12/01/2007

Survey Season at Great Lakes

I have been swamped with friend’s requests to fill up a survey. It’s that time of our course, where we arrive at the 3rd stage of our empirical research and the research calls for some primary data on people’s perception, and thats why the surveys. Every one is hooked on to freeonlinesurveys and surveymonkey sending surveys through Orkut. If that wasnt enough, they also vehemently put the survey link on their Gtalk status and inundate 164 email inboxes. I dont remember who sent which topic in their surveys, but glance at each one of them and say, your survey will be done BY EOD( A phrase I learnt in the corporate world which meant “ok now leave me alone” ). I guess every one is in that phase where they want others to fill in surveys and also NOT fill others survey as some surveys are time consuming.


These surveys have made people more innovative as they realise that they need to have what it takes to get the work done. Some go to people personally and sit with them, with a laptop, requesting 2 minutes of their time( 2 minutes… thats the clincher to attention). Logendra was the more innovative of the lot, as he decided to distribute printed copies of his survey when the whole class was waiting for an address from our placement head. It was taking some time, and people were not doing anything special apart from frivolous banter, and it was the right time to give the survey paper, as people could not feign that they were busy. Apart from we B schoolers, the major part of the survey was filled in from industry contacts and our network was basically used to fill in the numbers that remained.


Enthusiasm is never down, with messages like ” Please fill my easy survey” coming in a few minutes back. Some smart alecks have other pick up lines that attract people to click on the link. However crazy as this may sound, this survey episode reminds of me the existential challenges in Online Marketing, where one does all that one can to elicit user attention to use the emotions experienced at the time of reading that one smart aleck line in the email subject.


May the tribe of the Kotlers rise…………..

2 comments:

Ponnarasi Kothandaraman said...

Hahaha..Never experienced this! :)

Kartik Kannan said...

Once you get to a B school, You will realise that being freaky is normal when u have a large sample size ..... :-)

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