A while ago I heard about this ingenious program which is called Replace Me and the Program which basically about replacing myself. It’s all about outsourcing and how you can get to know people that can work for you and do a great job doing the stuff you did before. This is basically about replacing you.

Replacing Myself by Hiring Writers

I am very, very happy to find Neal and Elisha doing a great job in replacing me. But it seems that there will be a bigger project coming up and I’m probably going to look around as I am quite sure that I’m going to hire new writers. This is very different from how I did this back then because, before I start on a project, people just have to fit in with me. Now they have to fit in with the theme and me obviously. So I’m really wondering what the most effective way would be in approaching people that would like to work for me. If you have any idea I might be happy to know about this.

Using Other Networks and Social Media to Look for Employees

My idea right now is to ask my writers to use their own networks and social media to get to the people we would like to work with. It’s funny as it feels like it is the second round. It feels like I have proven to myself that the model I had started this project with – which was teaching what a person wants to know and let them do it instead of me – really does work and it has been a tremendous experience to teach people what I do and then be able to have that done with just writing a few comments.

Hire People from the Philippines

I’ll be hiring new people. If you have any idea about who I should approach, please tell me. I’m basically interested in people who are from the Philippines. This is the only place where I have good experiences concerning outsourcing. If you are online article writer from the Philippines and you’re interested in doing bigger projects for me, let me know. Thanks!

When other people hear that I work together with great experts in the Philippines, they often ask “How did you connect to those people?” The truth is that I followed a formal teaching program to learn this all the way through. I signed up for $99 per month and I did learn how to outsource to the Philippines. Sounds great, doesn’t it?

Well, it sounded like it would be really, really easy and of course it wasn’t. Usually, or at least in my opinion, things often get more complicated than you might think when you put things into action. I have some experience with outsourcing projects via freelancer.com and other related websites. I have also worked with a few individuals from the US and India, which didn’t leave me happy because I had to put in a lot of money and time, and the results weren’t what I hoped for.

Hiring Rebecca

I decided to hire some people full time. I started off with someone who’s a human resource manager named Rebecca, and she worked in a call center before. It was pretty perfect for the first time. She did all the initial interviews and she did a lot. She educated me about Filipino culture, she looked after the payments, etc. Generally, Rebecca did a pretty great job. First thing I did was I had her hold interviews, and then I got another ten people I would have wanted to give a job to, but I couldn’t because I don’t have so much money. I took her on to manage the people that worked for me since she had an open communication with me which I really liked.

However, her laptop got stolen which put her two to three weeks offline, and I haven’t heard from her since. I guess Rebecca is gone, and that is something which, I find, is a rather difficult situation. It’s totally okay for someone to tell me something like, “I worked for you for two months now and it’s really not what I expected,” or, “I’ve been in that problem, how can we deal with that,” or, “I would like to quit.” Okay, no problem. But it’s very hard if someone doesn’t tell you why they don’t call you or reply to emails, and that’s pretty hard and it happened to me a couple of times. It’s just something I have to deal with. I find that very annoying.

With Rebecca out of the picture, my guess is that she knows there isn’t too much room for human resource management going on right now. Furthermore, most of the management requires content knowledge, so I have to do it myself anyway. Rebecca is actually just supervising people that can supervise themselves. Rebecca, if you are reading this, thank you for everything that you left unto me. You have been a great help and I am sorry to see you go that way. You have probably found something else that you can do. I hope that you have found great work.

Hiring Designers

I took on a couple of designers also. I actually outsourced the whole design part of my company to another company, and now they are doing all this beautiful WordPress designs. I have access to the designs for a reasonable price which is really nice. I think that’s a very good deal for both of us and for the designers as well.

Hiring Neal and Elisha

Actually, I took on two very talented writers. They are Neal and Elisha. If they had a Facebook Fan Page, I would become their fan immediately because they are really cool. Neal is a Physics graduate and Elisha is an IT graduate. What’s great about them is that they have a great personality. They are more introverts, but they are open and they say what they need. They tell me if they got stuck or they have a problem. They tell me and I can help deal with it. That is something I really like. They also match very well between the two so they can help each other out, and read each other’s pieces and comment on that. They just generally gave me a huge boost in productivity because now I can do a lot more than I could before.
What we’ve done so far

So far, we have written articles for other people for promotional purposes. We have also been working for 3 sites of mine. One is about WordPress, another is about Behavioral Targeting, and the third is for E-Book readers. Very different topics, you might notice. How can we put all those together? That is a bit of the crux because it’s something I had to learn. I can take myself out of the page totally because I have the content knowledge that is important for the task at hand. A couple of things that work very well was, “look at this site, look at what they’ve done, go out, do some research, we want to have kind of the same things.” I give a good example of what I want to have in the end.

I’m also doing most of the research, and then I just pack a huge file of 20 or 30 links to other papers and articles and I send that to them. I then ask them kindly if they can read that and make a summary. It’s pretty cool because while they are reading about it, they learn and get educated about what content experts talk about in specific areas. At the same time, they are producing articles that are really valuable for my blog.

Outsourcing to the Philippines has been a great experience. If you want to do so, I suggest that you ask from an expert, and you need to have knowledge of distributed processes and you need cultural knowledge of the Philippines and how the people work there.

7-zip is an open source program which means you are completely free to use it for whatever purpose. It nicely integrates into your windows explorer. Basically, I use that program in windows because I hate the way the zip integration is done in Windows. It’s not efficient, it takes a long time for zip files to get encoded and to get compressed and to get decompressed. You don’t have any options. And basically it only does zip.

7-zip is the way zip files should be integrated into Windows. It’s very small, it’s very efficient. It doesn’t take much resources. It’s very secure. It’s easy to use, which to me is very important. So that’s it pretty much. I recommend that if you’re on a 64 bit version of Windows. You actually do download the 64 bit version of 7 zip. It just gives you a little bit of extra power. But the 32 bit version is also fine. If for some reason you want to use that.

Download 7-zip here: http://www.7-zip.org/download.html

This will be a series of posts. In each article, I’ll talk about one tool. There are about 20 tools that I will cover. These tools are for personal use, but also very specific for business use. I’ll tell you some scenarios in which I use the tools, what I think how you should use them and for what purpose, and when not to use the tools. It’s also very important to know the boundary conditions on tools and applications. If you’re using tools that you think are really important that I haven’t mentioned, please leave a comment, because I know that I’m using a very specific set of tools. Obviously, you might have some great tools that you use, and if you share that with us, that would be great.

Most of the tools that I’ll talk about are for Mac and Windows computers. Some of the tools are just for Mac or just for Windows, and whenever that’s the case I’ll mention that and try to tell you about alternatives.

Computer Setup

Just some information on my setup, i have a home computer which is running Windows 7 Ultimate. It’s a two screen setup, core duo, just a normal pc. I’m not really a power user in the regard that I use a lot of resources. I just do normal stuff with it like surfing the web, doing video editing from time to time but nothing very fancy. For my mobile work, I have a Macbook Air 13 inch. Obviously that is running OSX. I also have a netbook, which is running Linux. It’s running Ubuntu 10.1 and that’s also great. I have some experience on all different main operating systems. But here I’ll specifically cover Windows and Mac.

There are few tools that I think should be in the operating system, but they are not and so that is why I need to install something like it in order to have a fully operational system. It’s funny, it’s called operation system, but often to me its not acting like one. More often than not, I think, the operation system should have functions that it doesn’t have. Obviously, it’s fine to have a very slim, light system; OSX does that really well, and Windows 7 is definitely a step in the right direction. However, you’ll discover what I mean.

Dropbox

First thing I install on every new computer is Dropbox. Dropbox is a great tool which gives you a Internet-based hard disk. You get some space; in the free version you get 2 GB of space, but you can round that up to I think about 8 GB when you recommend the program to other users, which you should do because it’s really a great product. It integrates really nicely into your operating system, whether you’re on OSX, on Windows or on Linux. The Dropbox is basically a specific folder within your operating system. In Windows that might be on the C:\Dropbox, while in OSX that is in your user directory, and the same goes for Linux. You can install it anywhere you want to.

Whenever you put a file in there, it uploads that file to a web server. Now when I say, web server, I don’t really mean a physical web server, because Dropbox is a very good example of a cloud service, which means that your data is not necessarily saved in one location, but it’s rather saved in a real big network of different servers. When you upload your file, it gets synced to the server, and just for the sake of imagining it, being a computer somewhere on the Internet where your file is actually stored. This gives you the chance of syncing that file not just to your home computer but also to your laptop or to your computer at work, for example. What’s great about this is that if I’m working on my laptop and I save a file in Dropbox, I come home, and the file is already there. I don’t have to email it to myself, I don’t have to use a USB stick.

Online Backup System

Even better, with most of my programs, I have now changed the location where they save the files, so they save them directly into dropbox. Basically, if I write a document in word, now it automatically gets saved to the dropbox. This even spares me the hassle of moving the file to the dropbox folder. What that does for me is, I can just use the same files no matter on what computer I am, and it’s such a great relief, not because I don’t have to email files to myself, or because they are already there. Saving time is just a side effect, but the great thing about this is you only have one version of the file. How often have you had the problem that you have multiple versions of the same file and you just don’t know which is the actual file that you’re working on? Of course sometimes its very handy to have more than one version, when something goes wrong, for example, or you find that you’ve deleted an important portion of the file and then worked on it. In Dropbox, you can also see recent versions of the file and compare it and restore other versions than the one you are working on right now. Dropbox is not just a hard drive, but it’s also a backup system.

Using Dropbox With Multiple People

This also works very well when you have the file opened on different computers. It has a good system of detecting that two people are working on the same file currently, and then it doesn’t over write the file, but it saves a conflicting copy. It’s not as good as working together in like google docs , for example, or in applications that are really designed to have multiple users working them at one point, but it’s quite alright; it definitely doesn’t over write anything. If two people are working on the same file, it just saves two copies of that file.

The really beautiful thing about Dropbox is that you can easily share folders with other people. They just need to have a Dropbox account, or if they don’t you just click on share that folder and enter their email address, and they get asked to sign up automatically. Instead of emailing them huge files, you have a shared folder basically, and you can just put the files you want them to have in there and they can put the file that you need in there for a really easy sharing experience. You get a notification if there is a new file for you which pops up. The only hassle can be sometimes that if people put really huge files in a shared dropbox, then if you go online, for example, on your laptop, and you’re on a 3G connection on a mobile internet connection, then it can take a very long time to download the files. You can definitely discuss having a maximum file size limit to put in the drop box. But if you’re in a fast Internet connection, then it doesn’t really matter.

Special Dropbox Folders

There are also some special folders in the dropbox. One is called the public folder, and one is called the picture folder, or photos. When you put stuff into photos, it automatically generates a web gallery. Using this, you can make photos on your iPhone, save them in the dropbox folder for let’s say, a specific dropbox folder for a convention, you share the link, and then whenever you make new photos they automatically get added to the web gallery. You also have the public folder. Everything in the public folder is public, and you can create a link to files in the public folder and you can send that link to people. This solves a huge problem, because it used to be very difficult to send huge files via email. People send a dvd, or people upload them to something like rapidshare. I never really like those one click file hosters, because I’m not sure what’s actually happening to my file and if that’s safe there, but I do trust in Dropbox. They have a sound business model, and the security precautions are very good, so I’ll trust them with my files.

I don’t have to log in; it’s just a folder in my computer that i can drag and drop stuff onto and I just send a link with instant chat messages or an email. That works really, really well. I wouldn’t use that to put files that you want to have online for a longer period of time. Because sometimes people link to those files then from a website and if you take the files out of your public folder the link will break. Just use that more for kind of a sending files style. I also really like to record videos on the iPhone and save them in the public folder, and then directly from my iPhone, use a multiple video upload platform like Hastebrat, and upload the videos to multiple video portals. This is a great way to have coverage of events as they are happening and generate the buzz and traffic from it.

Accessing Your Files in Dropbox

Another great thing about dropbox is the user interface. Dropbox just works. They have put a tremendous amount of work for this really complicated piece of technology, but the user friendliness of it is really good as well. It’s a complex program but it’s easy to use. I already told you that you can use Dropbox from your computer. It integrates into your file system as just another folder. But you can also use dropbox from a web interface. You get complete access to all the files online. So wherever you are, you only need an internet connection to get through your files, or to send them via email.

I also use the Dropbox app for iPhone and for iPad, and there’s also a Dropbox app for Android based phones. On the iPhone, the app is great if you have produced content, mostly meaning videos and photos. Because you don’t need to sync them back to your computer, but if you save them in Dropbox directly, they are just on your computer. You don’t need to worry about syncing your files. They are safe and you can directly use them next time you log in in your normal computer. But it’s also cool to have access to for example your pdf’s from the iPhone or the iPad. What I do a lot on the iPad is that i upload interesting pdf that I want to read to a specific folder in my dropbox, and then I sync those files for offline view on my iPad, and then when i’m sitting in the train, on the bus or somewhere, I can read those files. That’s a pretty great way, because it saves you the hassle from syncing your iPad with the computer as it’s all done automatically.

Similar Programs

There are couple of other programs that you can use that are pretty much the same with Dropbox. For example, box.net is probably the most famous one. I haven’t tried that out extensively. I think it’s also very good; it integrates with Linkedin for example, and it has a little bit more business-like kind of style. I’ll need to test that to have an opinion about that. But the fact is, I’m so happy with dropbox, I don’t think I will need to test box.net. It definitely has some nice aspects to it, but Ill stay with dropbox for now.

If you’re wondering how much it costs, well, the free account is free. It is really free. No ads, you don’t get spammed with premium offers, nothing. It’s just so cool. Even if you don’t invite anyone, you can go a long way with your 2 GB if you don’t start uploading huge files or videos. If you’re just using Dropbox for normal documents, then you can go for pretty much forever.

Go and install Dropbox. It’s a great program. Tell your friends about it. Try to use it on your mobile phone, and tell me what you think about it. Im really interested to hear about your experience with Dropbox, and how you use it. What you think is problematic when you failed to use Dropbox or when Dropbox failed you. Tell me about it. Thanks for reading this article. I hope you enjoyed it.

Download Dropbox here: http://www.dropbox.com/

What they don’t do is they don’t teach you from a psychological point of view how you should structure your survey in order to create an effective survey.What do I mean when I say effective survey? Well, this has lots to do with working in a structured way and getting that information that you actually need. Lots of times the problem is lack of planning, people just start jotting questions into the survey system and they hope that this will just be fine. Often times they think that it doesn’t really matter how you ask the questions, and I’m here to prove you wrong. It’s very important to have a good planning.

Problems from Creating Surveys

Let me just tell you about a few problems that could arise while creating your survey. For example, asking a question like: Do you like the new design of our home page? A lot of things are wrong with that question. First of all, people are always inclined to answer yes if possible. If you just ask completely random questions, most of the time people will answer yes more often than no. You should be aware of this effect. Second is, we’re social animals, and we like to comfort other people, we like to do something nice to them, and when we take a survey, we can’t do click and move into the objective kind of reality all at once, so people will likely be nice to you in a survey. You need that into account. If you ask do you like our home page, people are probably gonna say yes, because this is the normal thing to say. Pretty much like, how, how are you? Good. and You? Good.

Funneled Survey

So how can you overcome these problems? FIrst of all, you need to have a funnel structure in your survey. You need to be aware that the answer on question 2 will likely depend on the wording and the answer of question 1 that you have asked. This strategy of a funneled survey minimizes the negative impact of the psychological effect. What that actually does is, you start off with the broadest question of all. Let’s take the example here of someone wanting to find out how they can improve their website, and asking their customers what they can do about it. Let’s say they sell digital information products, and they’re setting this survey out in a newsletter. A good thing to ask would be, What do you think about our website? That would be a really broad question, and then use an open text field. Don’t give them drop down menus, don’t give them answers like: I like it, I don’t like it, because that would defeat the purpose of having an open question. The open question is meant to generate information for you about things that you haven’t thought about. So it’s very good to have a very open question at the start.

Oftentimes it also helps to clarify that there is no right and no wrong answer, and they should just write out whatever comes to the mind. It’s very important that they write down whatever comes to their mind first, because those are most likely the things that are more strongly connected to behavior, than the answers you get when people think for a long time. See, we all listen to two different realities. One is the cognitive reality of who we ought to be, what we ought to do, how we think we work. The other one is the real reality: what we actually do, how our minds actually work, how we actually do behave. That often times can be quite different from what we think what we ought to do, how we should work, or what kind of person we should be like. This open question, fast answer, helps you to really get out of the behavioral component. Also don’t give them clues. Don’t tell them, “you could say something about our design, or about our navigation or whatever.” No. Just ask them a really open plain question.

Asking Questions on Different Levels of Hierarchy

Let’s move to the next question. You may ask: Is the spacing between the navigation elements in the drop down menu too wide? You’re actually interested in that specific thing, but that wouldn’t be something that you ask in second place. Try to go from what you think about our website, to that point that you want to know, like, what’s the spacing between the navigation elements in the drop down menu. Try to think of different hierarchies here and come up with a question on every level if possible. For example, you could ask: Would you use the drop down menu, or do you use the side bar navigation if you want to go to another page. What do you think about the top navigation menu? These are tricky questions because often times, people just navigate subconsciously. In the best of all cases, they navigate your site without even knowing what they’re doing. That means that your user interface is so good that they don’t need to think about it. They just do it. But sometimes, they might not. You could also ask them in general: do you prefer drop down menus or do you prefer sidebar navigation for sub pages? , You can give them a picture because not everyone knows what a drop down menu or sidebar is.

You might ask them a question about, what do you think about the readability, about the sub page item in the drop down menu. What do you think about the design of our drop down menu? Last but not least, you can have a couple of questions which are like the specific questions that you wanted to ask: What do you think about the spacing? I probably wouldn’t ask about the spacing because people just don’t think about stuff like that, but I would ask them like: Is it easy to find the sub page you want to go on? Can you read the text well or do you usually use your browser settings to come up with different font sizes and stuff?

Know the Personal and Environmental Factors

You always want to know the context in which people take this survey. If you ask things about readability, you want to check important factors that can influence readability, and by that i mean person and environment factors. For example, you might want to get stuff about the person, like, do they have a reading impairment? Do they use glasses? You also need information about the environment. What kind of computer do they use? in what settings do they use them? Do they read your webpage during the day or always at night after work? What kind of screen do they have? What kind of device do they use? Do they use very small net books, or do they try to read your web page on an iPhone. Because it could very well be that you’re getting really mixed up results, and one person is saying oh yeah i like the drop down menu, its really good, its really clear. But they might be on an iMac with a 30 inch screen. Someone else might say, no it’s absolutely horrible to navigate your site but they might be on an iPhone or on real small netbook. Always, for each and every question, think about what kind of personal and environmental factors could influence this question. Then you need to make a judgment call if you need to ask a question about it or not.

Different Types of Questions

Let’s talk a little bit about the different types of questions that you can use. Generally spoken, you wanna have as few questions as possible. On the other hand, if your data becomes worthless because you get totally mixed up results, then it might be better just concentrating on two or three points that you wanna ask, but ask those things really well. We’ve had the idea of a funnel survey now, where you go down from very generic questions to very specific questions. For everything you wanna know, you’ll need to know what kinds of questions you should ask. For every kind of topic, make a funnel that you would use.

Text Fields

The most standard thing is just a text field. That could be a small text field or a large text field. You can use this to implicitly influence how extensive people will answer by styling your text field. If you ask what do you think about our website, and its a one line text field, people will most likely write, I like it, Good, Nice, Good Design, etc. If you have a very long text field, people are probably going to give you more extensive insight into their thoughts. But again, be careful because you only want to use large text fields for the really important questions.

As a rule of thumb, I think, one could say that for more generic questions, you could use somewhat larger text fields, and for questions that are more specific, you can use smaller text fields. Then again, that totally depends on the question. There could be specific question that require lot of information.

Radio Buttons and Check boxes

Radio buttons give you choices where you can only have one choice at a time. Those are usually mutually exclusive categories. For example, are you male or female. In 99.9 percent of the case, that’s a mutually exclusive category. If you want to know something like, have you already bought a product from us? Customers of your site might perceive your site differently than people who are comparing different sites and companies to buy from. People who have already made a decision to buy from you are probably going to be more positive anyway because it’s a select group.
When you click a check box, a marker is left to indicate that it has already been clicked, often a cross. You can have many check boxes, and usually there’s no logic connecting them. This would be the case if you want to ask questions about different categories that are not mutually exclusive. For example, are you interested in sports, music, fishing, cars, blogging. Some people could be interested in none of those, or they could be interested in all of them or a combination.

The thing with radio buttons and check boxes is you need to understand that there are two things that influence how people click radio buttons and check boxes. One is the order of items. Some people always perceive the first and the last item better than those in the middle. Also, if someone’s interested in music and cars, but they put music and they say to themselves, oh yes I’m a musical person, they put music. Maybe they don’t put cars anymore even if they are interested, because they don’t see that fitting with them being a musical person. It’s very important that, in the best of all worlds, you have those items randomized. That means that every time someone logs a survey, the items are presented in a random fashion. This gives you the chance of having unbiased group results, not unbiased results on a personal level because those will still be influenced by the specific order of that specific time that people fill in the survey. But on a group level, you won’t have that bias.

Likert Scales

Likert scales are the things that you often see where you rate things from like 1 to 10. Looking at a Likert scale, you have a few things you can decide. For example, how many choices do you present? You could have something like 0 to 5, or 0 to 7, or 0 to 100. Another important decision is, what is your left and what is your right value? You could use numbers, so you could have your scale start at zero, but you could also have your scale start at -10 for example. Or you don’t give numbers to your scale at all, which sometimes can be quite handy. You just ask how much do you like our sign up button, and then on the left you put not at all, and the right you put I totally like it. That way the scale becomes more subjective, so people have to interpret more what you mean by the scale. This is often easier to understand in words than it would be numbers. If you ask, how much do you like the sign up button, from zero to 10, that is totally not objective. Some people would think five is best, and some will go, five is good. So using words can sometimes help.

There is one very important thing you need to consider about likert scales. A lot of people just always go for the middle. People think like, oh the middle is like the standard answer. Very rarely do we find huge differences on likert scales. What you could do is, you could just take out the middle, but then people probably go for what they think is the middle anyway. What we have found in research is that likert scales with 5, 7 or 9 possible answers often work quite well. People can not perceive more than 7 + – 2 items at a time, so it’s really good to stay within that boundary of the instant cognition of items. This increases the speed in which people can take the survey, and it helps them to just click away rapidly, and that’s actually good because the faster people take the survey, the higher the correlation will be with the actual behavior. The faster people take the survey, the more it actually says about the actual behavior instead of what they think their behavior is.

Slider

There’s a trick we sometimes use, and in the paper version it goes like this. We just draw a line and we ask people to just indicate on the line where they think something is. How much do you like the sign up button, please indicate on this line. Then they make an x on the line or they just mark somehow with paper pencil on the line from probably to bad to good, how much they like the button. Of course you don’t have pencil if you do an online survey, but a good thing here would be to have a slider. So people can take the slider and then move it from left to right. This way, sometimes, you get more fine tuning. On the other end, it sometimes has less power statistically. Another problem is you need to start the slider somewhere. You get a different result whether at the start position the slider sits 50 percent, whether it said 100 percent, or at zero, or somewhere in between. I don’t recommend you put it in a random location, because people will say, “Why do they put it at 39, is that what most people think? Hmm, well I’ll just leave it there then. ” Its really important that you think about this before you use a slider. Sliders can be great because people actually need to move them and in that moving behavior, I believe, is more information than just clicking somewhere. If you really wanna go into depth you could also check the speed in which they move the slider, or at different points where they put it before they decide for a final point.

So that’s pretty much likert scale. Use them wisely, if you have a lot of different likert scales, try to be consistent in what the left and the right side depicts. If you have bad or negative or less, minus, those kind of things, they normally should go on the left side, and then on the right are more positive things. It’s assuming you’re doing a survey in a kind of European language Western way with those customers. The good thing about Likert scale is that it has a visual component. So you could also ask the likert scale, fill in a number from zero to ten, how much you like our button. This is much more difficult for people to do because they need to translate that cognitive information into behavior, whereas from good to bad, those kind of dimension, left to right, those very basic cognitive idea, that we could answer those questions using much less energy, because we don’t need to translate it, it’s already presented in a kind of behavioral way.

Special Likert Scale

What other types do we have? We have a special kind of likert scale where you have different dimensions. That could be, please rate our information products on this scale, and then its bad left, good right, and you’d have different categories, for example, music, sports, cars, etc. Just be careful with this. People can get overwhelmed by such arrays. If you really want them to adhere to the same framework of thought, and if you want them to compare those different categories to each other, you can use an array. If you don’t really want them to compare those things, it might be better to use single questions, and structure your survey according to a category.

Drop Down Menu

So we also have a drop down type of question. Typical example would be, what country are you from. This is something you usually get from a drop down menu. There are two kinds of drop down menus. In one type you can only select one answer. In the other type you can select several answers. I always think that drop down should only be used for single answer type. Because it can get confusing if you have multiple answers, and this is often technically challenging to have that presented in a good way. You often use a drop down menu if you want to have people make a choice from different items that belong to one category. All the things in that list, they need to be from one category or from one dimension. Country is actually a very good example. When it comes to male or female, for example, I would present that in a radio button style, because that to me makes more sense. I think you should avoid drop down menus when possible, because people need to click on the drop down menu first before they can make a choice. It’s just one more clicking to do, and if you present all the information at once, people can go through your study quicker, because it’s not feasible if you have three hundred countries in your list, which would make your form super long.

Containers

You can also use containers. It’s more kind of drag and drop style. If you want to ask people, which products are you likely to buy next year? and on the left side you have a selection of products, and on the right side you have a wish list or I’m going to buy list. It would actually make sense to have those items draggable. You can just drag the items from the left list to the right into kind of a basket. That’s a very very easy thing if you need people to select stuff from a huge list and maybe different categories or dimensions are involved in making the choice, and that’s also a way that is very close to how the real physical world works. It’s always a good thing to mimic how stuff actually works in the real world.

Facebook Like Button

So those are pretty much the basic types for questions that you use. In the last time, with the Facebook like button, and the youtube, like or dislike button, we have gotten a new set of ratings. Whereas before it usually was a star rating on the web, now we have just good or bad. Which I think is very good, because if you have sufficient users, it’s easier to have them say yes I like this or I don’t like this, and actually you also get information from everyone who doesn’t click, even though that’s ambiguous information and it’s very hard to interpret. I think one of the first companies who did that very, very well is Google. As often, they’re at the forefront of usability. What you see is that, under each and every article in their FAQ, they ask you was this information helpful? Yes or No. It’s so simple but it gives you a lot of valuable information. I believe that more people click links than click them up and down. Because clicking things up and down just seems like your’e doing extra work, you need to evaluate. But if you just read was this information helpful, yes or no, that’s kind of nicely flows from the end of the text that you’re reading. So it just doesn’t require too much energy to make sense of it.

Who Will You Ask Those Questions?

Now you know how to do a funnel survey. You know what kind of question you could ask and what are the implication of doing this. Let’s take a step back and see who will you ask those questions. This is a very important step, because you can have a great survey, but if you ask the wrong people, then you don’t get great results. This is a very, very critical point, and maybe this is something that is done wrong a lot. Really, really a lot. The right people for your study are not necessarily the people that give you the answers you want, but the right people for your study are those people that have the most predictive value of how your customers actually act when they give the answer. In the best of all worlds, you just ask 100 percent of your customers the same questions, and they all give an answer, you take the average, and then you read it on your site or you change your marketing strategy, or whatever, but not 100 percent of the people will take the survey. You need to make sure that the people who actually take the survey is not a biased sample.

Avoid a Biased Sample

What do you mean by a biased sample? For example, if you want to know about your website and you’re selling digital information products, and you wanna know what you can do to improve your website, if you give the survey to people who have just bought a product from you, those people are biased. If they have just bought from you, they’re likely to give you a more positive evaluation because of that. They would be stupid if they say your website is not good, because that would reflect in their choice as well. You also need to find people who, for example, haven’t bought from you, because they found your site too challenging or they didn’t like it for some reason; like you didn’t have the product they wanted. Also, the people that don’t know your site yet, potential customers for the first time, people who probably haven’t bought from you is a group you want to reach. How can you do that? Well, first of all, you should always make a plan of what kind of different groups there are that are important for your study,and then, record that in the study. You can have questions like, are you a customer of mine or not? How many items have you bought in the last year or in the last month? You want to know, have you seen my site before? Have you visited my site before? So if the people say they haven’t bought anything from you but they’ve seen your site, those are different people from people that have bought from you but they haven’t been on your site yet. Map that, make a plan of all the different groups you can have and take that with you in the study, ask questions about that, to get the good demographics.

If you then send the link out, usually the more people that take your study the better, but if you send your link out to your Facebook friends, on twitter, and to your customers, you need to understand that you will get very biased reviews. This is a very biased sample. I don’t mean that the individual people are biased, because they will just fill out the study to the best of their abilities, but on the group level it’s a biased sample, because you just talk to people who think you are great. What you need to find are groups that represent your customers or people you’re doing this for. You’re not doing the survey for yourself, your doing this survey in our case, to help potential customers find the stuff they want on your site more easy , more fast and they have more fun doing so, which in turn will result in more sales. It’s a different survey whether you want to know how to improve your site so that people will buy something from you, or whether you’re doing this for the webmaster, or your own employees.

Find people that are alike your potential customers. For example, you could look for blogs or email newsletters, or even print showing where these customers hang out. Look for people that are very likely to buy your product, but for some reason, they don’t. For example, you can ask people, please retweet my survey, or canyou please give this survey to your Facebook friends. It would be very nice if you have a personalized link; a link that could help you see who was your multiplier that gave away the survey link. That could also be an influence.

I hope you learned a lot about how to make a survey. You need to know what you want to ask, put that in behavioral terms. It needs to be easy, don’t overdo it. It should be a max of maybe 5 to 10 minutes, and if you pay people, you need to be aware what that does. Thanks for reading!

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If you cannot read this post you have just been unfriended.

Top 5 reasons are:

- You bring negativity into my life
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If any of the above describe your behaviour, but you can still read this post – you are next in line.

Inefficiency of Government

This is due to two things. First would be the inherent inefficiency of government or government agencies. I look at government agencies more from a system perspective and to me this is a net of relationships and inter-dependencies that makes it very hard for new energy to enter the system and repel the system from a state of order into chaos. Obviously chaos precedes understanding and new structures. It’s one thing to want to do good things and it’s another spending time doing. These are not the same things and do not have the same effect. Sometimes I think that non-profit organizations work much more efficiently if they would actually gear towards making profit. This is just a psychological side note here.

Being a Social Entrepreneur

Factor two is how I understand that you can be what now is called a social entrepreneur. This means you’re someone who thinks like an entrepreneur. You want to do things, you want it done, you want thing started, and you want to put this into reality now. You’re not focused on making a lot of money but on making a lot of fact. I was sitting in a workshop of a guy from NVU a couple of weeks ago and I think he described it best when he put maximize of profit versus maximize of effect. A social entrepreneur is more interested in the social effect of their actions than the financial effect. However, we understand that money is the universal resource of our society and the more resources you have the more potential for effect. It’s one critical factor in doing the math.

Doing this has changed my whole view of entrepreneurship because suddenly it became more of a personality trait. I now see an entrepreneur as not being defined by the end goal but by the actions he takes to reach that goal. It also means someone who is not working in a business, like someone in a government agency, could also be an entrepreneur. It means this person takes ownership of the things he is doing. The best word to describe it is a leader. In the business world that often means the business owner or the entrepreneur. I’m very happy I can be an entrepreneur and I can, at the same time, do good things in the world. I wouldn’t want to become the evil person who is only making money. It’s actually quite nice that this is possible; thanks to a course we had at the university where we were taught a lot about sustainability, innovation, entrepreneurship and how all these are connected.

It was very valuable because it made me realize you can be in it for the money or you can be in it for your values. You decide why you are playing the game but you play the game because it’s fun.

Thanks for reading this article. I like to know more about you.

Do you see yourself as an entrepreneur?
How do you see yourself as an entrepreneur?
What is the nature of your business?
What are your values that you like to put into action or to put into reality?

Tell me about it. I’m interested in knowing about you and your perspectives on the topic. Thank you!

Looking from someone else’s perspective

You are communicating with a specific group of people. These people could be college students who are looking to write innovative solutions to your problems and earn money from it. In order to succeed, you should look at this problem not from your point of view, but from the point of view of the person who will send in the solutions. The question is not “How can we get the best solutions to our problem?” but “How can we help the people involved in finding and generating the best possible solution they can find?” This means we need to help them find a solution, but we don’t do the thinking for them. Instead, we support them.

How to support your solution finders

Basically, you need to define a few parameters of your search which will make it easier for the thinkers to be creative. Creativity works best when you define a threshold in which to be creative. The more you can help people find a solution, the better solutions you will get in general. Just remember this is not a school test. You are not screening people if they can do something in general, but you really want to have an answer to a specific problem. Ask yourself what you would like to know if you would have to submit a solution?

There are a few things that you can do. You can supply them with information about the problem and the solution. You can also supply them with information about the process and the content. Information about the process would be things like your expectations on how the solution should look like. For example, you can supply them with a template solution. Just get one of your co-workers to study and actually write a solution about it and you can also set the tone for the quality that you would like to have in the solutions. You can also supply the style of writing, among other things.

Ask questions

You can inspire them by asking questions. You can, for example, post ten questions that you think would help you to come into a solution. You could also build a platform where they can discuss possible solutions together. You can also make an information package or a video and send it to the people. You could have newsletters keeping people up to date. There are two ways you can do that, you can either ask the crowd sourcing agency to do that or you can do it yourself. What I suggest is that you have a look at what your crowd sourcing agency has to offer. They could offer the service of posting a question, getting that question to the members, giving you the possibility to receive the answers and also dealing with the payout. In these cases they don’t have additional branding and community function on their site. I guess you should go and look yourself somewhere else.

Crowd sourcing as a relationship building tool

You should see crowd sourcing as some kind of relationship building tool. Crowd sourcing achieves two things. First, you get the solution to your answer. Second, you get in contact with people who are interested in your product or service. They might be a prospect in different ways, and therefore might be interesting for your company. Given that, you should try to create a focus group of intelligent, creative individuals that take part in the project of finding a good solution to a problem. Give these problems for them to work together on and interact. They do it together and get paid for it. Crowd sourcing then starts up. I post a question and you give me an answer!

Integration with social network tools

In about a few months, I think you will see lots of integration of this kind of finding a solution with social network tools. That really makes sense because having the possibility to work together on solutions is what makes crowd sourcing so great. We don’t use that potential yet because right now everyone is sending their own solutions. You can take part as a team but if you do that you will still have to deal with all the communications and developing solutions yourself. One thing you could do as a company is to help people to work together as a team. You could for example write a text about the ten best tools if you’re working to find a solution via crowd sourcing. It will be something like getting a domain name, getting a blog, getting Google Ads and Manymoon. This should be enough. I hope this clarifies a little bit how I think businesses can use crowd sourcing effectively and shed some light on how you can build your network using crowd sourcing.