I wanted to share one of my morning reads with you today. It’s a deeply insightful rant about “social objects‘ by Hugh McLeod, a cartoonist, author and frequent Twitterer (@gapingvoid). You may not recognize the name, but you’ve probably seen these fun cartoons and drawings around the web — yeah — that’s HIM
A “social object is the reason two people are talking to each other” says Hugh McLeod. It’s the subject of the conversation, it’s the exchange of thoughts and ideas about a particular object.
I’m bringing this up because the rise of social media and technology has drawn our attention away from the actual subject of the conversation and has us occupied instead with things we can “count” such as Likes or Tweets or maybe even responses — as if THOSE things matter. And they don’t. What matters is the topic of the conversation and the actions we choose to take around that particular topic.
What’s The Social Object Around Your Survey?
This really got me thinking about how we’ve seemed to approach the feedback process. Today, there are so many opportunities to expand the conversation around the topic of the survey rather than just look at the answers and count the responses — we can actually have a conversation!
How to Convert Surveys Into Conversations
If you haven’t considered it yet, think about the ways that you can interconnect the various tools we have available here at Survey Analytics. For example, you can start a bunch of little conversations by running a poll on MicroPoll. You can then take what you learn there and create a viral survey using Facebook Connect. Finally, you can even combine a series of MicroPoll surveys into a a single SurveySwipe mobile survey that you can push out to our panel or a panel that you’ve created.
Regardless of the ways in which you choose to expand the conversation — just do that. Don’t let the survey be the only place where you collect feedback. See it as an additional ingredient to expand the conversation.
