyed the book, which was a mix of autobiography and riches to risk to riches business story. Apparently he was a born entrepreneur: resourcefully avoiding piano and violin practice while starting several small businesses with his parents’ blessing – worm farm, button mail order business, magic tricks, and more.
Yet, what makes the book valuable for the rest of us is where he details moments where he failed and what he learned. Critical to Zappos success, it seems, was what he and his partners learned from an early failure hidden inside a success – the loss of culture that occurred in the growth of their first successful venture – LinkExchange (eventually acquired by Microsoft). He and his partners vowed not to grow Zappos that way, and Zappos has created and maintained a strong culture that they feel is critical to success of the business and maintaining it as a place the founders and the employees want to work.
And, everyone knows that their Las Vegas customer service team is amazing. In this book, he helps us understand how that evolved and what Zappos does to support that WOW culture. It has been codified into ten core values (Zappos website page on the core values), but what is obvious from the book is that the culture predates the values being crystallized. I participated in the session to draw up the core values for my current employer, and I admit to being more than a little jealous of Zappos’ core values. They are inspirational and wonderful. My favorite Zappos core value is:
create fun and a little weirdness
It just seems to recognize that teams are built by people being themselves (a little weird), through bonding events (by definition, these events stand out, so are also non-normal), and by laughing together.
Another critical learning was not to outsource key components of their business. The Zappos team outsourced their warehouse logistics in Kentucky, and then bore the brunt of dissatisfied customers and reinventing the warehousing operation to solve the problem (taking it back in house).
What impressed me about the book is Hsieh’s (and partners’) open leadership style, and his openness in sharing internal Zappos communications and their core values with the rest of us. The book reprints emails sent at times of stress and change, including a note from around the time of their layoffs in 2008, and then the one announcing acquisition by Amazon.com in 2009.
Well, in true Zappos “Deliver WOW through service” style, they sent not only my advance copy, but an extra advance reading copy for me to share. If you’d like my giveaway copy of the book, please leave a comment on this post or on the Facebook note where this blog will be syndicated. I will choose a commenter at random on June 15 and award the book!
If the award period is past, if you didn’t get the book I’m giving away, if you prefer hardcover, or if you dislike commenting on my blog, of course it is available at Amazon.com/deliveringhappiness and at the book’s website DeliveringHappinessBook.com.
Yet, Facebook is where my friends and family are, so I go there to hang out with them. Since I do not do a lot to maintain my Facebook presence, I pull in feeds to it from several places. I do pull items in from my Flickr account and from this blog.
I have mixed feelings about the broadcasting I’m doing on Facebook via the blog. I like it that my friends engage with what I write – leaving me their reactions or just an “atta girl”. Yet, by feeding the blog into Facebook, I’ve let Facebook capture the interaction on the blog post. So, instead of comments on the post, I get comments on my notes in Facebook. One level away.
I like this less than comments on the blog itself, but most of the kind folks who comment on Facebook would never encounter the posts except as notes on Facebook.
A conundrum indeed. I value the interactions more than comments in “the right place”, so I’ll continue to do this. Unless, that is, Facebook drives me away…
So, just the other day, with some of my Michigan Usability Professionals Folks, I was wondering about local social media folks that I hadn’t yet met. You know, wondering about who might be good speakers to invite to talk to us, that kind of thing.
Podcamp Michigan 11/8/2008
I didn’t even tweet it, though I should have. But, I did find, in my inbox this morning, a twitter notification from, of all things, Podcamp Michigan. Ask and ye shall receive. Or, in this case, “receive even though the ask was inchoate and unarticulated.”
A podcamp is an unConference focused on blogging, podcasting, and social media. Should be fun. I’m planning to attend. You?
