Consider the following examples:

This doesn’t have to happen! By following a few basic guidelines, it is possible to have your company logo look great whether as a profile picture, an interest icon or a wall posting thumbnail.

A Few Important Facebook Image Dimensions

While it is true that you can upload just about any graphic or image you like to Facebook, it never hurts to consider the size at which your logo will appear when it displays as a profile picture, interest icon or wall post thumbnail.

It would be great if it were possible to upload images in all of these sizes. so that every presentation of your logo and your brand on Facebook was clean and perfect. However, you really only get to upload one image — the profile picture image — and then the system automatically creates thumbnails as needed. Which means that when you upload your logo you need to think about how it will appear in all sizes.

The Facebook Thumbnail Safe Area

To prevent your logo from getting cut off, you need to leave an appropriate border around the edges. Through trial and error, the folks at Mashable found that in order to avoid having your logo cut off on Facebook when reduced to a thumbnail you need to leave a “border” of about 6% on each side of the image. In other words, if your image is 200 pixels wide, you should leave a 12 pixel border on each side of your logo to ensure that it isn’t cut off. See the following example provided by Mashable:

Facebook Thumbnail Logo Safe Area from Mashable.com

Consider the following examples, which illustrate how some companies successfully uploaded logos to Facebook which look good in the comments:

Note the purple discoloration around the Reese’s logo. This appears to be caused by the way that Facebook compresses the images after they are uploaded. To prevent this from happening the best approach I’ve found is to use a slightly off-white color — perhaps a very, very light gray. If you just leave the background white — no matter what image format you upload — you are always going to get these artifacts.

McDonald’s takes a slightly different approach to the border: instead of surrounding their logo with white, they continue their red logo all the way around. If you look closely you can also see that the top is slightly lighter than the bottom, giving a very subtle iPhone button like appearance to the wall thumbnail.

See how the Pringles logo goes right to the very top of the Facebook image/logo safe area. While this might not have been so attractive is the background were a different color, it works just fine here because the background is white and it has the impact of allowing the logo to butt right up against the top of the wall postings. One other thing that Pringles does that is interest on their wall posting is use a red board around the entire image — my impression is that this helps with the quality of the image AND it compensates for the color of the background:

How Tall Should Your Profile Picture Be?

Facebook allows your corner image to be up to 600 pixels tall, but you will want to be thoughtful about how you use that space and you should spend a little time testing different versions to ensure that when your logo is shrunk down to a thumbnail it is shown and full and not cut off.

• Online Center for Dentures and Dental Implants

Highlights of nQual Rich Focus (according to Tim’s review) include the fact that it is extremely easy to use; it’s easy to present a wide variety of stimulus material; it offers a variety of innovative research techniques and it provides a transcript immediately following the session. Negatives of package include the fact that all participants must use Window-based systems (Internet Explorer, to be specific); it is not yet completely self-service and it only supports real-time groups.

nQual is a London-based company — which implies London-based servers, which may or may not mean latency in the connection (I’m not sure why there would be, but it’s worth thinking about ). The cost of a single group is around $900 although volume discounts are available.

• Read Tim Macer’s review of nQual Rich Focus
• nQual Rich Focus web site

Sometimes it seems that many of the folks writing surveys — even the professionals — don’t seem to get it that the people taking the survey are for the most part volunteers (unless you’re paying everyone who takes your survey and not doing some kind of a drawing, almost all of your respondents are effectively volunteers) and if you don’t make the experience interesting and perhaps even fun then it is unlikely that anyone is going to go to the trouble of finishing the survey.

Not every survey can be fun. Some surveys are on boring topics. Some surveys use complex methodologies that make it difficult to create any kind of positive user experience. But it seems to me that it is important for us to at least try. If we’re going to ask our volunteers to give us their time and their opinions, it seems that the least we can do is try to make the experience at least somewhat entertaining and interesting.

To that end, in addition to Martin’s article below, I also present you with a link to a page on SurveyGalaxy which offers a list of the most highly rated (i.e., most interesting) surveys available on SurveyGalaxy as rated by respondents. Note that these aren’t always the prettiest survey in the world or the most interactive — but something about them has made respondents give them high ratings.

• Article: 20 Top Tips to Writing Effective Surveys
• SurveyGalaxy List of Best Public Surveys

Personally, when I’m conducting an online survey I tend to prefer a sample of 1,000. In an overall sense it is usually overkill, but it usually allows me to segment the results in a number of different ways — I can break the results down by age group, gender, income, etc — something I couldn’t necessarily do if I started from a much smaller sample. I suppose it is the luxury of having access to a large respondent base — I can afford to oversample. Believe me, if I were paying $10 a response (like what I sometimes have to do when I rent a panel of people in another country) I am much more conservative in my sample sizes and pay really close attention to my margin of error and the needs of the study.

There are some web sites out there that make margin of error more understandable. The Red River College Marketing Research blog recently pointed to an article at www.isixsigma.com entitled "Margins of Error Made Easy!" which I found to be worth reading.

There are also several sample size calculators out there (you can find them by typing "sample size calculator" into Google). One that appears especially handy is at dssResearch.com. Grapentime.com offers not just a sample size calculator, but also a sample size calculator for attribute ratings (in other words, it tells you the minimum sample sizes you need for different type of metric mesasurement scales).

Margins of Error Made Easy at Isixsigma.com
Sample size calculator at dssResearch.com
Sample Size Calculator for Attribute Ratings at Grapentine.com

I’m not going to go into an entire review of the software package here at this moment (although I did just download it — Golden Hills offers a free 30-day trial), what I did want to say is that version 8 of the software was just released a few weeks ago and it offers a variety of features such as:

• Opportunity to organize surveys into folders.
• Basic weighting.
• Multi-page web survey form (takes SurveyGold to the next level!)
• Basic validation
• Ability to import/export surveys for other SurveyGold users.
• Memorized filters (you can set up data filters for viewing your results and it will remember them)
• Wave reporting (view mdata collected over time against prior periods)
• Updated user interface (very XP-like in my opinion)
• Faster database
• Improved graphing in the reports module

Several bugs from the previous version of the software have also been fixed.

Learn more about SurveyGold 8

Just for the record, I should say that all of the opinions expressed on this blog are 100% my own and do not in any way reflect the views of Universal Orlando or any of the vendors I work with.

The article argues that it is impossible to get a true understanding of your customer’s satisfaction by simply using one of the three metrics, and that the best way to really understand what is going on is to use some combination of at least two, one of which will be the mean score.

In terms of determining whether it makes more sense to look at the top box or the bottom box, it suggests examining how changes in either box correlate with the overall outcome.

What is most fascinating and useful about the article is actually its description of "Non-Linear Effect Analysis" in which it describes how customer loyalty tends to rise not linearly, but exponentially. In other words, customers who give a "9" out of 10 instead of an "8" out of 10 are exponentially more loyal.

Read the full article at CustomerSat.com
See all of the online resources offered by CustomerSat.com