Site offers SMB market surveying options

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.