General Sentiment (discontinued) vs. SnapSurveys

Determine what your research question or customer relations needs are to pick a tool that is a good match.

I think it is very important to go through their training videos and user guides. Devote the time to learning it correctly from the beginning. In the long run you will enjoy it much more than plowing right into it and then trying to find out if you did it right. Also, while you are not required to buy the annual maintenance contract, I think if you are going to use the program, don't skimp, buy the annual maintenance contract. The free technical support is necessary, especially when you are up against deadlines.

• Using volume and association metrics to assess and predict trends and emerging topics
• Use the articles metric to drill down into specific posts, such as tweets, Facebook, blog comments, news articles
• General Sentiment has the ability to access password protected sites to access information that may not normally show up in standard internet searches

• The training helped me to customize surveys for the different departments that the office of IR served.
• Surveys were easy to create and gathering information was made easy because SnapsSurveys worked well with SPSS.
• Once surveys were created I could scan them and have the results to my boss in less than an hour depending on the size of the survey group.
• Snaps customer service reps were always willing to help.

Incentivized

• The application does take time to start gathering data on a specific topic. As such, its important to include as many keyword search topics as possible, and also be sure to refine them as you gather data.
• The user interface isn't particularly intuitive, there is some work that could be done to streamline its use.

• Though the user interface is easy to navigate, it would be nice to see is design updated to something more aesthetically pleasing.

Social media tools are constantly evolving. I would want to be sure that my research question was complimented by the metrics and options presented by the social media tool. General Sentiment is very useful and innovative and their customer service was excellent. Their sales and customer service team was very helpful in onboarding our staff and being flexible with our needs.

The main reason we will renew is that it does the job, it supports our system, and we have budgeted for it so why change?

I think as an organization there is always room to grow, however, this application has really helped us with our dilemma with offline, online, and paper surveys. We are able to make our surveys fun and engaging and the interface for the person creating the survey is user-friendly. Customer service is very helpful if you need additional support.

Incentivized

It is an in between option. The options we evaluated were Qualtrics and SurveyGizmo. It's cheaper than Qualtrics and easier to design surveys than SurveyGizmo. Nonetheless it's not the worst option out there like SurveyMonkey.

Incentivized

• Social media analytics can accelerate the speed with which researchers can investigate a topic of interest, at a lower cost.
• Due to the low barrier to entry (e.g., most social media sites and blogs are free), data collection burden, as traditionally defined, is significantly reduced or eliminated. The absence of direct interactions between researchers and the study population may do more to mitigate sources of bias compared to other more intrusive forms of data collection (i.e., interviews, focus groups).
• Used to to gather unstructured data and feedback from Medicare beneficiaries, caregivers, advocates, and other stakeholders to identify systemic issues that beneficiaries encounter.

• Using a professional survey package enhances my reputation as a research professional.
• I have been able to use the software's functionality to exceed my clients expectations.