The Sports Info Business

Take your hands off the computer and raise them if you have ever heard of Felipe Coimbra.  Are they in the air?  No? I hadn’t heard of him either until Davidlano, whom I follow on Twitter introduced me to twtpoll.  This is a cool little app Coimbra developed that allows you to conduct your own one question survey.  I decided to give it a try.

Here is the question I asked:  Have you ever considered a career in sports? —  With Professional Teams, Colleges, or related businesses? I posted the survey at 5:00 Thursday evening.  In order to drive people to drive traffic and have people to take the poll, I put on my marketing hat.  I thought, ‘How would I promote it, quickly?’  I was able to easily post a link to it on Facebook as well as LinkedIn.  The link was created under the section “What are you doing now” so any friend on Facebook who saw my profile or anyone checking out my profile on LinkedIn can easily find it.  I did not want to sample an active database, just friends and colleagues who happened to see it online.  If you want to join in and answer the question, click HERE

The Good and the Bad 

I always deal with the bad issues first.  The bad as it relates to this tool is that it currently allows you to ask only one question at a time, so it has limitations.

 ….and the good?  Think about the simple immediate impact this survey can have on your business.  Sure, you can go to Survey Monkey and develop a survey and send it out to people.  But it is not transparent and it takes a lot more work.  Give this site a try and see how simple it is.

Applications

Think about the power of the simple application.   Here are a few examples.  Want to ask a company question and be able to show all employees results in a transparent, real-time way?  My wife is thinking about starting a Montessori school in our community.  She quickly grasped that she could contact a targeted list with a simple question to see if a new, niche school has interest to move forward.

As for sports, you can deliver a sample questions to season ticket holders, test a new advertising campaign or gage sponsorship penetration with a simple, direct question.

The opportunities are endless.  Want to see what people might pay for a special event ticket?  Why not start here.

Once you fill out the question and options, you will want to have people to click on the link and respond.  Here are the ways the applications allows you to do so.

The first option on the page is to “Share This”

Look at the list of social media applications.  They are all here.  Digg, Delicious, Stumbleupon, Buzz Up.  They are all here.

The second option is to post and there are nine options here including My Space, Friendster and Blogger.

The last option is by email.  Here you can add specific email addresses at the site.

Expectations

My expectations were not very high for this experiment in terms of response time as it posted only 12 hours before this entry was finished.  However, I will continue to watch it and hope you will as well.