Some Degree of Paid Seeding is a Must
From ClickZ: "Face it, even if you become an expert at organic seeding, the competition is tough. Very rarely is a branded viral video going to take off organically. Some degree of paid seeding is a must if you want to rise above the clutter."
Posted by: Joe Reger, Jr. at Tue, Aug 12, 2008 19:24:00
Article: Money & Credibility
The latest article was posted a couple days ago and deals with the issues of money and credibility within blog-for-pay models.
Posted by: Joe Reger, Jr. at Fri, Jul 25, 2008 16:01:00
Bug Fix to Codes Visibility on Share It Page
For those of you who were having trouble seeing embed codes after joining a conversation, we've made a fix and you should be able to see them now. Apologies for the bug and thanks to everybody who reported it.
Posted by: Joe Reger, Jr. at Mon, Jul 21, 2008 12:14:00
No Complaints on dPolice So Far
So far so good. We've flagged about 50 people for putting up obviously junk content. And nobody's complained. Which means that we're calling their bluff and they're not contesting it. If we had flagged people and they had complained then our criteria for flagging could have been wrong. We're terrified of shutting down legitimate content or censoring anybody... that's not how we roll. But we will continue, as we have in the past, to increase the quality of the content in the system. Early indications are that the flagging system is getting people to stop junk postings. It's not that it was a huge problem. But the junk postings are what potential customers focus on... as they should... we're asking them to pay for people to engage their brand with their friends. If people aren't doing that then the model breaks down for everybody.
Posted by: Joe Reger, Jr. at Wed, Jul 9, 2008 21:52:00
Change to Impression Scoring Coming Soon: Limit Per Time Period
There was a code launch today. For a few hours clicks on a person's answers acted differently on the front-end than they had in the past. (I've since changed the UI back to, more or less, the way it was before.) People complained that maybe they'd have to click into profiles to read conversations and that this would be a burden.
I do understand. But potential customers get what's up and they don't like it. It's clear that they don't want to pay for junk clicks. A small subset of users aren't reading each other's answers which is what an impression should count for. Instead, they're trading clicks and in a rapidfire manner are generating impressions for many users' conversations.
So I'll soon implement something that makes it so that you can click as much as you want but only one impression is recorded per sixty seconds per web visitor. When a click doesn't count I'll display a warning on screen to that effect. Maybe 60 seconds isn't the right time period... maybe it's 2 minutes... maybe it's 20 seconds. In this way we'll be able to argue that people are actually reading the answers and that clicking purely for impressions isn't happening.
We know that people are actually reading the answers because we email a lot of folks and we check web traffic stats. But we can't prove it clearly and the quick-clickers are very obvious about their activity on Facebook groups... which is what potential customers find very quickly. Thanks Search box.
Right now we can't prove people aren't quick-clicking and it's hurting our ability to sell. Companies are saying "well, I don't want to pay cash for people to quickly click and ignore." As much as we argue that this is a small percentage of users and that the holistic result is great exposure, the risk of junk clicks spooks them.
Most people use the system on blogs and in Facebook without trading clicks with their friends. Clicking-without-reading is hurting most users as they're lumped into a category of people essentially gaming the system. Clicks alone were never the intention... reading of the conversation and true involvement was. I thought that clicks was a good proxy but maybe not.
In the short term I didn't want to enforce it because the dollar amounts were low and we were young so I decided that it'd be best not to be a hardass about it. But maybe that was short-sighted.
Us getting sales is good for everybody. We're talking to companies about multi-dollar opportunities and series of conversations. We can only foot the bill personally for so much longer. I'm not naive enough to believe that anybody really cares right now whether we go bankrupt, but I do think that people would like to be part of something that grows, takes on new partners and starts to generate some real cash. Getting there means increasing the quality of the system as a whole... from the way impressions are counted to the ways that people can interact.
One big change today, apparently overlooked in the terror exhibited when a small group thought they'd actually have to, you know, read conversations, is that answers are now editable. Something that's been requested for many months but was herculean to implement.
Quality's going up. Changes to impression scoring coming soon.
Posted by: Joe Reger, Jr. at Wed, Jul 9, 2008 21:07:00
Content Flagging and dPolice Launched
We've just launched the notion of content flagging. You won't get flagged for having a particular opinion. But you will get flagged for junk postings, hate postings (which we haven't seen), etc. The conversation igniter can flag content but nothing happens until dPolice (dNeero's Content Police) check it out. In grey areas we'll side with bloggers. The goal is to increase the quality of the content created in the conversations. Junk posters can no longer hide! Let us know what your experience is.
Posted by: Joe Reger, Jr. at Tue, Jul 8, 2008 10:13:00
Ability to Edit Answers
By popular demand... drum roll please... the ability to edit answers! When you're reviewing your conversations you now have an Edit button. You know what to do. Expect some breakage. New functionality and all (and it's a pretty big feature, even if on the UI it seems small and obvious.)
Posted by: Joe Reger, Jr. at Tue, Jul 8, 2008 10:12:00
Money in Research: Edgar Allen Poe and Game Theory
Money's used in research all the time. Most college psychology experiments are paid. As long as the money doesn't introduce bias then the results remain valid.
Posted by: Joe Reger, Jr. at Wed, Jun 25, 2008 14:31:00
Notification: New Release and Balance Lag Time
Hi all. We know, we know. Some performance issues lately. Just so many of you joining conversations and posting them to your blogs. We love it, but to keep up with you we need to do some performance optimization.
To that end, we're launching some new optimizations today. Most is under the covers. The performance issues were actually caused by background processes that were taking too long to execute. For example, we calculate your balance and determine whether to pay you overnight. That's compute-intensive (even though it seems simple). It starts running around 3am and isn't ending until noon or so. It used to complete in a couple minutes.
So, we're optimizing it and other processes like it. The tradeoff is that we have to do some of that processing at other times. We think we've made some good compromises which will give you better site performance.
Expect things to look a little wonky for a few days as we work through the changes.
Also expect that your balance may not be reflected properly on screen. Be assured, your balance is in no way affected. The base tables are all there and your balance is preserved. What we're doing is storing a calculated/cached balance in a new table for performance. (We never use the new balance for actual financial calculations, of course... we look to the base tables.) It'll take a few hours for the system to populate the new tables with your current balance information. Until that happens you'll see invalid numbers as your balance.
Let it ride a couple days. If it's still wonky please contact us.
Apologies for the inconvenience (the performance issues lately and the balance update time period). We're working hard to keep up with you!
We'll probably launch the new code around 11:00am today.
Update: The code has been launched and now the balance updates are being calculated. We appreciate the patience.
Update: Joy. Looks like the new balance stuff triggered some conversations to close for a while. We'll get 'em going again.
Update: Balances should all be back to normal. Apologies for the inconvenience. Let us know if you see anything funky.
Posted by: Joe Reger, Jr. at Thu, May 15, 2008 06:01:00
What are Rankings? Rankings allow you to choose certain questions as indicators of a quality that you want to track. For example, you could create an "Environmentally Friendly" Ranking and when people answer the question "Do you care about the environment?" with a "Yes" you assign them 50 points.
Identify Users Across Many Conversations: You can use Rankings to measure across many conversations. A conversation here generates a few points... a conversation there a few. In this way you get a sense of how a person responds over time to many different things. You're using your dialog to learn. And you're using the Ranking to quantify.
Build Panels with Rankings: As people score points you can skim those in the top 10% of Ranking score and put them into a Panel which allows you to ignite conversations that only they can see and take. In this way you're not only targeting but engaging your audience.
Posted by: Joe Reger, Jr. at Sat, May 3, 2008 15:33:00
Surveys are Now Conversations
We just launched a big change. We looked at what we were doing. We listened to what our users were telling us. We watched how our users engaged the technology. We explored the effect that it had on their readers.
The result was this. We weren't surveying. We were starting conversations. What we previously called a survey was really a starting point. The questions of the survey framed what people discussed. And from there people ran with it.
So we went with it. From here forward we're in the conversation business.
To make the switch more complete we've also added a new feature. You'll notice it the next time you take a survey. In order to complete the survey you'll need to provide your own question. Then, anybody who comes to the survey from your blog or social network will need to answer that question in addition to the original ones.
In essence, this expands the conversation, helping what we now call our Conversation Igniters find out what's really on your mind.
We'll be publishing an article outlining some of the engagement marketing theory that backs this concept. For now we just wanted to put up a quick note so that you don't get confused by the new terminology.
Let us know what you think!
Posted by: Joe Reger, Jr. at Sat, May 3, 2008 15:23:00
For Researchers: Filter Results Capability
It?s about time we got back to building some cool stuff for dNeero Researchers and Marketers! Today we launch a filtering capability that allows you to see survey results for a subset of your respondents. To see it in action, go to one of the surveys you?ve already launched and click on Results from the For Researchers tab? the results section with your private financial info. If you view Results from the public survey you won?t see the new capability.
Click on Filter Results and you?ll be presented with a bunch of demographic fields. Age, gender, etc. Choose who you want to see and then click Show Results. You can add a name to save your filter for future use. Your filters will work across surveys.
How?s this useful? Let?s say you want to survey anybody in the blogosphere but want to compare results between Males aged 24-29 and Females aged 24-29. All you need to do is create a filter for each group and compare the results. Using all of the possible combinations in the demographics fields you can really segment your data and see what?s happening.
As always, this is a starting point. We?d like to allow you to compare two (or more?) filter groups on the same page. And we?d like to add some deeper querying based on survey responses? for example, show me how everybody who answered ?Yes? to this question responded. We?ll get there.
This change touched some fairly core elements of the system. We?ve tested extensively internally. That said, please let us know if anything seems goofy over the next few days.
Posted by: Joe Reger, Jr. at Wed, Apr 16, 2008 16:14:00
TalentZoo Article Up
Got an article published on TalentZoo.com. Many thanks to Colleen, Web Editor at TalentZoo.com. I'll be doing a column every few weeks... assuming they continue to accept my writings. They've got a bunch of great content for marketers and according to them: "Each installment of your column will be featured for one month on our homepage receiving more than 200,000 impressions and in our email newsletter to over 80,000 recipients." Excellent. I worked dNeero in there where it was relevant but wanted to make sure that I wrote something actually useful to folks.
Posted by: Joe Reger, Jr. at Mon, Mar 31, 2008 23:37:00
Please Ignore the Blog Comments
Somebody is abusing the social nature of the web. He or she is posting lude comments to all of the dNeero Blog posts. Note that they're not affecting any dNeero users' blogs... just our own blog... the blog you're reading now. We'll likely have to shut down the comment system for a while to let things settle. And to the person doing this, you should be ashamed.
Posted by: Joe Reger, Jr. at Thu, Mar 27, 2008 10:22:00
Referral Money Display
Found a bug in the referral system display. Basically, when you refer people to dNeero your account is tied to theirs and when they get paid dNeero pays you a percentage of what they got paid. It's important to note that we're not taking anything away from them.
This has been going on for a long time but the visibility of those transactions hasn't been clear. The small payments have been wrapped in to impression payments which are already rather small on many days for most bloggers/facebookers.
The net effect is that you didn't have visibility of your referral earnings. Having identified the issue we believe that you'll have visibility moving forward but please check us on this. Wait a few daily pay cycles and check your reseller earnings page. You should also see reseller program entries in your balance screen. Let us know what looks wonky. Apologies for the lack of visibility!
Posted by: Joe Reger, Jr. at Thu, Mar 27, 2008 09:43:00
More on the Facebook Performance Issue
A couple weeks ago we started getting performance issue reports from Facebook users (thanks peeps!). So we dug in and scratched our heads. No obvious error messages or memory constraints.
A few days ago we installed a performance metric capability with page-level resolution. We expected that it'd tell us which pages were slow so that we could focus on optimizing them.
Bewilderingly, the page that people complain most about was being output by the system at a brisk sub-second clip. Odd, we thought. Facebook says that our servers need to respond to theirs in 8 seconds. Less than one second certainly fulfills their requirements by a long shot.
But the reports continued.
Here's what we think is happening. Facebook has to process pages before passing them on to Facebook users. This takes them a lot of time on bigger pages. Pages with a lot of html.
Once you understand this the fix is relatively simple. We took a long list of stuff and added paging capability to break it up into smaller chunks. Early reports are that it's working and people can get back to that page they were having trouble with.
This is part of the fun of writing an app that runs with/on another company's platform. We're very dependent (i.e. at the mercy of) on Facebook's servers. I don't believe they've documented the exact page requirements in a way that accurately reflects what our users are experiencing. I could be wrong. I'll peruse the app developer message boards a bit.
The worst thing we heard is that we lost a couple users over this issue. We can't blame them. But hate to hear it. Sorry peeps! We'll continue to improve. Let us know where we're dropping the ball (as you usually do) and we'll keep juggling!
Posted by: Joe Reger, Jr. at Thu, Mar 13, 2008 17:12:00
Page Load Times Published
Page load times are critical for a web application. As a site scales you invariably find performance issues. We've solved many in the past and will solve many in the future. As you progress along this journey you find that you need increasing levels of resolution when it comes to your performance data.
To that end, we decided to add page-level performance metrics to the system. These metrics tell us on an hourly basis what the average page load time is for each page on the site. We've got tons of other metrics in place too, but most are server-based... memory, cpu load, etc.
Once we had this thing built we looked at it and said "you know, users may want to see this." So we made it available!
For many months now we've had a number on the bottom right of each page we display. That number tells you how long it took to load the page you're looking at. You'll notice that it's now a link. Click it and you'll be taken to a list of all pages and average page load times.
Enjoy. Clearly we'll be using this to find trouble pages and optimize them.
Posted by: Joe Reger, Jr. at Tue, Mar 11, 2008 12:37:00
Marketers Interested in Incorporating Social Media into Campaigns
"Social computing/word-of-mouth marketing tops the list with 67 percent interested in incorporating it into their campaigns. The findings resonate across all marketing, not just direct marketing." More here.
Posted by: Joe Reger, Jr. at Sat, Mar 8, 2008 16:33:00
Pageload Optimizing and Improvement
We continue to get reports of slow Facebook page loads. Thanks Kymm. Thanks Paul. Thanks Ingasol. You are appreciated and we do apologize for the slowness.
As we mentioned in the last blog post, we're experiencing increased load on the servers. This helps everybody. With more users we can sooner attract top-tier companies to pay for campaigns. And with that we can get funding so that we can afford the shiny new servers to keep things zipping along.
The main point we'd like to make is that we're just as, if not more, concerned about it as you are.
We've been optimizing things behind the scenes for the last few days. To do this we change some code, launch it and then quantify the improvement. Doing this has the unhappy side-effect of forcing us to restart the app servers each time we launch new code. It generally makes for 50sec - 2min of downtime, depending on which server the load balancer sends your browser to. Some of the slowness you've seen lately has been us trying to make things faster... I know, ironic.
Today we stripped out some functionality from the Facebook main page. There's a lot of stuff that we were doing with your friends and surveys. Who took what? Invite friends. Etc. Most of you told us that you ignored that stuff. So we took it out. Hopefully this will speed up the page loads a bit.
We're going to look into other key parts of the system to see what we can remove/optimize. As always, we'll try to keep you up to speed with the blog here.
Thanks for your participation. We'll get the speed back.
Posted by: Joe Reger, Jr. at Fri, Mar 7, 2008 11:13:00
Traffic Load Continues to Grow This chart shows the traffic trend over the last few months. Sustained growth that continues to add load to the servers. We're working to optimize the site, remove expensive features and increase the server capacity. Not as fast as we'd like or you'd like... but we'll get there. Here's a good video explaining some of the challenges YouTube handled as they grew.
Posted by: Joe Reger, Jr. at Fri, Mar 7, 2008 11:05:00
System Status: A Couple Restarts
We had a couple restarts today as we released some new code. No cool new features... sorry. But we did tie up a double-signup hole that was annoying some people. And we added some reporting features as we try to nail down the latest bottleneck... we're still hearing a few slow load reports from people. Let us know what we can do to improve and thanks for using dNeero!
Posted by: Joe Reger, Jr. at Tue, Mar 4, 2008 14:46:00
Posted by: Joe Reger, Jr. at Mon, Mar 3, 2008 11:44:00
95% Senior Marketing Execs Say Social Media Set to Soar
From the WOMMA Blog: "Ninety-five percent of senior marketing executives believe social media's importance is set to soar over the next five years, according to new research from WOMMA member company TNS Media Intelligence/Cymfony." More info here.
Posted by: Joe Reger, Jr. at Mon, Mar 3, 2008 11:04:00
We Don't Force Facebook Invites
Got a report that somebody thinks we're forcing friend invites in Facebook. We're not. We make the invite available to you so that you can share your opinion with your friends. But we're not putting up an invite screen that prevents you from using the system. In fact, we're one of the least obtrusive apps out there. You're in control of how you use it.
If I had to guess, it's probably somebody who saw the post-survey-take screen and assumed that we're saying that you need to invite friends to get paid. We're not saying that.
Or somebody just antagonizing us. That happens too.
It's all good.
Posted by: Joe Reger, Jr. at Mon, Mar 3, 2008 11:03:00
A little background: when you use dNeero within Facebook your browser is actually talking to Facebook's servers. Their servers then talk to our servers, collect the response and package it in their pretty Facebook page. This happens every time you click a link or submit something. But here's the catch... they'll only wait for 8 seconds for our servers to return. If they don't hear anything they'll show you that "Error while loading page from dNeero" screen.
Nothing wrong with this, of course. We want to provide fast page loads as much as they do and applaud Facebook for having performance standards.
But sometimes when the servers come under higher load, as they have over the last couple days, pages take a tiny little bit more than 8 seconds to be built. And not all pages, of course. Just the most complex of pages. And not all times that you request them... thanks to the magic of caching the second time you load a page it's often much, much faster.
Last night, responding to your reports, we began to write some optimizations to various parts of the system. We looked at the type of load increase and dug into those parts of the system that were most affected by it. We think we've gotten some decent improvement in key areas. This afternoon we launched those optimizations.
If you see anything wonky please let us know. So far we haven't seen any issues... knock on wood.
Posted by: Joe Reger, Jr. at Wed, Feb 27, 2008 11:23:00
?In social media, marketers need to understand where their brands intersect with the passion points of their consumers. But ultimately, they need to empower consumers to express themselves via their connection to the brand. In most cases, brands can craft the framework of a campaign, but the customization of content and the dialogue around the campaign will be up to the consumer.?
dNeero allows marketers to create a conversational framework with a set of questions. Then they not only empower consumers to express themselves? they encourage them to do so with money. Consumers then customize the content with their answers to the questions. They add to the dialogue by writing a blog post to surround the survey embed. Their readers then extend the conversation even further with comments on the blog.
We continue to see people at a high level looking for what we can deliver. They just don?t know we exist... yet.
Posted by: Joe Reger, Jr. at Mon, Feb 25, 2008 20:15:00
Everyone from Harvard to confidential global brands are putting feelers out to find people who can lead their social media programs. It?s going to be interesting to see how things progress as more brands move from measurement to engagement. In 2007, more dollars started shifting to social media, but the big turning point for many companies is the movement in the form of existing employees or new hires to drive strategies across multiple functional areas within a company. The leading brands in social media understand that corporate integration across the entire organization is crucial to success.
This is great to hear. The more people internal to organizations become empowered to engage social networks the easier our job is. dNeero should be a key element in social campaigns. But having social campaigns is something of a prerequisite there. Many companies are working social media from many disconnected fronts. We can work with them, of course, but feel that an orchestrated effort will be more effective.
Oh, and if you've just taken a job as Head of Social Media, give us a call... we'd love to demo for you!
Posted by: Joe Reger, Jr. at Mon, Feb 25, 2008 20:12:00
"Go ahead and bellyache about blogs. But you cannot afford to close your eyes to them, because they're simply the most explosive outbreak in the information world since the Internet itself. And they're going to shake up just about every business?including yours. It doesn't matter whether you're shipping paper clips, pork bellies, or videos of Britney in a bikini, blogs are a phenomenon that you cannot ignore, postpone, or delegate. Given the changes barreling down upon us, blogs are not a business elective. They're a prerequisite. (And yes, that goes for us, too.)"
Posted by: Joe Reger, Jr. at Fri, Feb 22, 2008 18:43:00
Half of Advertisers Looking for New Media Options
Sixty-two percent of marketers say traditional television advertising is losing effectiveness, according to a study from Forrester Research and the Association of National Advertisers. More than half of the marketers surveyed reported that they are experimenting with "new media" forms of advertising as an alternative. Click here for more.
Posted by: Joe Reger, Jr. at Fri, Feb 22, 2008 13:25:00
Launch of the Reseller Program
We're glad to announce the launch of the dNeero Reseller Program. This program allows you to sell Social Surveys to businesses and organizations. You'll earn 10% of any money that bloggers or social networkers make through the survey. This is a big opportunity for enterprising types who are willing to contact businesses. We can easily see college students making this their part time or full time job.
At its core the program is simply a Reseller Code that you hand out to businesses. If they create a survey and enter your code then you earn whenever that survey pays out to somebody.
We'll do a bigger announcement in the coming days. And we'll continue to enhance the Reseller Program pages. But for now the tech works so we wanted to make sure you knew what was up.
There's a Facebook Group for resellers to share thoughts, techniques, etc.
Let us know what we can do to improve the program. Get out there and sell!
Posted by: Joe Reger, Jr. at Sun, Feb 10, 2008 19:57:00
Referral Program Page Improvements
We've improved the Referral Program page. Go to the For Bloggers tab and choose Referral Program. Now you'll see each individual payment that's sent to you via the referral program. Note that this page will only report earnings from this point forward.
Posted by: Joe Reger, Jr. at Sun, Feb 10, 2008 19:43:00
Meeting with Stephanie Davis, Editor of skirt! Magazine
Just got back from a fun meeting with Stephanie Davis of skirt! magazine. With a solid editorial pedigree including GQ and Self magazines, I knew she'd have some good ideas for dNeero. A quick googling also shows that Stephanie came to Atlanta to jumpstart skirt! magazine by opting out of being one of The Lost Girls who traveled the globe seeking identity, adventure and connection. Such an epic adventure has long been on my list of things to do before I die.
I wasn't sure how to approach the whole church & state issue of editorial & ad sales. Stephanie was clearly on the editorial side but she had a good sense of what was up on the other side of the fence... and the commitment to keep the fence in place. Which is good to see. My sister Kendra and her journalism schooling would appreciate it as well.
Sr., exhibiting his super-human salesperson skills, decided that it'd be good to note and then defend that he voted for McCain while Stephanie voted for somebody else. Sr.'s functionally retarded but Stephanie had a good sense of humor about it and played along. I'm not sure if Stephanie wants her vote public but suffice it to say she didn't vote for McCain.
Stephanie was kind enough to introduce us to others at Cox, their parent company. They have one internal marketing organization that runs campaigns for skirt!, Mundo and others. We're hoping that there's some way we can help them leverage the social media space. While I don't want to put words into Stephanie's mouth, it would appear on the surface that the dNeero concept is intriguing to her and may have some applicability. Ok, so I put some words in there. She can edit me out if she likes. Or destroy me with a Tall Skinny Blogger expose of some sort. Which really wouldn't be cool because the ladies are totally my key target demo. Lol.
Thanks to Stephanie for the time today. We enjoyed it. Now why do I feel like this blog post is gonna come back to me marked up with a red pen?
Posted by: Joe Reger, Jr. at Thu, Feb 7, 2008 14:09:00
dNeero gets my award for the best promotion, edging the guy holding the light bulb on the pole ala a music festival that I did not get a chance to meet.
Yeah, we totally pwned light bulb guy. And, just as cool, Lance posted his survey answers with a dNeero embed. Great to see and hopefully it'll help Michael Blake create an even better event next time. Thanks Lance!
Posted by: Joe Reger, Jr. at Thu, Feb 7, 2008 14:08:00
What's an Access Code?
As previously blogged, an Access Code is a code that the survey creator uses to limit the pool of respondents in some way. In the case of the Capital Connections survey, only people who attend the event tonight at 6pm in Atlanta, GA will be privy to the secret. This is a good example of using Social Surveys to communicate directly with those who you work with in the real world. We designed to feature to also work for retailers who hand out an Access Code at their point of sale... so that only their actual customers can review their store... or a new product they're launching.
Posted by: Joe Reger, Jr. at Wed, Feb 6, 2008 15:53:00
Charity Quarterly Reports Up
We just put up the quarterly charity reports here. $650 raised so far! Excellent! The numbers update every 12 hours.
Posted by: Joe Reger, Jr. at Sun, Jan 27, 2008 21:05:00
25,000 Surveys Taken
We recently crossed the 25,000 surveys taken milestone! Thanks to all of our excellent users! I think the biggest surprise is the amount of attention that people are spending on their answers. We worried that people might just check random stuff. But when you look into individual answers you see coherence both within the survey and between surveys. Can't wait to hit 100,000 surveys! Thanks for using dNeero!
Posted by: Joe Reger, Jr. at Sun, Jan 27, 2008 14:12:00
Surveys Selling Out Quickly These Days
With the increasing number of people using the dNeero system we're seeing surveys sell out much more quickly. Make sure you check to see how many slots are available. You can find this info on the main survey screen by scrolling down and looking at the right column.
Posted by: Joe Reger, Jr. at Sun, Jan 27, 2008 14:10:00
New Features for dNeero Users
We just launched some new features for researchers that we wanted to share with everybody.
1) Custom Charity - Researchers can now add their own charity and allow bloggers to donate to it. The custom charity will be listed along with the other charities that we've had up there for a while. But we also added an option for the researcher to specify that donators can only choose their custom charity. This allows researchers at charitable orgs to do some really cool stuff.
2) Qualifying criteria: Days Since Last Survey - Allows researchers to target people who haven't been active in a while. For example, if a researcher specifies "3" then only people who haven't taken a survey in the last three days can take it.
3) Qualifying criteria: Total Surveys Taken - Allows researchers to target people who have only taken a certain number of dNeero surveys in the past. Focus on newbies or vets... up to you.
4) Facebook-only - Researchers can now target Facebook App users exclusively. Or they can target dneero.com users exclusively. Or they can target both simultaneously. Powerful.
5) Bug fix: Instance Notification - In certain situations where a survey was set to launch in the future notifications were going out to people. This should be fixed now.
6) Profile deactivation - While it is sad, sometimes people opt out of the dNeero system. We've re-written the profile section so that these users don't appear on the site any more. They may appear in Google, of course, until Google clears its index.
7) Misc bug fixes - We're always collecting feedback from you on what's broken. We've made a number of misc fixes. Some are fixes to items that deserve their own description but we need to verify them in live usage for a while to make sure they're actually fixed... nothing worse than claiming something's fixed only to realize that it's still broken.
So that's what we've been up to. The net result of more targeting is that there will be times when you can't take surveys that your friend has taken, or vice versa. But this targeting is what researchers need to run compact and powerful campaigns which eventually serves you in the long run. They are the ones footing the bill, afterall!
Posted by: Joe Reger, Jr. at Sun, Jan 27, 2008 13:58:00
Bug Fixes Launched
Just launched a few bug fixes for you. Anybody having trouble with email account activation should now be able to get it done. Facebookers who uninstall the app will have their email wiped from our database so that they don't get our emails any more. Note that this means that if you re-add the app you'll have to re-add your email and activate it. Researchers creating surveys can now review live surveys again. And that's about it. Enjoy!
Posted by: Joe Reger, Jr. at Thu, Dec 13, 2007 14:01:00
A qualifying question allows a researcher or survey creator to ask you a question to determine whether or not you're qualified to take a survey. The question fits into the survey like any other but a survey taker sees it they're told that they must answer correctly to qualify.
The form of this new type of question is a free-entry textbox. This means that a researcher defines a text string answer. Whatever the survey respondent types in as an answer must include the answer that the researcher defined. So, if the question is 'what color is the sky?' the researcher should choose 'blue' as an answer. They shouldn't choose an answer like 'the sky is blue' because very few respondents will answer exactly in that manner. We're talking exact text matches required here.
So, how is this useful?
Imagine you're doing a survey on a recently-launched product. You'd like to know that people have used it. So maybe you ask them what color the instruction manual is.
Or maybe you're a website and you want to make sure people have been to your site before they take the survey. Add a link to your site in the survey and then ask 'what's the last name of our ceo?'
If you're doing a survey about a movie you could ask something like 'what did johnny use to open the door?'
To target a specific type of doctor you could ask 'what's the biological process that controls body temperature?'
The possibilities are endless. Hope this creates some new and exciting survey possibilities.
One note is that a survey respondent's answer to the question isn't included in their blog post embedding widget... if it was then the secret would be out and people could take the survey without really qualifying.
Posted by: Joe Reger, Jr. at Thu, Dec 13, 2007 14:01:00
Still Overpaying
We're still overpaying some people. Writing software for live financial systems is so much fun. As mentioned before, we structured our software so that it normally favors survey takers and overpays. For example, if a database write fails and we don't know what transaction happened we assume that we didn't pay the survey taker. Because of this we then re-pay them the next evening. We'd rather lose a few bucks and be safe about it. Many thanks to the secret user community mole who's willing to tell us when we're overpaying people. In fact, since the last round we added a bunch of logging statements so that we have a much better sense of what's happening. Yesterday we debited a few accounts for the overpays. But before we did we verified that they did get the money in their PayPal accounts. In essence we're giving them an advance on their dNeero earnings. Thanks for bearing with us as we pay you too much! Lol! We'll get everything worked out.
Posted by: Joe Reger, Jr. at Thu, Dec 13, 2007 13:01:00
New Facebook Profile Box Design
We've just launched a new design for the Facebook profile box (yes, it's Saturday night. no, we don't have a life.)
So, why the redesign? We've been listening to the forums, emails from users, support tickets and in-person interviews with potential customers. Here are the main problems we?re seeking to remedy:
Problem 1) Getting five days with clicks per survey in the first ten after taking the survey is difficult.
Problem 2) It's too time-consuming for your friends to click from page to page to view your survey answers... this are the intertubes and we are wants speed! Each page load took some time and to generate clicks on each survey a person had to wait for numerous page turns.
Problem 3) Researchers, marketers and bloggers that we're talking to are concerned that the Facebook side of dNeero (remember, dNeero is half blogging world and half Facebook world) doesn't have enough exposure for their survey concepts. In blogs they're posted smack dab on the homepage. On the old design of the dNeero Facebook App they're little links amongst many.
Here's what we did. On your profile will now appear a box per survey. That box will include the title of the survey along with a static image telling people to click it for your answers. When clicked the image disappears and, viola, like magic your answers appear. Right there on your profile page. When somebody clicks you're credited with an impression.
This won't solve everything (certainly not world hunger)... but it'll help alleviate each of the three problems. Because of the increased screen real estate it'll prompt more of your friends to check it out. And your friends won't have to spend time waiting for pages to load. In testing the Flash survey answers pop right up. And researchers/marketers get a model that more closely mirrors the blogging side of dNeero.
Some details.
The Flash embed is smaller. Even though we do want to mirror the blogging world model, we couldn't. We wanted to use the same Flash embedding. But it's too big when we tested it inside of a Facebook profile. So we made it smaller to be somewhat less obtrusive on the profile. It's about 50 pixels thinner and a full 100 pixels shorter. That's a good bit of real estate and the researchers may be cheesed (remember, they pay for your answers *and* exposure) but we think we can make it happen. We went smaller in testing but it became impossible to read survey answers... even with the current size we're pushing the limits of usability. Luckily most of you Facebookers are young punks and have good vision.
You need to use the wide profile option. The right side will be cut off if you use the thinner profile column. We're not going to police this in the short term but in the long term it may make sense to require that you use the wide profile. It all boils down to uniformity. Our potential customers, who pay you, need to know what they're getting.
As mentioned before, when somebody clicks the image and views your profile in-line you're credited for an impression. Why didn't we just auto-display your answers like we do on blogs? We can't. Facebook built their platform so that we can't show Flash until somebody clicks the image. We're cool with this. It's Facebook's world and we're just guests. And in all honesty it increases the credibility of an impression. If you were accruing impressions every time a person went to your profile and didn't even scroll down to the dNeero section the overall integrity of impressions would be questioned. Not an issue on the blogs because posts start out at the top of the page and roll down. But that's not how things work in Facebook.
To get your profile updated take a survey and when we update your profile you'll see the new stuff. Or go to a completed survey and click Update Facebook Profile.
One potential downside is that those of you with many surveys in play will see your dNeero profile box go from maybe 500 pixels tall to something a good bit bigger. This may create a force that has you questioning whether to take all surveys available. And this force is really a good thing. Social surveys involve peer exposure. You should be taking surveys that you want to share with your peers. If you don't want to give up X pixels of profile real estate to share survey Y with your friends then you should be taking fewer surveys. It's an economic free market model and is how it works on the blogging side of dNeero.
And in the long run because of all of the benefits listed above it?ll benefit Facebookers. We'll be able to bring you brand name sponsored surveys sooner with the parity between the Facebook and the blog side of the dNeero model. Without that parity there's a high risk that researchers won?t use us because they don't see the value on the Facebook side. Disparity and uncertainty aren't good sellers.
We may work to create a feature that puts up only one box on the profile but then rotates surveys inside of it. Problem is, we?re not Flash wizards and that sort of action will take some time. It's not high up on the list. We need to get some customers in the door so that we can offer you some higher-paying surveys. We'd like surveys in the $5/per range. We won't get there by coding... we'll get there by knocking on doors. In early 2008 that'll be our priority. But that sort of feature is something that we may revisit in, say, Q2 2008.
A big downside for us is that because your friends don't have to go to a page on the dNeero Facebook App to see your answers they don't have to add the app. This dramatically cuts into a key portion of our app's viral nature. It'll definitely mean less referrals to dNeero. But it's a tradeoff we're willing to make because it serves our users and our potential customers. In the short run it's tough for us to make this decision because we need users. But in the long run we know it's the right decision to make.
So, we hope you understand the change. One thing we've noticed is that any change is generally met with hostility. Even moving a link or changing the way something's calculated (even if it's more accurate). So trust us, we hate making change! But as we engage this wild wild west hybrid market research/marketing model we have to be willing to constantly balance out the interests of all and respond to concerns that people have. We think there's more than enough value in the pot for all dNeero parties to make this change worthwhile.
Let us know what you think. In the next couple days we'll probably put up a survey asking you what you think of the new profile box. Thanks for your feedback and thanks for using dNeero!
Posted by: Joe Reger, Jr. at Sun, Dec 9, 2007 01:01:00
dNeero Reaches One Million Survey Displays
Just noticed that dNeero has hit a million survey displays. This means that across all the people who are blogging dNeero surveys we've displayed a survey inside of a blog (or social network) one million times. Not a very huge number at all in the grand scale of CPM business models but that side of things is but a portion of our proposition. The seven digit million mark is a shiny, crisp number. Baby steps. Thanks to all the bloggers who've trusted us to take part in their online life!
Posted by: Joe Reger, Jr. at Wed, Dec 5, 2007 23:01:00
Some Fixes Launched
Just launched some new code to fix stuff that Kymm, Ryan, Jason and others have found.
Friends that you added recently weren't showing on the list of people who've taken surveys. Kymm found this a couple nights ago and we've been working on it. The issue was/is a cached session. Instead of pulling up your friends from Facebook on every page turn we cache it in memory. This makes each page about 2.5 seconds (or more depending on network latency) faster. Which is a good thing. But that memory cache can remain for longer than you had expected. So we set it to timeout at 20 minutes... we think... it times out in testing but we'd like to make sure that it works on the live site. If you add a friend in Facebook you'll need to not use dNeero for at least 20 minutes for that friend to show up in dNeero. At least 20 minutes... give us 30 min to start just to make sure the software has time to flush the session.
We added an invite friends box to the screen you see after taking a survey. And it includes all of your Facebook friends. Using this box will invite people to your answers, you'll get credit for an impression and your friend can take the survey.
Survey taking performance has been fairly dramatically improved. In testing we're seeing 2x to 3x reductions in time between when you click the Complete the Survey button and when you get to the next screen. As with anything, this could have broken something... let us know.
We changed the impression recording code. We have a singleton pattern implemented with synchronized threading to manage impression recording. This pattern is required to maintain performance but seems to fail about three or four times a day when simultaneous modifications occur (which is what synchronized is supposed to prevent). We'll keep working on it. We hope that any impression recording issues disappear. In general the impression situation seems to be a good bit better than it was less than a week ago on the old system.
One person has complained that 4/10 Facebook app page turns results in a dead page. Haven't been able to duplicate this and haven't heard similar complaints from others. We're seeing fairly quick page loads. Not to say it isn't happening though. Anybody else seeing this? Note: earlier today (mid-afternoon EST) it seemed like all of Facebook Apps was down/slow. Our internet connection was fine and most of Facebook worked but any apps (even ones we didn't run) were slow/down. Maybe they were rebooting their servers. It corrected after 20 min or so.
We'll keep working on it. Let us know what you think.
Posted by: Joe Reger, Jr. at Tue, Dec 4, 2007 02:01:00
User Can Only Take a Survey Once?
Apparently some of you are getting this error when you take surveys. It actually commits your answers but then gives you this message. We're looking into it. Apologies for the inconvenience.
Posted by: Joe Reger, Jr. at Sun, Dec 2, 2007 21:01:00
dNeero Relaunched, Look Ma, No JSF
dNeero has been relaunched after being essentially rewritten to support a tighter Facebook integration and to rid us of a technology called JSF. Well, we never really went away but we did slow down the surveys. The new integration serves up Facebook pages without the pesky iFrames. This makes it easier to use the app and feels more like it's part of Facebook. It also prevents those browser-based redirects to the main dneero.com site that some of you were experiencing. Of course, no rewrite is perfect. Let us know what issues you see. Initial feedback has generally been positive. We've been working to fix issues all weekend. Most report that the app responds a little more quickly. Thanks for your patience while we were getting this technology issue hammered out.
Posted by: Joe Reger, Jr. at Sun, Dec 2, 2007 13:01:00
New Surveys Flowing
The dNeero survey editorial team has gotten three or four new surveys up in the last couple days. Enjoy!
Posted by: Joe Reger, Jr. at Sun, Dec 2, 2007 13:01:00
Pending Balance Calculation Change
We've changed the way that we calculate the Pending Balance. This important number appears just after you log in.
In the past we were including in that number surveys that were way too late to accept impressions. In other words, surveys from two months ago that didn't qualify for payment were still being considered pending possible cash.
We've changed the calculation to remove old surveys that you can't earn money on. This doesn't take any money from you... it just presents a more accurate report of how much pending cash you can make.
Let us know if you have any questions.
Posted by: Joe Reger, Jr. at Sun, Dec 2, 2007 13:01:00
Working on a big rewrite of the app to better integrate with Facebook and cut down on click tracking issues. While we haven't been able to duplicate the issues we keep hearing about them. Internet Explorer doesn't treat IFrames well (it neglects to send cookies at times which creates new sessions on the server... and other issues). Facebook offers another way to build apps and we're moving to it.
Won't be responding to requests very quickly as we're in development mode. Won't be spending time on the forums for a little while either. Won't be launching many/any surveys in the coming weeks as there's no point having you fill out surveys if you're unhappy with our service.
Thanks for your patience. We'll get these issues resolved as quickly as possible and will be back with new surveys soon. We're working 16 hour days to get there. And once we do the launch, expect a bunch of issues while we get the kinks worked out of the new code. Just the reality of software development and I'd rather you expect it.
Joe
Posted by: Joe Reger, Jr. at Tue, Nov 13, 2007 19:00:51
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