Poll 2.0 Look and Feel Out of the Door

Thank you all for the feedback we have received with our new poll look and feel. Overall we have had very positive feedback.  The key objective was to make sure you poll stood out on your website and to ensure you had the maximum engagement with your visitors. The element where we focused on was the poll’s borders and we put a lot of our graphical expertise to come up with this new skin!.

Our new look and feel - Hope you like the css

Our Enterprise Polling platform is maturing

We initially experimented with a flat yearly pricing model and found out that most of the clients were enterprise clients who wanted much more features than just an api. These clients wanted whitelabeling and we started listening…  We are slowly phasing out the $59 plan because it does not meet most of the enterprise needs.  Our ‘enterprise’ clients always needs some customization and we are ready to serve them.  Here is our latest pricing page

Free APIs for your polling pleasure

Happy New Year folks!. Finally we are out with some of our cool Free API’s.

Every poll of yours will have the following new menu link showing up on the left hand side.

You will be shown a screen with all the freely available APIs which we have provided.  The help icon on the screen will take you to the API documentation of the individual apis.

In summary here is the list of API’s that we have rolled out.  For more detailed api documenation you can go here.

1. Vote API
Allows voting on a specific option on your poll .

2. Get Votes count API
This API lets you know the votes recieved for a particular poll and the individual votes for the poll options.

3. Get Poll Results URL API
This API will let you get the result URL for the poll. This is the URL to our famous results dashboard.

4. Get Poll Embed Code API
This API will let you get the embedded code for your poll. You can use this code script in your website or blog or wherever you want to display your poll.

5. Get Polls API
This API will return all the polls which are there in your account. You can then use the poll information wherever you wish.

6. Get All Votes API
This API will return you all the vote results for all your polls.

So HAPI APIing!

UPDATE: There is a good example of how a customer of ours uses the poll api on their home page to get customer feedback on which content (coloring pages) to publish here.

Poll api in the works – really? why?

We are planning to roll out a couple of Micropoll apis within a month.  The key api which we want to roll out is the Vote api – which we think is going to be the coolest one.

Why APIs ?

Before I get into the why,  for those who don’t know let me quickly explain what an API is,  API stands for Application Programming Interface. Basically an API is a way for other people to write code to access your application or your website.

The funny thing is that when I explain this to people they tend to immediately ask me: “Why would I want that??”. Well, let us start with a small website that exploded in popularity almost overnight: Twitter.

The main thing – and to me, the most powerful – is that your customers may want to interact with you in ways that you’d never thought of.   It’s fairly unlikely that we have realized all possible ways that the customers want to use Micropoll’s powerful polling engine.

Stay tuned folks – we are releasing some free apis very soon..  Hopefully we don’t give you too much control that we shut it down :) .

Economy on top of people’s minds – Recent Poll

Recently, interviews with 1,007 adult Americans conducted by telephone
by ORC International on October 14-16, 2011.
As you see the economy was on top of 54% of people’s minds.
Unemployment was a close second with 47% followed by the deficit at 45% and health care at 42%. Other issues, like terrorism, foreign policy and moral issues, which previously dominated presidential elections, came in 36%, 23% and 18% respectively.

economy-poll-still-important

Another interesting viewpoint from CNN’s poll director was – “Will Moammar Gadhafi’s death help Barack Obama’s re-election chances in 2012? If it does, the effect may be muted simply because there aren’t a lot of Americans right now who say that foreign policy will be important to their vote for president next year,”

 

Interesting Poll : 20% Secondary school children in U.K wants ‘Caning’

Teachers should be allowed to be tougher when it comes to classroom discipline, according to a survey.

A poll, commissioned by the Times Education Supplement (U.K), of more than 2,000 parents revealed that 49 per cent of them wanted to see a return to the days when smacking and caning were allowed in schools.

And, unexpectedly 20 per cent of secondary school children agreed with them.

Sending children out of the class was the most popular method of dealing with indiscipline, chosen by 89% of parents and 79% of children. Other popular ways of cracking down on bad behaviour were lunchtime or after school detentions and writing lines.

TES editor Gerard Kelly said: “These results show that parents want today’s teachers to have more authority in the classroom. It’s not about making school life miserable but about showing children that sanctions will be enforced and that their actions will have consequences.”

The survey comes just a week after Prime Minister David Cameron pledged to restore order and respect in schools. In a speech he warned that parents must take responsibility for their child’s behaviour and that those whose children constantly play truant could see their benefits cut.

New Feature : Great looking poll preview page

poll preview change
We are happy to introduce a new feature in Micropoll – Customized Preview Pages.   The new menu items on your left will include the ‘Edit Preview Page’ which will lead to the page where you can change your Preview page skins. This is the page where your community interacts using the Facebook comments plugin. At this point, we have six great looking skins to help you catch the attention of your pollers.  Happy Polling!  - click on the image above to get a larger view of how this looks like.

Analytic geeks in demand

According to latest poll results from KDNuggets , salaries of analytic professionals have gone up in 2011.  

The analysis was based on about 250 respondents, from which 78% worked for a company, 18% for a University, and about 4% were self-employed.

The average US salary was estimated as $113,000, up about 10% from 2010.

This article was cited in ReadWriteWeb last week. Even though enterprises are investing in analytics type software, the key ability is to find the resources who can help in the process of funnelling relevant information through the software, analyze the results and produce relevant reports.

On the customer analytics front, it is gettting more interesting. The world has gone social. Conversations are happening all around us at lightning speed. People are making connections. Sharing their stories. And they’re waiting for businesses to listen to them. We enable that dialog, collaboration, and knowledge sharing across the enterprise. We know that “business as usual” is a foreign concept in the social world. And different platforms are revolutionizing how we communicate at work by harnessing the power of our social networks.  The ‘analytic geeks’ now have to make sense out of these complex interactions.

Super Bowl Study

Last year TV commercials for Doritos during the big game helped PepsiCo’s tortilla-chip brand achieve the highest net improvement score of any Super Bowl advertiser, while GoDaddy.com’s ads did the most damage, according to surveys from comScore’s annual Super Bowl research, which included both pre- and post-game surveys, measured various aspects of media use and ad preference during the big game.

Game Day Mobile Usage

Last year the internet played an important role in the Super Bowl Sunday festivities, with two-thirds of those who watched the game indicating that they went online at some point during game day. Approximately 41% of respondents say they used the internet during the actual game and 30% used their mobile phones for texting and browsing. 9% of respondents said they voted for the Super Bowl MVP via text messaging.

With the increase of smart phone penetration year over year we expect the mobile participation percentages to increase as well.

This Sunday — SUPER BOWL SUNDAY — four research firms are doing the first ever mobile ethnographic study of Super Bowl watchers.  And they are using SurveySwipe to do it.

How to Participate

  1. Download the SurveySwipe mobile App.  If you’ve already downloaded the app, you don’t have to download it again, just be sure to update the app if and when it gives you the option.
  2. iPhone users will get a push notice after half time.
  3. Respond to the surveys that will test ad recall as well as ask you to take pictures of your location and the brand you’re interacting with.

Participate in your Super Bowl !