Some random Readers' Choice award ...
Posted by: Alan Laing
Date posted: Mon Jun 16 6:36:16 PDT 1997
...thoughts. Although I am a print subscriber, I was not selected to vote in this one. I would just like to share some of my sentiment concerning the award
- A vocal minority of
OS/2 users continue to be outraged and dominate the discussion in this forum and the preceeding one. They clearly care about the award or the process(es) used to arrive at the 97 results. Whether the majority of OS/2 users feel the same or not I am not sure. Probably they could care less or are not aware of this or the preceeding results. They probably did not decide to use the product because of past IW awards that it garnered. Some non OS/2 users were also outraged and blasted IW and Ms Reed. They also clearly care about the award or the process(es) used to arrive at the 97 results, for whatever reason. The net result is that you have gained little or no positive benefit for your publication due to the award but appear to have had a preponderance of a large negative impact on the readers who have responded.
- A quite small number of respondees were either
- supportive of what you tried to do
- against vocal OS/2 users
- and/or, hoping some other product would win for whatever reason
- The only other group of people who seem to care about the award are the mareketeers for the winning companies since they get to hang that cute little icon on their advertisements.
- The majority of your readers could care less if you conducted a poll/survey or did not conduct one. This is an assumption on my part based on previously published readership numbers for IW as a percentage of the number of different people who responded to this and the preceeding forum. My estimate is about 300 diffrent fourm respondees. My guess is that this represents less than 0.1% of your circulation subscribers and small fraction also of your registered on line readers.
- In general, polls/surveys of this type serve no useful purpose and IMHO have no impact on future buying choices. Someone who is influenced by the little award icons on products and advertisements probably does not make a large number of buying decisions.
- IMHO, the pruchase choices for 99.99+% of products is completely unaffected by such awards.
So for 1998, please take the money that you are planning to spend on conducting the '98 award and donate it to a worthy charity, say the Children's Wish Foundation or United Cerebal Palsey to name two, and get some real benefit out of the dollars spent.