That's how David Barrow started one of his recent NZFVWO newsletters.  Online surveys are cheap, easy and can enable many people to fill them in, what's not to like? But how should you and your organisation approach them, and what should you use them for?

The takeaways:

1. Get the questions right
2. Keep it short
3. Make it easy, use optional answers rather than ask people to write their own
4. Space them out, don't survey too often
5. Don't cling on, best results are in within 48 hours
6. Feed back - tell participants what you have done with their answers

[Read more →]

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On 1 November 2008 Kim Hill interviewed Barbara Gibson, Chair of the International Association of Business Communicators, on the topic of Networking and Authenticity. It's a 22 minute interview; the MP3 file is around 8Mb, so quite small.

Gibson spoke clearly and with enthusiasm about the importance of using 'social media' — things like blogs and Twitter for connecting authentically with an audience one is trying to reach.

While her domain is business, everything she said also holds true for community organisations.

And for those organisations who represent the views of consumers, of goods or services, this interview is also particularly interesting. Gibson spoke, for example, about how the Internet has changed the way that companies interact with their customers; about how companies are quickly found out if they attempt to communicate in ways that are inauthentic and disingenuous.

It's well worth a listen, and even those on dial-up can probably manage an 8Mb audio file.

Note: RadioNZ seems to be making their audio files available for longer these days. The sidebar on the Saturday Morning with Kim Hill page now says:

Audio is available for all 2008 programmes.

Download:

• Barbara Gibson: networking and authenticity (Ogg Vorbis)
• Barbara Gibson: networking and authenticity (MP3)