So, what is this contest all about?

We wanted to run this contest to get everyone excited about becoming an affiliate and hopefully encourage some of you who would not normally think about becoming an affiliate to give it a try.

Of course we wanted to give you a little incentive to become an affiliate! So from October 1, 2009 – December 31, 2009, the affiliate that brings in the highest amount accounts over all (including Free accounts) will win a $50 VISA gift card and the person who brings in highest amount of paid accounts will receive a brand-new Wii! Just in time for those New Year’s Resolutions!

The rules for the contest and instructions on how to get your affiliate account up and running can be found on our Affiliate Contest page. And as always, if you have any questions or comments about the contest, leave us some comment love.

Have you ever wanted to build a survey for respondents to view on a mobile device?

Well, you’re in luck: our surveys work on mobile devices, such as Blackberry, iPhone and Android, without any special tweaking on your part. We’ve even tested our surveys on the Nintendo DSi Web Browser! Huzzah!

Hot Tip: For the best survey software experience, Blackberry users should view surveys with the Opera Mini web browser, instead of the Blackberry default browser. Technically speaking, the Blackberry browser typically has JavaScript and CSS disabled, which affects the way the surveys are rendered on their device, which can result in some problems. Though, never fear! If you suspect any of your respondents will use a Blackberry device, you may choose to include a short blurb in the introduction of your survey, suggesting that they utilize the Opera browser, since it offers the best survey-taking experience.

You can download Opera Mini here, and see their full list of supported devices, which also includes Nokia, HTC, and Sony Ericsson devices.

Happy Mobile Surveying!

As fun is a relative term, we’ll try to vary the types of posts we do, to make sure there’s fun for everyone! On that note, if you have suggestions about what we should write about, you can pop over to this survey and let us know your ideas. This first post is of the Stuff We Like variety, which is for products or services that SurveyGizmo employees find fun and useful.

Today, we’ll be highlighting TextExpander by SmileOnMyMac.

And we’ll tell you what: we really love TextExpander.

In short, TextExpander saves us hours of typing. The software allows us to assign shortcuts to text that is written frequently, such as a long signature, frequently typed URLs, and frequently used CSS and HTML. So, instead of typing the whole signature, or copying and pasting it from a text file, I just type “SIG”, and TextExpander fills it in for me. This time-saving product increases efficiency, thus increasing our happy-vibes.

Just check out my usage stats:

9.72 hours is more than a regular workday! And I haven’t used it for a month yet. Stats like these are the reason we love TextExpander so much!







Two Tips for Successful Snippets:

• Modify the case of your shortcuts to reduce conflict with commonly typed words. So, instead of sig, which would interfere with the word signature, I make it SIG.
• Use commas or periods at the beginning of your snippets–this reduces most conflicts!

More Cool Features:

• TextExpander syncs with MobileMe.
• You can create snippets from selections, or from text copied into your clipboard.
• Text’s not all: it supports Rich Text, including photos and formatted text, Shell Scripts, and AppleScripts.
• There’s TextExpander for iPhone and iPod touch, goodie! You can download that here.
• For iPhone and iPod touch app integrates with cool apps like Tweetie and WriteRoom. See the full list of mobile apps that integrate here.
• They have pre-created HTML and CSS snippet groups for your coding convenience.

You can download a free trial of TextExpander, and buy the full version for a measley $29.95. TextExpander pays for itself when time equals money!

No matter if you have a survey running already or not, you’ll definitely want to check out the tutorial we just added. The tutorial goes over how to make sending out a customer satisfaction survey that much more effective and meaningful for you and your business.

Research has shown that retaining a customer costs a considerable amount less than spending advertising dollars on finding new ones. That’s where this new tutorial comes in to play. The tutorial: Send Email Auto-Responder on Negative Customer Feedback, goes through how to add an email notification whenever a customer fills out a customer satisfaction survey and gives negative feedback.

By adding this to your survey, one of your customer support representatives can contact the person who sent in the negative comment immediately and can then try to mitigate their problem. The survey itself will also let you know what parts of your business you need to improve to retain your customers.

Check out the tutorial and let us know what you think!

Sarah has been a great addition to our staff, and it’s not just because she is a customer service whiz. I’ve really enjoyed getting to know her and she makes the office an even better place to be. At SurveyGizmo, I have met not only some of the most talented but also the most interesting people, Sarah not excluded.

Sarah actually has her own candle business, modwax, and somehow finds spare time to knit scarves. While her bio says that she is always knitting scarves for everyone around her, I have yet to receive one *wink wink*. She also has a strange affinity for some children’s television called Yo Gabba Gabba, which you can see by looking at her desk.

We think Sarah is great, but don’t just take our word for it. Here are some actual quotes from customers from her first three weeks…

“Both I and my client were hugely impressed with the speed with which you dealt with our problem.” ~Eugene Clark, Director of The Community Exchange

“I was blown away that I received a response to my customer service inquiry so quickly. I don’t think that has ever happened to me in my life! Wow!” ~Gina Chen, Ph.D. student, Syracuse University

“Customer service is quick and courteous. You can feel 100% confident of a fast solution.” ~Max Hotopf, CEO, Healthcare Europa

“Swift and efficient support – when I was totally stuck, thank you!” ~Carl Peyron, Senior Consultant, MIND YOUR BRAND

(source)

The notion that fun increases participation is not new. How many times in your career have you been bribed to attend a meeting with food? Ok–probably enough to know that pizza does not cancel out tedium completely, however, we keep trying to make everything more enjoyable for ourselves by mediating looming unpleasantness when it threatens us. However, this video from TheFunTheory.com goes further–it speaks to the challenge of compelling people to make a healthier choice by making the beneficial choice more fun.

Even more, how can we make building surveys more fun for you?

How can we make building surveys more like playing, and less like work?

Have a think, and enjoy your weekend!

While we’re answering the phones, juggling support tickets, playing with Lego models, and building awesome survey software, we’re also thinking about how we could improve the blog. So, we’d like to start writing an ongoing series of posts about SurveyGizmo Tips, Tricks + Hacks, where we blog about everything from new SurveyGizmo features, to creative uses of the survey software, to reminders about neat tricks the software can do, and other good things that will benefit you, the ever-deserving populous.

We’ll find ideas for this series from trends in support tickets, calls, and other various inputs–but we should also just ask! So, let us know:

What would you like to hear about?

Feel free to leave a comment, @reply on our Twitter feed, leave a shout on our Facebook page, or go to this neat-o SurveyGizmo poll to submit an idea.

Thank you. We’re listening.

Chad! And his survey-logic visualizer!

His tool for visualizing survey logic impressed us all, so he received the coveted Lego AT-AT. Congratulations, Chad!

When the dust cleared, and Lab Week concluded, the SurveyGizmo employees had to choose between an awesome interactive tutorial system, a super new mascot, a rad global spellcheck, and a stellar tool for visualizing survey logic. We all hated to pick a favorite, since each project was so well executed, and each will add quite a bit of awesome to the SurveyGizmo application. Though, in the end, someone had to prevail, and we’re glad Chad was gracious enough to bring the assembled AT-AT back to the office so we can all play with it!

Chad’s (now award-winning) survey logic viewer will make it easier for everyone to troubleshoot advanced and simple survey logic alike. So, congratulations to him, and to the whole team for their hard work and great results.

Look for each of their projects in a SurveyGizmo release sometime in the future!

Two weeks ago Christian Vanek, one of our co-founders, attended The Market Research Event put on by IIR (Institute for International Research) in Las Vegas. He came back with a number of amazing take-aways, and one of the most significant was within the last year the market research community has embraced using online social communities in their research. In particular, the way they are used as cost saving techniques during these economic times. This lit the fire on our collective behinds to roll out some social network integration projects.

The Twitter integration started the ball rolling, and we just kept on going. We’re excited to announce that we now have a full-fledged Facebook Integration!

What can you do with the Facebook Integration?

We wanted to make the integration as easy as possible for you to send surveys to your friends and to get your surveys to go viral. So with the Facebook integration, you can:

• Send surveys to your friends
• Allow your friends to forward your surveys to their friends
• Make your survey public to anyone who has the SurveyGizmo Facebook application installed
• Post your survey to your Facebook wall, so everyone who reads your wall can see it & take it

Those are all options available to you with the Facebook integration. If you don’t want to make your survey public, you don’t have to. If you only want the people you invite to take your survey, you can do that as well.

It’s extremely flexible, and basically gives you a free panel company of your own to work with. How cool is that!?!?

All you need to do to get started sending surveys through Facebook is head over to http://apps.facebook.com/surveygizmo and link up your already existing SurveyGizmo account to your Facebook account. It’s as simple as that.

You’ll be able to see your surveys inside of the Facebook app, and then you can send them out to your friends.

Also, from within your SurveyGizmo account, you’ll be able to publish your surveys directly to your Facebook wall and make your survey public to everyone who has the application downloaded and/or allow it to be friend to friend forwardable.

We hope you enjoy using it as much as the staff here has! And while you’re there, why not become a fan of SurveyGizmo?

Today I spoke with Derek Scruggs, SurveyGizmo’s VP of Sales and Business Development, about attending Connections ‘09, The ExactTarget User Conference. Held this year on October 13-15th, Connections is a conference for worldwide partners of ExactTarget, attracting a cosmopolitan crowd to the Indianapolis area, which charms natives and foreigners alike with its midwestern appeal. According to Derek, it was a very well organized, well-run event, and he even got to see some of our Indy customers at an informal SurveyGizmo meetup!

For Derek and for SurveyGizmo, Connections reaffirmed the value of product integration. Many of the conversations that went on at the conference mirrored those that have been taking place in the industry for awhile, like customer engagement, and customer retention, with a major addition to the discourse: the importance of APIs and product integration.

ExactTarget was SurveyGizmo’s first product integration partner, and today we continue to move towards embracing similar partnerships and integrations, with services like iModerate, The Sample Network, StreamSend, and our most recent partnership with MailChimp. Since I believe users will eventually expect all of their favorite web applications and technologies to work together seamlessly, SurveyGizmo is doing its part to contribute to the brighter future of total integration with these, and other future partnerships.

Some of the people Derek enjoyed getting in touch with were Tom Needy of Leisure Trends Groups, and the cool guys over at FanMail. We hope to see you next year at Connections 2010!