Microsoft Enters the Marketing Research World
Microsoft recently launched a new product. You can watch the teaser video at this link.
I seized the opportunity and signed up for this service, since registering and using it is currently free.
This service offers many features for researchers and others managing conferences and seminars — including voting, polls, live interaction with the audience by surveying their opinions during the event, as well as a real-time display of results during voting. This can also be done during television broadcasts.
This service differs significantly from the service offered by Microsoft’s rival Google. Google previously launched a service for designing electronic surveys and analyzing them via Google Docs, and I previously wrote a detailed guide on using this service — find it here.
The process of designing a project in this service begins with designing the template. You can overlay your project’s wall with the designs you want — useful for using your company’s identity.
Then comes the stage of specifying the demographic questions you’d like to ask the targets. I tested using Arabic in this and it appears the service supports Arabic well.
After defining the required demographic questions comes the stage of specifying the questions you’d like the target audience to answer during the event. The service provides a Likert scale of various point counts — you can choose the number of points you want, then you can also label the points with the expressions you want. Below is a test I ran.
After finishing the required questions, you need to activate the link before presenting it to the audience. The site offers integration with social networks as well as an API for embedding the service within your official site or company systems.
What’s nice is that results are displayed live, and you as account admin can review the results by participating demographics live too — to read voting differences between genders, education levels, age groups, etc.
The service is 100% free with no usage limits — so whether you’re gathering opinions of attendees at a seminar with fewer than 100 attendees or collecting them from viewers of a program with 10 million viewers, that won’t make any difference. The service is free.
It’s also worth mentioning that the service is compatible with all handheld devices and computers, and all you need is an internet connection to access the poll link if you want to participate.
After testing this tool, I found that it may be of limited use to marketing researchers at present because of the small number of question and scale types offered for use. That said, marketing researchers can benefit from it in conducting opinion polls — especially those in university lecture halls, where the researcher can run some simplified opinion polls like concept tests. Marketing researchers can also use the service to measure attendee satisfaction with a particular conference, seminar, or workshop, by displaying the link at the end of the event and asking the audience to participate.
Where Else Can It Be Used?
It can be used in classrooms at all levels to run short quizzes, or to monitor students’ understanding by asking some questions and observing response patterns. It can also be used to vote on a particular decision. It can be used as a primary tool in live television programs — with the advantage that you can get viewer voting results live, rather than launching a poll a while before the program. The latter gives unrealistic results because the poll link is passed via social networks to specific groups, expressly to flip voting results and tilt the scale one way over another. Live voting, by contrast, gives more realistic results for those interested in the issue the program addresses.
In any case, the service is still in trial mode and many changes are likely to be made to it, especially on the marketing-research side.
← Articles MOC