- Which HotGrinds service is right for me?
Do you have a specific question you want to ask, or do you want to know prevailing opinions on a given topic?
An
Opinion Survey allows you to present a specific question to your chosen audience.
A
Web Survey collects existing opinions on a topic from the internet.
For example, if you were thinking of adopting some new HR policies you could either:
Start an Opinion Survey detailing the proposed changes and invite your employees to participate.
or
Start a Web Survey about this type of HR policy. URLs from
relevant forums and blogs will be gathered and their contents distilled
into positive and negative sentiments.
In both cases you would see the results of your survey in the
Dashboard, showing the number of positive vs negative votes/sentiments,
and seeing what key concepts were expressed about the topic in positive
or negative terms.
- How do I begin an Opinion Survey?
After contacting us and getting a HotGrinds account, the process is very simple:
1. Decide if the survey will be
private or
public. A private survey can only be seen by people who you have invited to view and participate; a public survey can be seen by anyone who knows the website address.*
* a public debate usually needs to be on a special site dedicated to a single client, as our survey site is password-protected to maintain the privacy of your data. Please see question 9 in this FAQ for more information about dedicated sites. 2. Decide what question you want to ask.
3. (optional) Gather any background information you'd like to provide to the participants in your survey. This can be in the form of internet links or documents that can be attached to the survey.
4. (optional) Provide HotGrinds with a topical whitelist - web sites and/or pages that give a good informational background on the topic of your survey. This helps us give you an even better dashboard analysis of the comments in the survey.
5. (optional) Select a picture to publish with the survey, or ask us to find one for you. If no picture is supplied, the survey will be published with a neutral graphic.
6. Publish the survey yourself using your HotGrinds client account, or ask us to publish it for you.
7. Invite people to participate in your survey. See question #4 in this FAQ, "Who can participate in my Opinion Survey?" for more information on invitations.
- How do I begin a Web Survey?
After contacting us and getting a HotGrinds account, the process is very simple:
1. Tell our Web Survey team what topic you want to learn about. This can be a company, a brand, a product, a public figure - if people are talking about it on the web, we can do a Web Survey about it.
2. Tell our Web Survey team what sources you want to be used in the survey. This can be limited to personal comments (e.g. from blogs, forums, etc.) or can also include articles written about the topic.
3. (optional)
Provide the Web Survey team with a whitelist of sources you want to see in your Web Survey. For example, you may already know of certain forums or blogs where your topic is discussed frequently.
4. We do the rest of the work from there - crawling sites of interest, recasting the comments in them to sort positive from negative, and importing them into a survey which you can then see in your Dashboard.
- Who can participate in my Opinion Survey?
This depends on which type of Opinion Survey you are using.
If you are using a
public Opinion Survey, anyone who visits the site
can participate. You can choose to restrict participation to those who
register on the site, or allow anonymous participation (without
registering). You can also choose to limit registration to email
addresses in specified domains (for example, to the employees of your
company).
You can invite people to your public Opinion Survey by:
Emailing or publishing the URL of the survey.
Using the Invite link on the survey page to invite a group of participants via their email addresses. Each participant receives an email from HotGrinds containing a link to the survey as well as a personal message should you choose to write one.
Using the Invite link on the survey page to promote the survey on a selection of social networking sites via links on the Invite page.
If you are using a
private Opinion Survey, only participants you have chosen to invite can participate in the survey.
You can invite people to your private Opinion Survey by:
Using the Invite link on the survey page to invite a group of participants via
their email addresses. Each participant receives an email from
HotGrinds containing a link to a special registration page that allows them to register on the site with the email used in the invitation.
Using the Bulk Invite option on the Invite page to pre-register a group of participants. With this method of invitation, the participants do not receive an email from HotGrinds; instead, the account holder receives a single email containing a list of all participants with a system-generated password for each and individual links to the site for each participant. You can then send this information to your participants in the manner of your choosing.
There is no other way for a participant to register on a private site.
Invited participants can see only the survey to which they have been invited; if you have three surveys on your account, a participant invited to survey #1 will not be able to see surveys #2 and #3.
- Can anyone else see my survey?
This depends on which type of survey you are using.
Private Opinion Survey. A private Opinion Survey can only be seen by yourself and the people you have invited to participate in it.
Public Opinion Survey. A public Opinion Survey can be seen by anyone who know the address of the website it is hosted on.
Web Survey. A Web Survey can only be seen by yourself and the people you have invited to view it.
- What is the Dashboard?
The HotGrinds Real-Time Opinion Dashboard is a simple web tool that allows you to explore
conceptual and sentiment maps, and filter their results by respondent/user attributes. The
Real-Time Opinion Dashboard provides at-a-glance insight into the positive/negative
opinions of the survey respondents. You don't have to wait for expert analysts to tell you
what the data says – you can see it immediately in red and green on the dashboard.
Dashboard components include:
• Key concepts
• Associated concepts
• Sentiment distribution
• Clusters of opinions
• Interactive filters
• Access to forum/blog excerpts
For a tour of the Dashboard, you can
watch the Dashboard episode of our Product Tour video series.
- Can anyone else see my Dashboard information?
Dashboard results are considered confidential information, and HotGrinds has several levels of security to protect your data from other eyes.
Private sites. A private site requires a password to access. Private Opinion Surveys and all Web Surveys are hosted on our private websurvey site.
Account privacy. On a private site, any content belonging to a client account can only be seen by someone logging into that account or someone they have invited to view that content. Client A's debates and dashboard results can't be seen by Client B.
Restricted dashboard access. Only client accounts have dashboard access. The dashboard icon is not present for non-client accounts. If you invite someone to view or participate in your survey, if they do not have a client account they will be unable to see the dashboard.
Data from public Opinion Surveys can be seen by anyone who has dashboard access on that site. However, as most public Opinion Surveys are hosted on standalone dedicated sites, the account owner will be the only person with dashboard access.
- How do you get customer opinions into the Dashboard?
We begin by crawling a topic-appropriate group of websites, then filtering it to keep only those pages which reference the topic.
At this point, HotGrinds' unique recasting mechanism allows us to filter the topical comments on each page by positive and negative sentiment. The resulting recast file is imported into a survey on HotGrinds' private survey site as a group of positive and negative comments, making the contents available to your dashboard.
For a tour of the recasting process, you can
watch the recasting episode of our Product Tour video series.
- Can I put my company logo on my survey?
This depends on what sort of client account you have with HotGrinds.
A HotGrinds account based on our
introductory trial offer will allow you to use only Web Surveys and private Opinion Surveys, which will be hosted on our own branded private site.
A Premium or higher account gives you the option of having your own dedicated site which can be branded with your logo and a tagline of your choosing. Public Opinion Surveys can only be hosted on a dedicated site.
Dedicated sites are hosted on our servers and have URLs like
yourname.hotgrinds.com.
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