Biased results are a risk of online polls
I’ve just updated my list of social media lessons learned the hard way with details of an online poll which appears to have backfired.
In summary, part of a multi-million pound advertising campaign by Christian charity Alpha International has potentially backfired when an online poll on their website, asking whether people believed in God, showed an abnormally high 98% saying ‘No’ (source: The Register).
Mandatory form fields are a real bugbear of mine. Whilst sometimes appropriate, they are all too often a classic example of the needs of the website owner being given priority over the needs of the user. In many cases, as well, they can easily lead to a reduction in conversion rates, so there are strong business arguments against them too.
The only legitimate uses of a mandatory field is to collect information that is essential to processing the request. So for example, when you are purchasing something online you need to put in all of the relevant credit card details. It shouldn’t be used for anything else, for the reasons explored below.
Earlier today I signed an online petition to encourage Google to take a leading role in promoting accessible web development. The petition, launched by a Canadian web developer, suggests that
Google has not taken a strong lead in producing standards compliant, accessible web sites. Although contributing to the W3C and other standards bodies, the many sites that Google produces do limit access to people with disabilities. Given the web presence that Google has, this is enough of a problem, however it is worsened by the fact that Google’s model is copied regularly by web developers looking for an industry standard to follow.
A new home for accessibility at Google
Google were impressively quick to respond, posting a link on the petition to a new official blog post entitled A New Home for Accessibility at Google, by accessibility product manager Jonas Klink.
Euan Semple (image via BCS)
Tonight I went along to the Informatics Forum in Edinburgh to listen to an inspiring talk by Euan Semple on how social media can make organisations more effective. I furiously scribbled reams of notes on a few scraps of paper and have reconstructed them here as best I could. Apologies to Euan if I have misquoted or misinterpreted any of his points. The talk was organised by the Edinburgh branch of the British Computer Society.
During Euan’s time at the BBC, he pioneered the use of weblogs, wikis and online forums to enable staff to work more collaboratively. Now an independent advisor on social computing, his insights help bring a clarity of thought to what is, for many, a brave new world.
A colleague recently raised the issue of how we handle complaints that come in via social media, and this got me thinking about the impact of these channels on how we deliver customer service in general. It’s a massive topic, with an awful lot of angles to consider, so here are just a few thoughts.
To start, though, I thought I’d have a quick look at what people were tweeting about in relation to my organisation (LinkedIn has a handy feature called Company Buzz which makes this easier). As expected, the results were not great.
Some recent feedback on Twitter
You can immediately see why this subject is an important one, especially if the individuals posting such comments have a lot of followers (as the recent Dooce vs Maytag story proved). But do these individuals expect the Council to respond? And if so, what should we be doing?
How secure is your password?
In a BBC Technology article today about the recent email phishing scam which saw tens of thousands of accounts compromised, Sophos security expert Graham Cluley advised people to change their passwords as soon as possible. He added that about 40% of people use the same password for every website they use, which obviously increases the potential damage of a leaked password.
This advice will no doubt strike terror into the hearts of many, especially those who struggle to remember the passwords they have already set up. I use a system, though, which makes it possible to generate and easily recall as many password as you like by simply memorising a few simple rules. The beauty of the system is that it generates a unique password for each new account you want to log onto, without needing to remember anything new.
The Brizzly logo
Today I signed up for Brizzly, a new web-based client for Twitter which offers a very similar user interface to Twitter itself, but with lots of the added functionality which most of us have come to use on a daily basis. It recently featured as one of LifeHack’s 5 best Twitter Clients (alongside TweetDeck, Seesmic, Tweetie and DestroyTwitter), so I was keen to give it a spin.