I hope you find my writing and business tips and observations useful. My business and blog are dedicated to helping businesses communicate clearly and reach their potential.
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One of the reasons I give for writing promotional articles and blog posts is build trust in the community and your (potential) clients. By sharing relevant information, people can trust your expertise and learn about your personality and integrity.
In the current global situation, building trust may be even more important.
The Edelman Trust Barometer for Australia is a survey of consumers and how they feel about various institutions. In February this year, they noted a huge 74% decline in trust for business – only 34% of respondents trust a business to do what is right in a specific situation.
What is critical to learn from this survey is the following:
Some other interesting notes:
As for the survey, it was based on “4,475 upper-income, highly-educated people in 20 countries, including 1,375 in Asia-Pacific countries.”
I posted earlier about the MYOB survey of small business owners’ response to the global financial situation, but am startled by another part of their survey.
Apparently, 60% of surveyed small business owners don’t have a website for their business. That is incredible. They surveyed 1,503 business owners with no more than 19 employees, so it is a reasonable number but perhaps not statistically significant compared to how many small businesses there are in Australia.
Not all businesses are internet based, obviously, but offline businesses can have a website and use it to good effect.
Why am I so surprised they don’t have a website?
A website can be simple and as short as one or two pages; it can be static and need little maintenance (although search engines prefer more active sites). Some online directories offer full page listings which can act as a website, which is better than nothing, but the URL may be long.
SO back to the original question? Do you have a website? Do other business owners you know have websites? If not, why not?
My earlier post listed some examples of poor survey questions I have come across, so now here are some tips for making your survey questions effective…
Ideally, prepare the questions and leave them for a couple of days. Then reread each question to make sure it makes sense and will get the answers you are after. Once you are sure the questions are workable, ask someone else (or a few someone elses) to answer the survey for you and provide feedback on questions they weren’t sure of.
A well written and prepared survey can be a very valuable tool for your business so it is worth putting the time and effort into making it as good as you possibly can.
Aside from the content of the survey itself, it is very important that any surveys or feedback forms are well prepared in other ways.
I just answered a survey that included at least three of the following mistakes and it has left with me with the impression that those business owners don’t care about details or consistency – so why would I trust them with promoting my business (their apparent service)?
So before you make a survey available to your customers, check how it presents and do a test run to see it really does work – better yet, get someone else to do the test run for you.
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