Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Ever wish you could read the minds of your target audience? Google Consumer Surveys is the next best thing. It allows you to survey the web with a tool so precise, it predicted the 2012 U.S. presidential election. And don’t worry – it’s affordable and easy to use.

How does it work? You start the process using the simple three-step creator, which will walk you through targeting your audience. You can choose to get a representative sample of your country’s population, or target a more specific audience by age, gender, geography, and a screening question to help further narrow your audience. You also have your choice of ten different question formats, including multiple choice, star-rating, image selection and more.

So when your survey goes out into the world, where is it going, exactly? That’s your choice. You can choose to distribute your survey through Google’s network of online publishers, or via the Google Opinion Rewards mobile app....

Social analytics service Topsy announced that it now offers the full archive of tweets on Twitter, meaning that anyone can search through the entire library of messages ever sent on the microblogging service.

You could, for example, look up your own first tweets — probably for the sheer delight of embarrassing yourself — by heading to Topsy.com, searching for ‘from:@yourusername,’ hitting search and then sorting by oldest first.You can, of course, do that with Twitter’s archives, but Topsy lets you do it for any account....