I thought my idea for a survey was a great one, and one that everyone, regardless of whether or not they had a job, could relate to. I hoped that this broad appeal would make people more likely to take my survey.

Unfortunately, it didn’t. I think what I learned from this assignment is that web surveys are extremely easy to ignore. I was the first person to post my survey onto the J-School group, and got maybe three or four responses for an assignment that all 90 of us had. What’s worse, I realized that I did the same thing, taking just a few of the dozens of surveys posted onto the group.

In the end, I got 32 responses, and that was after convincing my own mother that she had to take the survey. I had posted the survey on facebook multiple times, and twitter one or two times, with limited response. At some point, it was 2 a.m. and I was bored, and figured that any of my Facebook friends that were still awake couldn’t have anything much more valuable to do than fill out a quick survey, and started digitally bum-rushing my friends with survey links.

That strategy worked well, in one night I doubled my respondents. I tried posting my survey to other people’s walls, to help spread it to a wider audience, but not bites. I think that surveys need to be very actively pitched to people, or else they won’t bother spending the time to do it. I think this week I’m going to try spamming a few LinkedIn groups, because I think that the type of people who are more active on LinkedIn might be more likely to fill out this survey.

I know from my own survey habits though, I won’t do it unless it’s literally right in front of my face, or there’s something in it for me. Phone calls sometimes work on me, and people in the street with clipboards nearly always do. I bet I would have a lot more responses if I went out and beat the pavement for this thing.