Monday, October 8, 2007

BuzzDash: Snapshot of the American internet user?

This post recommended by Dustin Harris, fellow helpdesk co-worker.

Hope everyone had a nice weekend :)

Yesterday, Dustin showed me the website BuzzDash, which came about a little over a year ago in September 2006. Here's a bit more about them in their words:

BuzzDash is a site and tool for gauging popular opinion on a wide range of topics - from sports, movies and politics to relationships and philosophy. Built upon individual polling modules called buzzbites™, BuzzDash provides a real-time forum where people can solicit, measure and share opinions on nearly any issue. - "About" page
So for example, here's one that I made (you do have to register with the site to create polls - see the lengths that I go to for you guys?):





On the site, you do not need to register to vote in the polls, just get voting and you'll see the immediate percentage change on the poll that your vote had.

There are user-created polls for most topics, some are silly and some are serious. A fun feature is that every poll hosted on the site (when you create a poll and would like it to be on the site your have to submit it for approval) gets its own page where members can sound off and argue the question, including super-debatable questions from how much of college should parents pay for to whether Bush should be impeached.

From surfing the site, you can tell that users are definitely up on current events. What's more likely of interest to PR professionals are the polls regarding companies and products/services. This site is a good way to keep tabs on how products and brands are being received, such as the succinct depictions of Zune apathy as opposed to iTunes loyalty among those who voted.

I think that if my future job called on me to watch the responses among internet users for a certain company, one of the sites of the beaten Technorati track I'd check would be BuzzDash - visitors assume it's authentic and user-driven (we don't know if there are companies behind these polls in disguise, but the vast majority probably aren't I hope), and it's easy-to-use and addicting. I think this could be a site to watch in the future to see if it sticks around.

Posted by Megan at 6:41 PM

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