There are two different Ruby gems out there right now to choose from:

survey-gizmo-ruby Ruby Gem

Kabari Hendrick released this Ruby gem to integrate Ruby with the SurveyGizmo API v.1 using an ActiveModel style interface. It interfaces with survey API resources such as surveys, questions, pages, options, and responses. It also supports all of the actions provided by the API: get, create, update, delete, and get list. There is also error handling.

You can follow these links to check out the survey-gizmo-ruby repository, see an extended usage example, or read the documentation.

Kabari’s company, Lab42, uses it in a few different places, such as this survey tool.

surveygizmo Ruby Gem

Bobby Uhlenbrock with Ample built this Ruby Gem, which currently focuses heavily on pulling response data from the SurveyGizmo API.

Bobby told us, “My goal was to make this as easy to drop into an app as the Twitter gem. Therefore, if you’ve ever used the Twitter gem, this should make immediate sense.”

You can follow the links below to see the surveygizmo Ruby Gem repository, as well as check out the documentation.

**We’ve also added both of these gems to our Survey API Resources page to make them easy to find in the future.

What’s Next

Both developers told us that their gems weren’t yet finished, and could use some help in the form of contributors, bug-finders, etc…so if you’re a Ruby developer who wants to make it easy to integrate your apps with SurveyGizmo, go get involved!

We love it when people build cool things with our API – thanks to Bobby and Kabari for getting these started! If you’ve used these Ruby gems (or the SurveyGizmo API) to build something great, please drop us an email and let us know! We’d love to talk to you more about it.

That being said…we’ve got new survey integrations to tell you about!

First off, there’s our new GoDaddy integration. If you need a private branded domain for your survey, you can now easily register it right from the SurveyGizmo dashboard. It’s simple to get to:

1. From the Publish tab, click on “Default Link” under the My Links and Campaigns menu.

2. Under “Sub-Type,” click on either “Branded Subdomain” or Private Domain.”

3. Click on “Account Settings.

4. Under “Private Domain,” follow the instructions to set up a GoDaddy domain from within the menu.

Once your domain is set up, we’ll incorporate it into your online survey automatically. No more messing with CNAME’s or DNS – it’s all taken care of. For those of you with Enterprise plans, this should make it much easier to whitelabel your surveys and promote your brand using private domains.

Secondly, we’ve integrated with WhatUsersDo. For those of you who don’t know, WhatUsersDo provides on-demand usability testing and user experience research for websites of all shapes and sizes. But websites aren’t the only thing that needs testing – web surveys deserve testing, too (we always recommend testing your survey using our “Send a Test Link” feature). Now, for a small fee, you can get a ton of insight into how independent users view your survey.

Here’s how it works: when publishing a survey, click on the link marked “Send a Test Link.” Normally you would use this feature to send a test survey out to up to 5 different survey respondents whom you specify. Now, however, you’ll notice that there’s another option – simply click on the link to WhatUsersDo, and you can immediately get feedback from random survey respondents around the world.

You can specify different objectives for the users you test, and ask them specific questions as the survey ends. They’ll also provide a video (with audio) of the user moving through the tasks you’ve assigned them, so you can really get the feel for how they’re interacting with your survey, and where they’re confused or running into problems.

Obviously, it’s a great way to step away from your survey and get a feel for how an unbiased user will react. You might learn that a page is too overwhelming, for instance, and decide to go back and break it up into smaller, more digestible pieces.

Both of these new integrations are just a few of the integrations we offer with our partners – from email to CRM, you can find a ton of resources to enhance and extend your surveys.

Happy surveying!

Heat mapping helps you understand the impact of graphical or textual components within an advertisement. We all know certain locations garner more resonance than others, but how great would it be to test out an ad before publishing it?

I then started to think about advertising agencies. Knowing how to best position and market products and services is what clients expect, right? But how do they reach target audiences quickly within budget and deadline?

Well, SurveyGizmo now partnered with Cint can help do that. Instant market research through online sampling is a tremendous resource for getting the insight you need when you need it.

Cint has a unique model. Research buyers and panel owners, like media groups or even soccer moms, come to the Cint Panel Exchange, a transparent, open marketplace, to buy and sell consumer opinions. Because Cint doesn’t own any panels, all communities are affinity-based and highly engaged.

So, how does this help with ad campaigns?

With access to consumers, concept tests can be generated to analyze the perception of new concepts, products, etc. even before they launch. Compare different branding alternatives in a study generally consisting of 300 answers or create a pitch test to measure perceptions of a brand before talking about it with clients.

And here is where the fun begins. Launch a SurveyGizmo heat map survey of your ad by determining your target audience and adding Cint sampling capability. Instantly access the insight you need to best optimize ad space.

With the busiest quarter of the year fast approaching, competing to broadcast the best message in the best way matters more than ever. Having a tool to help assess the impact of my ads gives me an advantage over the competition and now you have it too…unless, you’re my competition in which case you never read this. :)

For those of you who don’t know it, Jive Software makes business intelligence social. Think of it as the ‘glue’ that holds together an organization – it lets you share relevant data, organize projects, and collaborate between users across an entire enterprise.

The collaboration allowed by Jive Software’s dashboard-centric approach seems like the perfect place to share survey results – so that’s just what we’ve done. Using the SurveyGizmo survey API, we’ve partnered with Jive to natively integrate our application with the Jive platform.

The SurveyGizmo Jive App allows you to access your SurveyGizmo dashboard and reporting from within Jive. It’s now incredibly easy to see and share results with collaborators across your company who have the app installed. From within the Jive app you now have easy access to work with data from all your SurveyGizmo surveys.

To add the SurveyGizmo Jive App to your Jive dashboard, simply login to Jive and head to the Jive Apps Market. From there, you’ll be able to install the SurveyGizmo app with one click.

Jive is just one of the partners using SurveyGizmo’s API to enrich their applications – we’ve partnered with several companies like Mailchimp, Survey Deck, WordPress and more to bring SurveyGizmo’s data into their apps.

Interested in finding ways to integrate your systems directly with SurveyGizmo? Check out SurveyGizmo Developer’s Corner for resources to help you integrate with SurveyGizmo using our API.

Don’t have your own development team? No problem. Talk to our Professional Services team, who can easily integrate our application with your systems for you!

On May 4, 2010, otherwise known as Star Wars Day, MailChimp’s login screen absolutely blew my mind and was one of my favorite interweb moments of the year. I should have taken a screenshot, but at least they’ve memorialized it on their flickr.

Today, I went from MailChimp fan to MailChimp fanatic. In a day and age where customer service has almost become a bad word, I just expect long response times, canned answers, and a transfer to a supervisor when the individual I’m dealing with is not empowered to resolve my issue. MailChimp, this is NOT you.

The Issue
Basically, I had a free SurveyGizmo account user who had issues with their MailChimp integration. After resolving the issues, I asked the user if there was anything else that I could do to help. What did they want? Reimbursement for the unsuccessful MailChimp campaigns.

My Predicament
During my time at SurveyGizmo, we’ve always been empowered to do whatever it takes to resolve customer problems, whether this be working extra hours to help fix a survey or giving a refund for unsatisfactory service or performance.

However, this was a free SurveyGizmo user wanting compensation for a paid MailChimp account. How could I reimburse them outside of writing them a personal check? I don’t even have a checkbook!*

*Big shoutout to ING Direct! Save your money and bank online!

The Email to MailChimp Support
Not knowing where else to turn, I submitted the following support request to MailChimp at 8:07pm EST:

Hi guys! Marybeth, Support Manager at SurveyGizmo, here. I have a free SurveyGizmo/pay-as-you-go MailChimp account user who just ran two problematic campaigns.

In the first campaign, it appears that the API pulled the incorrect survey link, causing an “online survey not found” error. I helped the customer by creating a new campaign and ensured that the link worked.

When they resent the campaign, it turns out that the survey itself had a corrupted question, so survey takers were unable to submit their survey. Pretty much an all around disaster.

Unfortunately, this customer didn’t test either the survey or the emails or they would have found the issue themselves before their contacts did. Regardless, they aren’t very happy with us right now and want us to reimburse them for the campaigns.

Is there anyway we could hook them up with like 2000 credits? From my calculations, that is around what they used during this debacle. I would refund or credit them from our end, but they don’t pay us anything!

Any kind of help you can give me to appease this person would be great!

The Response
Now, MailChimp’s website shows their live support being available Monday-Friday, 9am to 5pm EST. Seeing that, I was not expecting an answer until the next morning at the earliest. Even then, I had guessed that whoever received my request would need to speak with someone else to see if they could help me out.

Much to my surprise, I received the following response at 8:28pm, just 21 minutes after submitting my after-hours request.

Hi MaryBeth,

No problem, we added 3,000 credits. 2,000 to cover useage and an extra 1,000 for apologies.

Feel free to email us back if you have specific comments beyond this that we can assist you with.

Regards,
Edwin
MailChimp.com / Client Services

My Reaction
I couldn’t contain myself. After responding with the following email, I proceeded to call our Marketing Manager to rave about how I just had the best customer service experience of my life.

Not surprisingly, she knew exactly what I was talking about because she has awesome experiences with their support as well. Anyway, here’s my response to Edwin which I wanted to share with the world because MailChimp is so amazingly awesome!

OMG. Edwin, you rock.

I wasn’t expected an answer until tomorrow and didn’t even know if you guys could/would help. Your customer service is amazing!

I was such a huge fan of MailChimp and now I’m a fanatic!

SurveyGizmo <3's MailChimp,

Marybeth Alexander
SurveyGizmo Support Goddess/Manager

Why MailChimp Support is Super Awesome
What’s not to love? Here are the specific things Edwin from MailChimp did to rock my world:

So how about you? Have you had any customer service experiences that make you want to shout from the rooftops?

So much interest, in fact, that we thought perhaps we should, you know, document how it works. So, without further ado, here’s our ExactTarget Integration Tutorial.

Here are just some of the cool things ExactTarget customers can now do:

• Add custom survey links to email campaigns, and pass in subscriber identifiers such as email addresses or subscriber IDs
• Keep track of individual responses and email reminders
• Add subscribers and update ExactTarget list attributes from within a survey
• Trigger auto-responders (eg. a thank-you to a survey respondent)

It’s easy to activate these features via your SurveyGizmo account page. Scroll to the bottom, check the ExactTarget checkbox and enter your SurveyGizmo username and password. If you have any questions about how to launch and manage ExactTarget surveys, feel free to email us at support@sgizmo.com.