How to use polling to establish your company as an authority and to gain publicity.

Hello and welcome to this episode of Speak PR. My name is Jim James and I'm your host, and on this podcast I like to share thoughts and tips about how to get noticed. Now, if you are running an organization and you know you've got value locked up, you're just trying to find some ways to communicate that to your staff or your partners or to your potential and existing customers, this podcast is for you. I've got over 25 years of running an international public relations agency I've also set up 8 companies on 3 continents. So what I share on this podcast are tools and tips and best practices that I know will work for companies big and small. Today, we're going to take a look at polling and polls because we're seeing with the elections coming up and also the impact of COVID where people are being polled, that organisations, governments, companies, and political parties use polls to create compelling content. And content is one of the main elements of public relations. So we're going to talk today about how you can create a poll to drive a conversation. Well, what polls really do is they give a company an opportunity to establish credibility, to be a thought leader in whichever topic or department that you want to be. The caveat though, of course, is in order to be a thought leader, a poll or a survey must be seen to be independent and to have enough scale to be meaningful. So let's just dive down into that then. So when we want to create a poll, as I've done for clients in the past, I really start first of all with the end in mind. In other words, I'm trying to think about what kind of a story or what kind of initiative I'm trying to establish in the media, but I need to use data to do that. So you can do a poll to try and just find out what people think, but then the results can be quite wishy-washy because you actually can't craft the questions properly. So the first place to start is with the end in mind. Now, the next part of the crafting of a poll is to really think about what content, what topics, what questions are people thinking about already. We can't really issue a poll that no one's interested in. We can, but it won't get any coverage. So one of the things to do is simply look at the current media or talk to people and see what's currently trending and what questions are not being answered. Because that's where we want to go. We want to fill the void with some information that we have established and that we've created through polling. So we want to first of all think about the topic, and then we need to start to think about questions that produce meaningful answers. Now, by doing a poll, we can showcase our expertise We can tell a story or use it to start to create a narrative around something that, for example, that we're launching. A new product could be justified by the data that comes from a poll, or we can use it as part of a substantiation for a piece of news that we're going to issue in a press release or an article or white paper. We can also use these polls and the materials, for example, at an event. At a press conference or a virtual press conference or a product launch. And we can also use this data, for example, in brochures, in advertising, in speeches and annual reports. So there are many different ways that this content can be carved up and repurposed. Let's then look at some of the ways to create that source of content. Now, the first point here is that the questions themselves will be of critical importance, because how the questions are crafted will determine the way that the answers can be given. Now, the issue there is on a couple of different levels. One is, let's first of all talk about the level of bias in the question. If the question starts with a, you know, all people believe this is wrong and it shouldn't happen, do you agree, yes or no? We've loaded the question with a negative bias. Now the problem with that is that then the people answering it will quite possibly be apprehensive about answering and may therefore not answer it. So we need to give questions that are even-handed and that are going to elicit an accurate response. And because we're going to be issuing out the, the data to the media, in many cases the media will want to see the questions as well. So if the questions are self-serving, then the data itself will lack credibility. Now the next part is to think about the different formats. Now we can ask a question which is a yes/no, a binary. We can ask a 1 to a number, for example, 1 to 5. If you do 1 to 5, people often will choose a 3. So if you really want to get people to make a decision, then having an even number, 1 to 4 for example. And then we can have open text where we want people to fill in the form. In my experience, it's good to have a mix of these questions because the yes/no enable us to create a very simple chart. The scaling creates quite a nice sense of relativity, and the open text gives us the, if you like, the narrative, and where people may be answering over and beyond the questions that we have asked that we knew we wanted the responses to. They may throw in things that that we hadn't thought about. So a yes/no, a scale, and an open text. Now what we can do then is to think about the headlines and the stories that we want to tell, because by doing that, the yes/no, the scale, and the open text can be geared towards that. So what I mean by that is if I'm going to do a research-heavy white paper where I just want to be able to quote 8 out of 10, 65%, 32%, and so on, then I will include more of these yes/no questions and scale questions. If I'm going to do more of a blog and more of a narrative, then I'll have more of the open text because I'm looking for more thoughts and more involvement from the participants in the, in the survey. So thinking about the structure of the content is really important because that determines not only the structure of the questions but the structure of the questionnaire itself— how many questions I'm going to ask, of which type, and in which section that they're going to come. So I may, for example, have 2 or 3 sections to a questionnaire for different aspects of the of the work that I'm looking to validate. And I may have an open-closed, a scale, and then a text. And then Section 2 is an open-closed, a scale, and then a text. And then Section 3 could be an open-close, scale, and a text. And then Section 4 could be an open text. So the structuring of the questionnaire also then will determine how long it takes to do. So it's worth thinking about how many questions you need to ask in order to have a meaningful result, and how many questions that you're going to ask people to answer which may lead them to get questionnaire fatigue. So you could do a quick poll, you know, quick like we can do on LinkedIn now, a quick poll of you think A, B, or C? And that'll get us a very quick answer, but it may not give us very much meaningful data to create more content than a very simple answer. So think about how long you would expect people to answer and take is really an important part of this as well. Now, we mentioned here that you could ask people that you currently know or not know to ask And answer these poll questions. And I was just talking with a client in Singapore that's launching a mobile app in Shanghai, and they're using WeChat. And the problem for them is they've got subscribers to their database, but because WeChat doesn't allow them to take very much demographic information, they don't know gender, for example. They've got phone numbers and demographics, but they've got Uh, geography, but it could have been, uh, you know, filled in incorrectly. So one of the best things that you can do is to incentivize people to answer, not in a way that incentivizes them to answer in a certain way because that obviously would skew the results, but to incentivize people to take the test is really a very good and effective way to get by. And of course, you have to look at the cost Then of what you're giving away, it could be a random reward every tenth person, or if you fill in this form, you get. For example, I just filled out one for the Woodlands Trust in England, and it actually took quite a long time, about twenty minutes, and I was going to be then randomly entered into a fifty dollar or fifty pound promotion prize. So what could you do to incentivize people to take part? The people in Shanghai are looking at could they offer, for example, free space in return for giving replies to their questionnaire. Now the next part then to think about is the size of the sample. Now to be statistically significant—not an easy one to say—statistically significant, there needs to be a sample size that's credible. Now we're hearing, for example, on the radio in the UK today about. People's perception in England that over 7% of all people have had COVID. Now actually, that is wrong, but also the sample size was taken from people that are using an app. In other words, it's already people who are sort of pre-qualified. So if we look at the size that you need to take, if it's an internal survey, it could be everybody, but you want 70 to 80%. If it's an external survey, how many people do you need in order to make the survey into something that you could actually take to a media and say this is credible? One view is that a sample size needs to be a minimum of 1,000 respondents. But of course, if you're surveying all demographic groups, and let's say in Singapore there are 6 million people, and you want to just survey 1,000, but you're surveying men, women, uh, of all ages, then 1,000 of 6 million is not that great. If it's 1,000 of people who have been in the National University of Singapore, for example, and their experiences of COVID then of course that could be a representative sample. So I think the rule of thumb is what is the overall universe of people that you're trying to talk about, and therefore what would be a percentage of those in order to make it meaningful. I have read that as little as 50 people can give an indication of the larger sample size. Now whether that's true or not, I'm not sure, but that's one sort of small measure. But certainly if you're creating a survey it's worth creating a survey and sending it to, for example, 5% of your target audience first in order to just proof test the questions. I'll always do that when I've done a survey. I'll first of all ask partners or staff to take it, and then I'll ask, for example, a subset of 5% of people to take the survey for me so I can start to narrow down and see whether I'm going to get those charts and those narratives that I'm looking for, for the public relations, from the questions as I've structured them. Now, we also have to bear in mind that there will be a margin of error. Some survey companies reckon you'll have 3 to 5%, so the sample size needs to accommodate a margin of error of up to 5%. Now, you can use survey tools to start to create this, or you can use an a third-party agency. The benefit of a third-party agency is that you will have the credibility of the results that are produced by a third party. Now, research is big business. So we have, for example, Nielsen, which has revenues of over $6 billion. The second largest is a company called Kantar, which is $3.85 billion worth of research. There's a company called Quintiles IMS Uh, with $3.5 billion. And then there's Ipsos, for example, which is over, uh, $1.9 billion in revenue. So there are these big companies. So if you've got the kind of budget and scale that requires global research, there are companies that can do that. But there are also much smaller ones, companies like Millard Brown, and also individual independent agencies as well that are out there that can help to create surveys for you, people like Blackbox in Singapore. So quantitative market research where public opinion or business opinions are gathered can be done in-house or with third-party agencies. Third-party agencies also have the benefit of understanding how questions should be written, which is also really important, and in my experience, the hardest part, because we may think that we understand how to write a question, but the skills of writing questions that are balanced and comprehensive and tease out interesting facts and figures from people really is a specialist skill again. Now, if we also want to do it ourselves, we can go to companies like LinkedIn, PollDaddy, SurveyMonkey, and even Facebook. So each of these companies now have different tools that we can use. There is a company that has a, an app called poll.app.do, and this has a Facebook-specific app. They claim to have 50,000 happy pollsters. And they pay between $8 to $28 a month to survey from 1,000 to an unlimited number of participants per poll. So if you're looking for a tool that specifically works, for example, on Facebook, this poll app will do that for you. Um, LinkedIn now has its own free polls, but obviously very simple. Polls. PollDaddy and SurveyMonkey are 2 of the biggest ones that I've used, and they create the benefit of having wonderful output of charts. So you enter your data and your questions into the system, you enter your database, and then you send it out to people. And PollDaddy and SurveyMonkey will both create fabulous-looking charts. And it's really these charts and the narrative that are going to create the opportunity for media coverage. So if you want to create coverage, then you've got some facts that can be delivered as a press release, but also creating an infographic. An infographic's really the combination of information and illustration. If you can create some contrarian results If you can create some kind of a shock that people wouldn't understand or wouldn't have believed to be true, then that's guaranteed to get you some kind of an interest from the media, especially if that's then accompanied by a well-written press release or an article or an invitation to an interview. Simplicity is the next key element of a visual. People don't have the time to read through all the results. They want a graphic, maybe a picture showing one of the key elements of the results, plus a number. And think about who's going to be reading the infographic. Where are they? Are they looking at it at work or at home, on a mobile device, on a big screen? And also, do you want to make this a graphic that they could share and use in their own presentations? Because if you have something that is novel and easy to read, as we talked about in our content podcast yesterday, it could be shareable. And if it's shareable, of course, it can become viral and spread your brand through just the quality of your content. Think, of course, about fonts and colors and design. And you can use a platform like Canva, which has got already, uh, infographic templates, or you can build your own. There's also Visme, which is another one of these platforms that you can use to take that data that you've got and make it into something appealing. So polls are something that you can use, something that obviously, as we're in election season with the Americans, as we are in COVID season worldwide, polling creates great narrative for public relations. So I hope this has given you some insight and maybe some inspiration to create a poll and think about the frequency of a poll. It's one thing to generate a poll one time, but if you can make it, for example, a quarterly or an annual exercise, then it starts to become something that the media are looking for from your company and helps to establish you and your company as the authority in the industry. So thank you so much for listening to this episode of Speak PR. If you like it, please do rate it or share it and come to the e-sauce-pr.com website to sign up for our newsletter or to the speakpr.co website to sign up for our mastermind. My name is Jim James. Thank you so much for listening.