Have you ever wondered how your company or nonprofit organization is perceived by the broader community? Or maybe you simply want to measure awareness of a particular feature on your new widget before you promote it in your next PR campaign?
These are questions many of our clients ask as they work to make informed decisions about their business and communication strategies. For instance, imagine you have a software solution like PDFill that allows people to more easily and conveniently edit PDFs.
As the vice president of marketing, you are chartered with driving downloads of this software. As you work to create the right awareness, you’re interested in knowing how many people are aware of your product and what they think about its usability.
You decide you want to conduct a perception audit. The trouble is you have limited dollars for this research and cannot afford to hire a prestigious firm to do the work for you…. Well we have some good news to share with you.
A business associate of ours has taken a very innovative approach to market research. He uses Zoomerang to create his surveys and then finds people to take them using Amazon Mechanical Turk (mTurk). For those of you who don’t know, mTurk is a marketplace where workers (people) are waiting to do small, simple tasks on the Web. And, for a small fee, these workers are eager to complete surveys.
Here’s how it works. Each time our associate has a survey he needs completed by a group of people, he submits what is called a hit. Each hit has a tagline, a description of the work that needs to be done, the number of workers needed and the fee to be paid to each worker. Typically, for a survey containing 15 questions, our colleague pays each person $.11 to $.25 for his/her work.
Once the hit is published, workers accept the hit and begin work on their assignment. When the work is complete, they submit for approval. For surveys, our colleague uses a complete code that appears at the end of the survey to verify that the worker has completed the hit.
With this process, our business associate has been able to glean all types of information from all over the country. For a survey completed by 700 people at $.25 per response, he paid just $175.
Clearly, this type of data gathering is not right for everyone (especially if you need a very select demographic to participate), but we thought this was a fabulous idea and look forward to trying it out in the future.