Great Expectations, Part Fourteen: Polls

By Sanya Weathers

As your customers discovered a long time ago, polls without any context aren’t useful as data gathering tools, but they are terrific for setting agendas and creating expectations.

(If you want your poll to be useful, don’t put it on your forum or even on your website. Mail it to a random cross section of users, or put it on the product in such a way that a user has to take your poll before doing anything else. And if you do THAT, be sure to make the first question “Are you willing to take the poll?” and if the answer is no, let the user go. Otherwise the poll will be tainted by rage.)

Having trouble getting people to realize how serious you are on a particular topic? Do a series of related polls. The repetition of theme will get your seriousness across more than a single press release will. Customers make two types of poll topics – fluffy ones, and the ones that are life and death serious. You should use your polls in the same way, and avoid making any polls about things that only sort of matter.

Use polls to float new ideas and introduce new topics. Put a poll about some specific aspect of game play on your forum and compare the results with in-game data to determine just how far off your hardcore users are from your average customer. (By definition, a customer who frequents an official forum because he loves to talk about your product *IS* a hardcore user.)

More than just the topics, use the language of the poll itself to communicate your intentions. Urgency, timing, and what kind of feedback is desired can all be communicated through the wording of the poll.

Finally, put these expectation setting polls in multiple places, including fan media sites.  Again, if you’re trying to create a specific mood or expectation, you need to get your message out as broadly as possible. A user poll has a call to action right there, creating a wisp of casual engagement for anyone with a little time to spare.