Technorati sucks you in to do a survey

Posted by  Shawn Callahan —July 8, 2006
Filed in News

Technorati_Survey

I noticed this call to bloggers on Technorati today and because I’m interested in how people conduct online surveys (we’re running one at the moment on awareness and attitudes to narrative in organisations) and thought, sure, I’ll help Technorati out, and, I wonder what cash reward I’ll get. So I did the survey and at the end was presented with this message:

We appreciate your efforts, but unfortunately you do not fit with the specific criteria we are pursuing for this project. Thank you for your time.

I’m sure the advertisement said I’d get a cash reward. Disappointing. The survey was managed by a company called Decipher. I think I’ll add this to my worst practices database as a reminder on what to avoid whenever I conduct an online survey.

About  Shawn Callahan

Shawn, author of Putting Stories to Work, is one of the world's leading business storytelling consultants. He helps executive teams find and tell the story of their strategy. When he is not working on strategy communication, Shawn is helping leaders find and tell business stories to engage, to influence and to inspire. Shawn works with Global 1000 companies including Shell, IBM, SAP, Bayer, Microsoft & Danone. Connect with Shawn on:

Comments

  1. Les Posen says:

    I did the survey from within my RSS aggregator, Netnewswire. All the way through to the end; perhaps I better matched the demographics – I use Google Adsense, and they wanted to know my attitude to including similar from Yahoo.
    I asked them to send my USD15 payment to a NYC friend so she can buy me some more credit with iTunes (US).

  2. Michael Furey says:

    They are looking for people with websites they maintain, mainly trafficked by US users, that has thrid party advertising, in a blog (not content!), lifestyle centred, has at least 500 unique users a month… Get past those options and you should have your $15.
    The way they handle the audience they aren’t interested in is just rude and unprofessional.
    It’s also not a very smart system, as it doesn’t track IP addresses to make sure the same user doesn’t resubmit… This is basic web management stuff.

  3. I guess I was passed over because I said I wan’t interested in hosting advertisements on our site.

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