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Site offers SMB market surveying options

By | November 29, 2011, 7:41am PST

Summary: Survey Builder is free if you want to run polls against your company’s own list of responses; pricing varies for access to prescreened respondents.

uSamp offers smaller companies a new way to gather market intelligence quickly and inexpensively — using either your own list or a panel of screened respondents.

Like other hosted cloud service sites, there are several layers available. SurveyBuilder, which has been live for several weeks, is the offering that probably would be of most immediate interest to small and midsize businesses.

For starters, it is free if you completely define the polling audience. Surveys are relatively simple to build via an interface like the one in the screen grab below, and there is no limit on the number of questions or responses you can request.

That scenario changes if you want to run the survey against one of uSamp’s 6.5 million prescreened respondents, said uSamp co-founder and CEO Matthew Dusig. So for, example, if you wanted to gather a short poll against 100 specific sorts of women, you might pay $500. “There is nowhere you can go to get market research for this amount of money,” Dusig.

The value of the paid version of SurveyBuilder lies in those respondents. The site boasts access to more than 6.5 million “diverse” respondents and it is signing up almost 10,000 panelists every day, Dusig said. For participating in surveys, panelists receive perks such as gift cards or rewards or Web site credits.

Dusig said survey pricing is predicated on how specific your company gets with the demographics of survey respondents, how many questions you want to ask, and how quickly you need the responses.

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Heather Clancy is an award-winning business journalist with a passion for green technology and corporate sustainability issues.

Disclosure

Heather Clancy

Writing publicly about what the high-tech industry is actually doing to help itself and the world get greener or more sustainable is one way I figure I can contribute more meaningfully to said effort. I am also a big OMG-kind-of-fan of smart leadership, which is why the goodly folks who publish this blog let me go on about this topic and why I am always on the hunt for forward-looking business management ideas.

My daily writing is focused on looking for topics for my blogs, GreenTech Pastures and Business Brains. I also write often about emerging technology trends such as mobile computing, unified communications and cloud computing. Occasionally, I will pop up at an industry conference in some sort of speaking capacity. In cases where a speaking engagement involves a sponsor that may be covered in this blog, that fact will be disclosed in coverage as appropriate.

My corporate writing work usually consists of crafting research white papers about some aspect of technology. In the event that my commentary (in written, audio or video form) mentions a company for which I have provided consulting advice, I will disclose that fact. However, there is no connection between these projects and the topics that I'm covering in my blog.

Biography

Heather Clancy

Heather Clancy is an award-winning business journalist with a passion for green technology and corporate sustainability issues. Her articles have appeared in Entrepreneur, Fortune Small Business, The International Herald Tribune and The New York Times. In a past corporate life, Heather was editor of Computer Reseller News, where she was a featured speaker about everything from software as a service to IT security to mobile computing.

Heather started her journalism life as a business writer with United Press International in New York. She holds a B.A. in English literature from McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, and has a thing for Lewis Carroll.

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