You asked for it: MySpace Surveys

We couldn’t help but notice all the searches for myspace survey functionality. So here it is — surveys you can embed in MySpace (or other difficult CMS systems)!

Want to see it in action? Here is an example of our contact form embedded into a MySpace profile: http://www.myspace.com/SurveyGizmo. You can create contact forms, surveys, newsletter signups, fun quizzes — anything. We’d love to know what you do with this feature, so get a survey up and post your results to this blog!

Instructions: To use this feature, design a survey in SurveyGizmo (some myspace design tips are listed below). Then, just like normal, click on the “Launch” link (or promote if your survey is already launched). A new option has been added to the bottom of this screen called “Option 3 - MySpace, yada yada yada”. This will give you the css and html to paste into your MySpace profile.

Some helpful tips:

• Don’t use complicated survey questions on the first page — good news, subsequent pages are totally fair game! This is because anything powered (or enhanced) by javascript won’t work on myspace — go figure.
• Here are the ‘Safe’ questions: Instructions, Images, Radio buttons, Checkboxes, Text fields, Essays, File upload forms, Contact questions and tables of the aforementioned.
• If you want, redirect them back to your blog or profile when they are done. You can do this by placing a URL redirect action on the thank you page.
• Lastly, this survey-publishing option doesn’t track abandons the way our other surveys do (a quirk of bypassing our initial page). So, don’t expect that data for myspace surveys.

Taking this feature to the next step: Before you ask, yes, it has occured to us that this feature might lend itself to embedding surveys in HTML emails, too. We suggest you don’t jump the gun on *that one* unless you can afford some time for testing. In the next few weeks we will do our own testing of email-embedded surveys and let everyone know how it turns out.

Good luck with your surveys!

Repurpose your survey data - a lesson from MarketingSherpa’s Demand Generation Summit

Last Monday I attended MarketingSherpa’s Demand Generation Summit in Boston. I wasn’t sure what to expect, but I was there wearing my SurveyGizmo hat — taking copious notes on tactics on lead and demand generation. After all, as the new kids on the block, creating demand for our services is vital! I was expecting a some presentations focusing on content tactics, podcasting, RSS, ROI, SEO, and measuring the effectiveness of our campaigns (you know, all the other goodies I’ve come to expect from MarketingSherpa). I definitely left with more inspirational ideas than I could hope to accomplish in a year (or two)!

What I wasn’t expecting was to hear the word “survey” a hundred times during those two days. It’s true, many of our customers use our software to power lead generation forms and landing pages. But I didn’t anticipate such emphasis on re-focusing research into lead-nurturing content. In hindsight it makes sense — you survey and collect data all year as marketers, so why shouldn’t you use those numbers in white papers? My number one take-away point from the conference was the hidden value of survey data. How often do you run a survey with the sole intention of collecting leads or segmenting customers into personas? That’s more than just actionable knowledge. The summary information can also be used to drive demand for your services!

My second take-away is that everyone should be preparing their end-of-year customer surveys. Don’t wait until the last minute. Stay tuned to our web site next week. We are preparing customer satisfaction survey templates to get you started!

New Apple Dashboard Widget for SurveyGizmo

Do you run surveys? Do you have a Mac? Then monitoring and managing your surveys is just one keystroke away, thanks to our brand new Apple dashboard widget, developed in partnership with wdgty.

For those of you who unfamiliar with the term, a widget is a mini-application that runs on the Apple OS X Dashboard. You can toggle to your dashboard by pressing the F12 key. Try it! Your Mac comes with a few basic widgets that tell the time, stocks and local weather. Plus, developers around the world are creating some wonderful tools that have integrated widgets — like SurveyGizmo!

About Our Survey Widget

Our groovy little widget is great for keeping an eye on your surveys without keeping a pesky browser window open. We show your basic stats right on the widget, so you can watch the numbers grow as people fill out your survey. In Progress surveys turn into Completed, Abandoned, or Partially Completed. You also have handy links to Create a New Survey or Edit, Reporting, and Preview an existing one.

How to hook your widget up

The only requirement is a Mac with OS X 10.4 (Tiger). (PC users stay tuned for our Yahoo Konfabulator Widget for the PC)

STEP 1
You need to first go to your account screen and click to enable your user API Key. If you don’t have an account, you can create a free account (which has everything a casual surveyor needs — and it’s yours forever).

STEP 2
Download the widget from our widget page or from the Apple site. Save the zip file to your desktop, then double-click the zip file to decompress it. You’ll see the widget appear next to or under the zip. Just double-click the widget itself to place the widget on your dashboard.

STEP 3
Now you’ll need your API key (that thing you took from your account page). Copy and paste your key into the widget configuration screen. (You get the config screen by clicking the “i” on the bottom right hand corner of the widget).

You’re Ready to Rock ‘n Roll!

Yep, that’s all there is to it. Start cranking out those surveys, polls and quizes. If you make a really amazing survey or template (or get stuck trying to do something amazing), let us know! We are dying to see what creative things the Mac community can come up with! Our PC friends seem to like running consumer research surveys, but you can so so much more with SurveyGizmo. Go show ‘em how it’s done!

Special Thanks

Our friends over at wdgty, Stuart and Stephan, did a great job with the widget and we wholeheartedly recommend them. If you are looking for a widget to go with your own web business, try them out. Thanks, guys!

Permanent link to the SurveyGizmo Widget:

SurveyGizmo Widget Page

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Windows PC Users

Sadly, the PC platform doesn’t have native support for widgets, but the free Yahoo Konfabulator is similar. Let us know if you’d like to see a Konfabulator widget.

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Part 1. Contact Forms & Lead Generation with SurveyGizmo

SurveyGizmo - not just for surveys anymore.

This is the first of two how-to articles on using SurveyGizmo to create Contact Forms, Lead Gen Forms, Support Requests, Newsletter Signups, or any kind of custom form. SurveyGizmo makes a great all-purpose web form tool for embedding data-collection forms on your website. We use the term “survey” frequently around here (duh!) but take it to mean any kind of data collection. The word “survey’ here can easily stand in for web form, and vice versa.

No need to get the IT department involved or set up custom processing code. Just add your questions and drop a small snippet of code on your website - done! Plus, you get some special features that you can’t get from a regular web form.

• Track complete vs. abandon stats
• Send email auto-responders (as with many forms), but also have a downloadable text file with contact info.
• Send your data to more than one place - i.e. accept newsletter subscriptions as part of a contact form and post the subscription back to your Email Service Provider’s API.

This week we have several new, related updates

• New Tutorial: Creating Contact, Lead Generation, Newsletter, and Support Forms
• New Question Templates: 4 new templates for quick form setup
  1. Contact Form - Simple
  2. Contact Form - Extended
  3. Support Form
  4. Newsletter Signup - Extended
• New Look & Feel Template: a Contact Form/Embedded design template with clean simplicity for embedding surveys into your website smoothly

You can see examples in use on our own SurveyGizmo contact form and Widgix contact form. We have reprinted the tutorial here for convenience, but you can find it and others on the SurveyGizmo Tutorial pages.

Creating a Single Step Contact Form

A single-step contact form means that users fill out a single page, and then they see a thank you after submitting.

Step 1: Create a new survey using one of our contact form templates

Create a new survey and choose one of the contact form templates that seems closest to your need.

• Contact Form - Simple
• Contact Form - Extended
• Support Form
• Newsletter Signup - Extended

You can and should edit the questions and layout, so just pick something similar. Read more about the basics of creating a new survey.

The templates all have examples of forms and email auto-responders.

Step 2: Edit the questions

Modify the questions to suit your needs. Clicking the notepad icon will allow you to modify many options. You can also add or reorder questions.

Step 3: Handling the submitted data

You have to decide what happens after the user clicks the submit button. Every data form or survey in SurveyGizmo always has at least two pages. The second page acts as a Thank You page, but it can also hold actions to act on the data collected. Use these actions to send email or push data.

Email auto-responders

All of the Contact forms contain examples of email auto-responders. You can modify these or add additional ones. You can read more about setting up Email Auto-responders here.

Pushing information out of SurveyGizmo

SurveyGizmo Pro and Enterprise accounts have access to an Action type called HTTP Post. This is used to push data to outside services like Email lists, newsletter signups, customer databases, etc. You can transmit information to other outside services such as SalesForce.com, Constant Contact, Campaign Monitor, etc.

Step 4: Modify your look and feel

When you are finished with your questions, it’s time to move on to modify your look and feel. If you used one of our Contact Form Templates, it already comes with a look and feel template that is well-suited to being embedded on a website.

You may, however, want to tweak the width of the form, the font size or font family, text color, the background color, or Submit Button text. You can change all those things on the Look & Feel tab. You can also select different templates or modify the HTML or CSS if desired.

You can click “Preview” to view the included Look & Feel or modifications. For you designers out there - it is also possible to modify the look of a survey by adding CSS to your site that acts on the survey form’s ID and Class names.

Step 5: Embed the form on your site

When you are happy with your preview, it’s time to “Launch” (publish) the Contact Form. Clicking Launch will take you to the Publishing tab. You’ll most likely want the Embed Option 2 - the Javascript Option. You can cut and paste this small snippet of Javascript code and place it on the page in your website where you want the form.

Usually you’ll create a blank Contact Us page on your own site using your own template/design. When the page is viewed, the form will fill in dynamically and be wrapped in your site’s design.

A Special note to WordPress or other CMS users like Drupal, etc.

You can create a page or a post and paste in the Javascript snippet. You need to make sure you paste the Javascript code into the HTML, so if you are using the Rich Text Editor click on the HTML button and paste the code in there. If you paste it in the Rich Text Editor directly it won’t work, because the code will be interpreted as copy text.

You’re done - go visit the page and test your form!

Email auto-responders will run immediately (unless you set a time delay). Stats will begin to show up in 10 - 20 minutes. It’s useful to think of the “Abandoned” data as “views” on your form where someone didn’t fill it in. This is natural on most web sites, but if you feel more people should be filling out the form, you might make changes and compare the data over time to achieve a more useful form.

If you create some forms, feel free to post links here to show them off.

Read Part 2 . Contact Forms: Increase conversions with multi-step web forms

Ok, we hear you - MySpace.com surveys

Update: You can now add our surveys to Myspace: read about it.

We have noticed a bunch of searches on our site for MySpace.com surveys. We see incoming searches with MySpace Surveys. MySpace.com, for those with their heads in the sand, is the huge-normously successful social networking site that every marketer is salivating to get a bite out of. We haven’t really looked into incorporating SurveyGizmo surveys into MySpace.com yet, but what do you think? (Yah, I mean you reading this right now.) Is this something you want? What should it look like and how should it work?

We want to know what our users want. What would work well for you? Simple polls or extended surveys? Contact forms or contests? Are you looking to include surveys on your corporate MySpace page or create something viral you hope will be picked up and spread around?

This is less “build it and they will come” and more “tell them and they will build it.”

What do you think? Share your ideas here or email us at support@sgizmo.com and we’ll bring it.

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Web site updates

I did a little window dressing around the SurveyGizmo site this weekend. It’s a little more streamlined and we hope you like it. There is also a new search feature in the sidebar. It searchs both the blog and web pages.

A correction:

Our last entry noted out a new tutorial Auto-responders and Merge Helpers but gave an incorrect link, all better now.

Have a good weekend everyone.

Merge Helper for Survey Auto-responders and Survey Starter Templates

We have added new tools and tutorials to make it easier to build better email auto-responders for your surveys. With the Merge Helper and Email Merge Helper, you can incorporate values from your survey automatically into a survey triggered email auto-responder.

What can you use the Email Auto-responders for?

• Notifying you of each survey taken and providing you a copy of the results
• Sending a name-customized confirmation to survey takers to thank them
• Providing a copy of answers back to respondents - good for tests or quizzes
• Confirming the opt-in to someone joining your newsletter list or submitting a customer service contact form
• Get fancy - Use our landing page template for a “Top Ten Tips on _______.” Then, send then one tip a day, automatically scheduled, over the next ten days.

Use the new Merge Helper to grab any value from a survey and insert it into your survey. You can read more about Auto-responders and the Merge Helper in this tutorial.

Survey Templates

Last week we released new survey templates, but this is the first chance we have had to blog about it. When creating a survey, now you can choose from blank, one of our templates, or a copy of one of your own surveys. Right now there are just three templates, but we’ll be bringing on more. We also encourage user-submitted templates as well!

Keep in mind the survey templates are sets of sample questions. They can be paired with any look & feel template. They can also easily be edited or adapted as you need. Remove, add or edit questions as desired.

You can also preview a template before choosing it.

You can check these survey templates out here

• Basic Questions template - Start here if you’re new to SurveyGizmo
• Customer Service Satisfaction Survey
• Landing Page Template