blog.msurveys.com

James Governor is thinking about using twitter as a light-weight polling tool:

"So I am looking for 1000 followers to the RedMonkRSVP twitter id. The idea is that we will be able to run instant polls according to our, and your, research ideas. Sort of a lightweight yougov poll. Twitter was never intended for this but I would like to try it and I need your help. Please get people to sign up and lets start twittering the wisdom of the crowds. I don’t have an infrastructure in place to aggregate and query results, but when did that ever stop anyone from achieving cool things?"

[If twitter means nothing to you, this post from BBC backstage has some useful introductory info.]

I've been thinking about this too, given the popularity of twitter (my BBC twitter bots currently have more than 3000 followers), and the way twitter can be used as a simple platform for delivering content via web, IM and SMS messaging.

While I can't quite see James' idea working as it is, given my previous experience with IM bots and survey technology (see also my IM survey bots), I think something along these lines may work:

• survey invites are easy - you can easily get a list of your followers in XML and JSON formats
• rather than using the public timeline, everything should run via direct messaging
• an IM bot can send a direct message to each follower, using the twitter bot and IM lingo
• as long as respondents reply with a direct message back, and I configure my twitter account to deliver direct messages to IM, the same IM bot can catch responses and aggregate them in the survey backend, as well as sending out the next question to be asked
  

This process would be confidential (no-one else can see questions and responses), while still making use of the twitter infrastructure both for survey notification and multi-channel survey delivery via IM, SMS or web.

In addition, this would mean that entire surveys, not just simple one-question polls are possible, given that the IM bot is communicating with a fully fledged survey backend.

Much of this functionality is already implemented in the existing survey bots I worked on previously, so I'm just waiting for the twitter IM functionality to become more functional again before setting something up (at the moment, there seem to be some problems around twitter, e.g. I can't even see the twitter@twitter.com bot online).

I'll post here again once the twitter IM functionality is back up and in a reasonably reliable state, and I've had the time to put together a simple prototype.