Impressity Blog

Impressity now available as Typepad widget

Admin — Thu, 21 Oct 2010 07:33:00 +0300

We are really proud to announce that Impressity now lets you share surveys on one of the world's most popular blogging site: Typepad.

Check out our widget at Typepad (http://www.sixapart.com/typepad/widgets/polls/impressity_embe.html) and see for yourself.

This is a great milestone for Impressity. We are not only serving a rapidly growing customer base with our survey service, but also introducing more ways to make survey creation and survey sharing simpler, more seamless, and definitely more affordable (FREE!). We are dedicated to bringing more survey innovation in the future. Meanwhile if you have any feedback or suggestions, please feel free to send us an email at contact@impressity.com. We are looking forward to hearing from you and thank you for your support!

Enter Impressity Survey Contest to win $100 grand prize!

Admin — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 10:32:00 +0300

The jury has spoken, the dust has settled, the grand prize goes to BradenRiverElUser, congratulations!

We'd like to thank all the contestants for participating in the survey contest. We will host more Impressity Survey Contests in the near future, please come back and check out our new contest dates soon!

We are really excited to announce that the first Impressity Survey Contest starts today!

Some of you may wonder "why having a survey contest"? The reason is that we believe great surveys are real art works, and they are hard to come by. Therefore, whoever really puts thoughts into his/her survey and makes an effort to get good responses deserves some recognition.

So roll up your sleeves and gives us the best survey you've got. No matter if you are an MBA student working on a market research case project, or an entrepreneur testing out your business idea; this is a great opportunity to showcase your survey design skills, get some recognition, and $100 bill wouldn't hurt either.

Please read the contest rules below, and click Here to submit your survey.

Deadline:
September 30th, 2010

Grand Prize:
$100 US Dollars

Eligibility:

Any user who submits his or her own surveys before the deadline.

Submitted survey has responses from at least 50 unique respondents. (Faking responses will deprive you of contest eligibility)

Any user who can log in or sign up for a PayPal account to withdraw money. Check out PayPal website to see whether you can receive money from PayPal.

Judging Criteria:

Appearance. We will judge your survey appearance by creativity, professionalism, and how well it caters to the target audience. Make good use of color, font, gradient, and images to make your survey more appealing.

Questions. We will review how well your questions are designed to get accurate data from your target audience.

Responses. Each survey must have responses from at least 50 different respondents. Take advantage of the social button, embedding option, and our Facebook application to generate more responses for your survey.

General Contest Rules:
Impressity reserves the right to disqualify entrants who fake survey responses, or violate the spirit of the contest.

Terms of the Contest Contents:
For clarity, you retain all of your ownership rights in your survey and responses. However, by enter the Impressity Survey Contest, you hereby grant Impressity a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicenseable and transferable license to use, reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works of, display, and perform the survey and its responses in connection with the Impressity Website and Impressity's (and its successors' and affiliates') business, including without limitation for promoting and redistributing part or all of the Impressity Website (and derivative works thereof) in any media formats and through any media channels. You also hereby grant each user of the Impressity Website a non-exclusive license to access your survey and responses through the Website, and to use, reproduce, distribute, display and perform such survey and responses as permitted through the functionality of the Website and under these Terms of Service. The above licenses granted by you in survey and responses are perpetual and irrevocable.

Captcha to defeat survey spammers

Admin — Mon, 09 Aug 2010 07:49:00 +0300

You asked for it, and you get it... Many of our customers asked us for a feature to ensure that only legit survey responses are submitted. While you can already set your survey link setting to forbid multiple responses from one computer, sometimes you have to allow it if your survey respondents may share the same computer. Therefore we have come up with this new survey link setting: Show Captcha. Once you have this setting enabled, you survey will show the captcha picture. Only when the survey respondent types in the exact same text as shown in the captcha can he continue to submit the survey.

To change your survey link setting to show captcha, see the example below:

And when the survey respondent takes this survey, s/he will see the captcha picture in the first page of the survey. S/he will have to type in the right text to continue with the survey. If a software is used to "spam" the survey results, the software will be baffled by the captcha requirement.

As we have promised in our statement: we are always listening to our customers' feedback and are trying our best to meet the customer requirements. Please keep the feedback/suggestion/critism coming. This will help us build a better product and help you enjoy the best survey service in the world.

Cheers.

Introducing Facebook Login

Admin — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 10:32:00 +0300

Hi there,

We always consider ourselves old-school: that is, we are not usually hyper about the latest buzzwords, such as Iphone4, Foursquare, and so on... We usually wait a while until the buzz proves itself to be a trend instead of a fad, and then invest in. At the end of the day, our goal is to serve small businesses and entrepreneurs with better market research data, a pretty down-to-earth business. Therefore we actually prefer to be a little bit conservative and pragmatic in our business approach.

However, even we cannot deny that social networking has proven to be the trend in the last few years and will continue to grow strong in the future. Facebook and Twitter have such huge market penetration, their network value is just not negligible. No businesses, even the brick and mortar ones should stay completely away from these SNS. Leveraging them well can help you tap into the target market better, interact with your target audience more directly, and help you get words out there faster.

That's why we have added "Facebook Connect" to help our customers log in easily without creating yet another user account. Let's be honest, we know you will probably forget the password next time you want to log into Impressity site to create a survey; whereas you may still remember your facebook account since you log into Facebook everyday. Of course if you are old-fashioned like some of us, then creating an old-school Impressity account will still work. We are just offering more options in this fast-pace, super-"connected" era.

Click here to log into our site (if you haven't) and enjoy the single-signon convenience brought by social networking of 2010.

New survey looks that will surely attract your respondents

Admin — Sat, 26 Jun 2010 05:42:00 +0300

Hi there, we are really proud to announce that Impressity now provide you with some of the most professional looking, most sleek survey themes in the world. Just log into your account, create a survey, and choose from the numerous themes. The themes range from business to casual to artistic. You can even pick some really fancy themes like 'Matrix', 'Aurora', 'Nature', or 'Speed'. You can also further customize them to cater to your specfic needs. You know how hard it is to convince people to fill your survey. These survey themes are here to help you catch the audience' eyes and attract them to fill in your surveys more willingly.

Besides these survey themes, we also introduce "Gradient" into the survey theme settings. Now you can also make the survey showing gradient, just like the cool effects you see on Apple's homepage or our homepage. Just click "Edit theme" or "New theme" buttons on your survey designer, and find out more about how to set gradient to your survey theme.

We have invested a lot to pay for these sleek looking image stocks, so please don't wait up and try them today!

Housing market reviewed one year after the collapse

Admin — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 10:17:00 +0300

If anyone ask me about what the most memorable thing was in 2008 and 2009, I would probably answer the collapse of housing market due to subprime mortgage crisis, and the consequential domino effect that spiraled into a global economic recession. If you happened to purchase a house in the peak, you would know what I'm talking about.

So here we are, half way into 2010. We are asking our users around the world, do you think it is a good time to buy house now? Is the real estate bubble finally busted where you are? And if you are buying a house, what are the determining factors? We've got some enlightening results from our survey:

It is half-to-half on whether to buy a house at this point of time.
Houses are generally considered more affordable than not.
While there are numerous factors that play quite evenly in deciding where to live, "Good jobs" stands out as a leading factor.
And finally, the perception of house price varies depending on where you are. Around the world, people have different opinions on whether now is good time to enter the housing market. What do you think?

Welcome to Impressity Global Customer Panel and Featured Page

Admin — Fri, 28 May 2010 11:20:00 +0300

We are very excited to introduce Impressity Global Customer Panel, and Impressity Featured Page. You are invited to join our panel; and feature your surveys under the one and only limelight of Impressity!

To join the Impressity Global Customer Panel, all you need to do is to provide some basic demographics information, such as gender, ethnicity, age range, etc. Don't worry, No personal information will be collected. We take our customers' privacy very seriously. Take a look at our Join Customer Panel page, and see for yourself.

You may ask, why should I join the panel, what is in it for me? The answer is that if you are interested in the latest trends, be it market trend or social trend, you would find the panel membership really useful. By joining our panel, you can not only tap into the most popular topics around the world, but also obtain further information and context on these topics. For example, our Featured Page shows you how people predict our economy will fare in this year. Only when you are a panel member, can you drill down further to see how these predictions vary among different age groups, industries, income groups, etc. If you want useful data that is really relevant, you need to join our panel.

And if you use our survey services to create a survey, you definitely want to consider feature it on the Impressity Featured Page . Your surveys will be put into the spotlight, inviting our Global Customer Panel to respond. Not only will a featured survey attracts more responses, it will give you additional demographics segmentation as well. So do not hesitate, feature you survey, and see how much better your results are! To find out how to feature your survey, check out here

How did you file your tax this year?

Admin — Mon, 03 May 2010 06:06:00 +0300

The tax time has finally passed. For all the procrastinators out there, you probably went through the same hassles as I did: downloading the tax forms, googling the definition for each cryptic blank, struggling to gather all the required 'W-" or "1099" forms, and inevitably the lining up at the post office... If you own a family, a house, or a business, this gets even more out of control. I strongly believe that the pain of tax return alone makes April the cruelest month of the year.

Near tax time this year, we called out to our users to share how they filed tax. Considering a large percentage of our user base are small business owners, this helps us see how busy business owners handle this excruciating task. Our survey is still on going on our front page or here (Click here ), but the results are already quite revealing:

There is an equal spread between "Do-It-Myself", "Use Tax Software" and "Hire Tax Professional" on tax return filing solutions submitted by our users.

It's quite surprising that 35% of our users chose to file the tax return all by themselves without the help of a professional or the software, considering the complexity of tax forms and the risk of a tax audit. We will need to conduct follow up research on this, to find out how these users manage to do that.

When filing tax by software, most of the users choose TurboTax. TurboTax is a clear leader in tax software for our user base (small business owners, entrepreneurs)

Again we will follow up on how TurboTax beats other competitors like H&R Block to win the market, whate are the strengths of TurboTax that makes it a favorite.

Today we provide you with a high level summary of how our users handle tax filing. More detailed investigation will follow up, which will show us why our users choose certain filing solutions, and hopefully it will be helpful to your tax filing next year as well.

Cheers.

Introduce Facebook SurveyBuilder Application

Admin — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 11:36:00 +0300

We are very excited to introduce our first Facebook Application: "SurveyBuilder". This is a straightforward application, which guides you to create an Facebook Survey in 3 easy steps. If you are already familiar with Impressity, the steps are even easier: it is almost the same as embedding Impressity survey in a web page, just now it includes Facebook.

By using SurveyBuilder to create Facebook Surveys, you can invite your Facebook friends to take the survey. The survey and results are hosted from Impressity site. You can manage the survey, analyze and download survey results like any other Impressity Surveys.

For more information, just go to http://apps.facebook.com/easysurveybuilder/

We are excited to introduce you to this new extension of our survey services. We are looking forward to your feedback and will keep improving our services to best fit our customers' need.

Which marketing channels work best for your businesses?

Admin — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 07:28:00 +0300

Last month, we have sent out a survey to gauge how small businesses conduct marketing for their products/services. The survey is still on going, so if you want to share out your experience, please feel free to fill out this anonymous survey at

Click here to take the survey

Some interesting findings so far include:

Our survey shows that small businesses are leveraging various marketing channels to advocate their businesses:

The most effective marketing channels selected are word of mouth, followed by search ads, outdoor display, and newspaper ads :

The least effective marketing channels selected are direct mail, followed by social marketing:

The interesting finding is that the old-school marketing channels, such as word of mouth, outdoor display, and newspaper ads are in favor comparing to new marketing channels such as social marketing and email marketing. Another interesting finding is that although old-school marketing is still popular, certain traditional marketing tools like direct mail and direct calls are in disfavor. Even though small businesses are usually regarded as the "long tail" in the ever changing marketing world, they do show a shift towards more targeted, personal marketing approach.

Please share with us your thoughts on marketing trend for small businesses in the coming years, as well as what you think of the emerging marketing tools such as social marketing and SEO.