August 26th, 2009, No Comments »
Blog Action Day is a single day–October 15–when bloggers write about a particular topic in order to raise awareness. Last year’s topic was poverty, and these were the results:
12,800 Bloggers
14,053 Blog Posts
13,498,280 Readers
17 Top 100 Blogs
That’s a pretty big reach. Change.org, the organizers of Blog Action Day, are running a 5-question, multiple-choice survey to determine the issue for this year’s event.
I urge you to spare 26 seconds to complete the survey and choose ‘climate change’ as the topic of choice. Why?
- October 24 is an International Day of Climate Action, so having the Blog Action Day on October 15 seems like a nice coincidence.
- This December world leaders are gathering in Copenhagen to negotiate the sequel to the Kyoto agreement, so it’s a critical time for the issue.
- In my estimation, climate change is the most urgent issue facing our planet. It’s already allegedly responsible for 300,000 deaths a year, and has far-reaching impacts through extreme weather, political destabilization, famine and so forth.
- It’s a topic near and dear to my heart. Capulet is currently working on the TckTckTck campaign, a global climate change movement–more on that later.
Please take a moment and go vote.
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June 1st, 2009, 1 Comment »
I’m running a quick little survey about clickthroughs on Twitter. It applies to you if you use a link shortener like Bit.ly that enables you to track the number of clicks a link receives when you post it on Twitter (hmm…mangled sentence there, but you get the idea). It’s all of two questions, and should take you, like, 14 seconds:
I’ll update this post tomorrow with the results.
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December 1st, 2008, 3 Comments »
As it happens, we’re running not one, not two but three contests (or, rather two contests and a survey) for clients at the moment. Let me run them down, in case they’re of interest:
- Jiibe Connection - This is a fun video project for Jiibe, kind of eHarmony (or Lavalife, if you prefer) for jobs. It’s hosted on Strutta’s new contest platform, and Giant Ant Media made one of the videos. Watch the job seeker’s video, then each of the employer videos, and match the seeker with the appropriate employer. All of the employers are from Vancouver companies–you might recognize them. One participant will win an iPod Nano.
- Bear Your Soul - We’re running a photo contest in a Flickr group for the Save the Great Bear project. It’s easy to enter, and there are tons (well, twelve) of great prizes.
- DreamBank’s Giving and Getting Survey - An 11-question survey about your gift giving and receiving practices. Again, there’s an iPod Nano up for grabs, or an equivalent donation to your DreamBank dream.
3 Comments »
July 27th, 2008, 7 Comments »
As regular readers know, we’re writing this book about social media marketing. I’m currently working on the chapter on social news and bookmarking. As part of my research, I’m gathering some real-world numbers about Digg, and just how big the Digg Effect actually is.
To that end, I’m running a survey. Has your site ever been ‘Dugg’? That is, has it ever been featured on the front page of Digg, and suffered a torrent of visitors as a result?
If so, please consider taking three minutes and filling out this very short survey.
Site Crashes Welcome
It requires you to look in your stats program (Google Analytics or whatever), and determine just how many visitors arrived from Digg on the day you were Dugg. I’m also asking for the URL of the page on your site that was Dugg, to confirm each entry. If you don’t know how to do this, send me an email and I’ll explain.
As an example, Get a First Life was Dugg on January 21, 2007 and received 10,829 visitors from Digg.
I plan to publish the results (though not your name or email address, obviously) on this site and possibly in the book. So you’re disclosing this data point for the world to see.
It’s okay if your site crashed–I’m interested in how many visitors you actually captured and reported in Google Analytics or your stats program of choice.
UPDATE: I’m only going to accept five submissions per website, to ensure one particular topic or site doesn’t bias the results too much.
And There’s a Prize
As an enticement, one lucky submitter will receive one of the brand-new iPod Shuffles I’ve got kicking around the house. They’ve become a common speaker gift, so I’ve got two or three of them at the moment. I probably won’t get more than 20 or 30 submissions, so your odds of winning are excellent.
If you don’t want the Shuffle, I’ll give $50 to the charity of your choice.
7 Comments »
January 15th, 2008, 4 Comments »
Over at my day job, we’re running a little web design and development survey for Nitobi. I know some designer and developer types read my blog, so I’m hoping a few of you will take five minutes to complete the survey. It’s only 14 questions, and most of them are multiple choice.
As an enticement, we’re giving away an iPod Nano to one luck participant.
4 Comments »
November 26th, 2007, No Comments »
Over the weekend Keith McArthur from Veritas (that’s a ballsy name for a PR agency, eh?) pitched me on the results of their new social media survey. Given that we’re finishing up a book on the subject (it’s back from the editor on Wednesday), it piqued my interest. The results will be available on Tuesday here, but he’s giving some bloggers a sneak peak.
Here are a couple of interesting results. They asked 2,265 Canadians the following question:
Which of the following best describes your current use of social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace?
For the 1,295 who have used social media, the results look like:
18% - I added my profile to one of these sites but I haven’t been back since.
9% - I used to be active on these sites, but not anymore.
30% - I added my profile to one of these sites, and I occasionally check it.
26% - I often visit sites like Facebook or MySpace.
17% - I am constantly visiting sites such as Facebook or MySpace.
I’d say that’s pretty reflective of my non-geeky friends.
The other result that popped out at me was a question they asked “444 people who identified themselves as senior managers or marketing executives” (is that a sufficiently large sample group?). After a series of other questions, they asked:
Which, if any, of the following will you cut back on in order to increase your social media budget?
The top three answers were direct mail marketing, print advertising and radio advertising. That can’t be great news for the newspapers and radio stations of the world.
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July 19th, 2007, 1 Comment »
My friend Monique is kicking around an interesting project for Harry Potter fans out there. She’s exploring how people’s lives have changed in (not, I think, because of) a decade of discovering and reading the Harry Potter books:
The friendships that I’ve gained because of the books have been deeper than I expected. This is the book series that I feel most passionate about. I hide that passion because when I worked at Raincoast I didn’t want my “outside” friends to badger me about the stories or inside-scoops they thought I might have. Now as the series comes to a close I want to celebrate the fun times that have been the last 10 years.
If you’re a fan, she has a survey she wants you to take. She’s going to post the results on the nascent SinceHarry.com.
I’ll give them another try some day, but on the first two attempts, the books failed to hold my attention.
UPDATE: Doc links to a review of the entire Potter series in The New York Times. I haven’t read it yet, but have tagged it ‘readable’.
1 Comment »
July 12th, 2007, 1 Comment »
Because I have an unhealthy need to make order from chaos wherever I go, my Maltese colleague Alex and I are kicking around running a BarCamp Malta some time in the next few months. The BarCamp wiki seems to be down, so here’s the Wikipedia entry.
Frankly, we’re not sure how much interest we’ll be able to draw, both from Malta and the surrounding region. So, we created a quick and dirty six-question survey. If you’re a Maltese blogger or geek, or one who might consider coming to Malta from elsewhere, please take 36 seconds and complete our survey.
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June 12th, 2007, 2 Comments »
I was reminded that I’ve yet to announce the winners in the survey I ran way back before Northern Voice. I apologize for this–it’s no excuse, but it’s been a crazily busy four months. So, with no further ado, here are the winners (using my wife as a random number generator).
- Alison wins the iPod Shuffle.
- Nitesh was going to win two books I had from Lonely Planet. Unfortunately, they’re back in a box in Canada, so they’re going to get a $50 Lonely Planet gift certificate.
- John gets the $50 Amazon or iTunes gift certificate for being ranked 42nd (Julie’s choice again) in people linking to the survey.
In the case of Alison and Nitesh, I don’t want to be more specific about who they are until I contact them and get their permission. So, apologies to any other Alisons or Niteshes out there who I’ll later have to disappoint.
A couple of people have also asked about the results data. I do plan to release it–I’ve just been going through it to try to anonymize any delicate bits and remove any links. I indicated when I ran the survey that the results would be published, but I think better safe than sorry here. The cleaning up process has taken longer than expected (and often gets shunted down the work list by more pressing tasks), but I’m getting there.
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