The Survey Says: Great PR headed your way – Part 1
Pick up almost any newspaper and you’re likely to see a story based on the results of a poll or survey. Sometimes, these stories may be no more than a few paragraphs, but the publicity garnered from such a story is immeasurable.
Surveys and polls are popular because they are easy to write, from the
reporter’s point of view – and for the audience – there’s a ‘gee whiz’ factor
and a way that they can compare themselves to others.
For the small business owner, it’s easy to create a survey that can help your
business. It can:
- Create awareness of the company
- Promote a product
- Piggyback on a holiday or event for a bigger story
- Promote the owner as an expert
- Draw traffic to a website
Conducting a poll or a survey is actually quite a simple process. You need at least 100 people to participate; all you have to do is have colleagues or clients check a few boxes on a photocopied form in order to generate an outcome.
Or you can use more high tech ways and create an online survey. Many online companies, including Survey Gizmo (the one I use) and Survey Monkey, can make the job easy.
Next time, I’ll share some pointers on how to develop a survey that the media will love.
Looking help to develop a great survey or poll to enhance your credibility and visibility? You can now pick Shannon’s brain for 30-minutes to get a complete, easy-to-do publicity campaign. Go to http://www.publicitybreakthrough.com
Shannon,
this is such a great topic! I have been using surveys in a couple ways lately including helping me plan a live event I’m doing June 3-5 (which I want you to be at/ speak at so let’s talk about that offline). And what I learned is that even when I think I can predict what my audience wants, they always let me know certain needs and wants I hadn’t anticipated!!
One challenge we recently encountered with Survey Monkey, is not being able to easily do a broadcast to the people who answered the survey. We weren’t able to do thorough follow up with some respondents and that was a result of having their info locked in Survey Monkey and not in our broadcast system.
So if you have any ideas around that, we’d love to hear it!!!
Hmmm. How about asking survey respondents for their email addy and other contact details.
Capture that info and privately email them to follow up? (I have some other ideas, but too hard to explain on a post!)
I’ll call you soon!