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Robert Hooven Becomes a Crowd Scientist - Vice President of Sales comes from comScore

Joins Crowd Science to Help Media Companies and Brands Gain Consumer Insight and Develop In-Depth Online Audience Profiles

Today we're excited to announce that Bob Hooven is joining Crowd Science as Vice President of Sales. Bob comes from comScore, where he was Senior Vice President of Sales for the M:Metrics division. He was motivated by a desire to bring Crowd Scienceʼs audience measurement platform to the thousands of media and corporate web sites needing verifiable, in-depth demographic and psychographic visitor profiles for high-value advertising and product sales growth.

“Bob is a proven startup veteran,” said John Martin, Crowd Scienceʼs CEO. “He is a serial entrepreneur with successful IPOs and acquisitions under his belt. Bob has a customer centric point-of-view that will serve Crowd Science and the companies who use our platform well. He aggressively drove revenue and customer growth at M:Metrics, which led to the quick acquisition by comScore. Before M:Metrics, Bob was head of sales for the Forrester High-Tech Group in the Western Region. During the early internet buildup, Bob started and built the sales organization at Nielsen//NetRatings, where he helped develop the then nascent Internet measurement industry. On top of all that, we especially like that Bob played collegiate rugby and learned the art of full contact sport at a formative age.” Robert has a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration from Norwich University.

You can hear from Bob in July when he's hosting a webinar:

Title: Punching Up your Audience Profiling
- When: 9 July 2009 at 2:00PM EDT, 11:00AM PDT
- Who: Robert Hooven, Vice President of Sales for Crowd Science
- Why: Learn about deep, verifiable audience demographics
- Register online: Click Here to Regsiter

About Crowd Science:
Crowd Science was formed by experts in online market research and audience measurement with a mission to “raise the bar” in the measurement of online populations. Their goal is to help web properties understand all facets of their audience through rigorous, verifiable interactive research. The company has developed an advanced platform for audience measurement and real-time survey research. The results are compelling: Crowd Science currently has several thousand active sites within their open research network.

Crowd Science Exhibiting at MRIA

Crowd Science will be exhibiting at the upcoming MRIA "In Tune" conference in Montreal this May 24th to 26th. Be sure to stop by our booth!

Crowd Science attending ARF in NY

Crowd Science will be attending the ARF Annual Convention + Expo in New York city on March 30th - April 1st, 2009.

Please be sure to stop by our booth. Hope to see you there!

Adding your OWN Custom Questions

Many of you have asked if you can add your own questions to your demographic questionnaires, so it gives me great pleasure to announce that now you can! 

If you sign up for a Personal or Premium account, you’ll have access to many neat new features, one of which allows you freedom to ask your visitors anything you like for any given amount of time, and have the results alongside your core demographic data.

We’ve designed our Crowd Science Demographics Custom Questions feature to provide the full gamut of options to help you define the right question and obtain the results you want. Whether you want to add a multiple-choice / one answer question,  or a multiple-choice / multiple answer question, or an open text question, you have the ability to do it with minimal effort.  

Keeping aligned with Research principles, we believe in structuring each questionnaire to be as short and concise as possible.  This helps to keep your audience engaged throughout the length of the survey, therefore attaining better results. So with this in mind, we kept the maximum allotment of custom questions to 3 at a time.  There is no limit in the amount of options you can include in each question.  Depending on the type of question, you can set the order of how your assigned options are displayed in the questionnaire (i.e. as listed, randomly, reverse, alphabetically, reverse alphabetically), and the order in which they are displayed in your report.  You can also remove and add new questions at any point, and as mentioned earlier, run them for an indefinite amount of time.

Our hope is that we’ve given you the flexibility to find out what your audience thinks about the things that matter to you.   If you have any questions or need any help setting up your custom questions, as always, please don’t hesitate to drop us a line at help@crowdscience.com.  I’ll be there to help you along the way.

Until next time, keep safe and have fun.

Crowd Science Ana

Crowd Science Demographics is out of beta!

I’m excited to announce that today we’re bringing Crowd Science Demographics out of beta.

We’ve spent the last few months scaling our infrastructure, polishing our user experience, and adding new features. The team has been amazing and I think you’re going to like what they’ve done.

We’ll spend the next week or so updating our website and blogging about all of the new bits, but I just wanted to share a quick overview.

Come on in, it’s open

Now that we’re out of beta, anybody can come along and create an account. The invitation codes and the waiting list are gone.

Lots of new toys

We have a slew of new features, including the following:

• Custom questions provide a way to add new elements to the standardized questionnaires. Similar to an omnibus survey, you can now ask your audience anything you like and get the benefit of having results reported alongside and filterable by all of the core demographic data.
• Filtering and cross tabs allow you to tease apart and compare particular audience segments. Find out, for example, how the offline activity of heavy internet users differs from that of light internet users, or determine which subgroup is dragging household income numbers down.
• New time-in-day and day-in-week reports provide insight into how your audience changes through the hours of the day or the days in a week. Compare weekenders to the weekday crowd, or find out why your traffic is particularly strong or weak during particular times of the day.
• Aggregated reporting lets you roll up several sites and sub-sites into a single report. Define permanent channels by grouping sites or throw them together on the fly using tags.
• Custom media kit URLs and logos provide a more elegant way for you to share your audience data. You can upload logos and choose custom URLs to provide a branded but third-party validated experience for your buyers.

A plan for everyone

We debated long and hard about what the right pricing model is. I have no doubt that it’ll go through several iterations as we get a better grasp on how people make use of the system, but I think that what we have now is very reasonable and, frankly, pretty stinkin’ good value.

And of course, we’re committed to providing the core Crowd Science Demographics service for free to anybody that wants it.

So, we’re starting out with four plans: Free, Personal ($5/month), Premium ($200/month), and Custom. All of the details are over on our pricing page.

I think that just about does it.

To all of our beta customers, thanks for sticking with us! Ana will send out an email tomorrow to let you about what we have in store.

Don’t change the channel…

Crowd Scientists attending ad:tech

Crowd Science will be exhibiting at ad:tech New York on November 3-4, 2008. We will be parked at booth 413 and we hope to see you there!

Crowd Science & BlogWorld Expo 2008

A number of "Crowd Scientists" were in attendance for the Blog World Expo 2008 in Vegas this past month. Blog World was a coming out for Crowd Science launching to the world of bloggers. The demographics service was well received and even referred to as most promising of the trade show floor. Attending this show pushed us to make some decisions on branding and messaging, so everyone's feedback was greatly appreciated.

BTW - the Crowd Science T-shirts in brown were in high demand - sorry to anyone who couldn't get one.

Thanks again to everyone who stopped by our booth.

Next stop - ad:tech New York .

Mentions on WebAppers and KillerStartups

Both [WebAppers](http://www.webappers.com/2008/08/21/100-close-beta-invitations-from-crowd-science/) and [KillerStartups](http://www.killerstartups.com/Web-App-Tools/crowdscience-com-know-more-about-your-audience) posted about Crowd Science and our Demographics product this week. And WebAppers were kind enough to give away some invitations to our beta. Thanks guys, much appreciated!

Crowd Science at Blog World Expo

Crowd Science will be exhibiting at Blog World Expo in Las Vegas, NV, September 20 - 21, 2008.  
We'll keep you posted on upcoming announcements. Make sure you stop by our booth. Hope to see you there!

Tip number two

A new post from my Tip series is well overdue.  But before I get to it, I'd like to give you a quick update on some of our progress.  We are getting closer each day at completely opening our doors to everyone who has signed up to Crowd Science Demographics. So stay tuned. And once again, we appreciate your patience.

Now, without further ado here is my next tip:

Tip Number Two:  Making the most of your website classification.

Whenever you add a new website, we'll ask you to classify your website content by selecting categories from our predefined "Category" list provided on the "Edit your Site" page.  We recommend to review the entire list and classify your website appropriately to gather a richer data set.   If there is a category you feel we haven't covered, you can manually classify your website by adding keywords on the "Tags" section.

Depending on how you classify your website, our system will select three or four different questions that are topic related to show to your visitors within your core profile survey.  For instance, if you select "video games", we'll ask questions about gaming (i.e. Which of the following game consoles do you currently own?). This will help you gain a broader/fuller picture of your audience, and their interests. We think it's important to ask topic related questions on your profile survey not just to engage your audience, but to also gain a fuller picture of your audience's thoughts and opinions on topic related areas that matter to you. 

We are carefully filling out our library of topic related questions, which will be an ongoing task to keep our library relevant and comprehensive.   So although some of you may not see topic related questions yet, still take the time to classify your website from the moment you sign up to take advantage of these questions as soon as they become available.

If you would like to review or edit your site categories or tags, go to your site Overview page and click on the "Site Settings" link to get to your "Edit your Site" page.  And don't forget to save any changes you make.

Hope this helps.

Psst: If you have Crowd Science related questions or topics you want us to cover on our blog, just post a comment or shoot us an email at info@crowdscience.com, subject line: Blog Entry.

Tips and more

It's time for me to introduce myself. My name is Ana Goldbach and I'm part of the Crowd Science Operations team.  Most of my time will be spent providing Client support, so we'll likely connect or chat if you submit a question about our service.

As you know, we are excited about our first product and the direction it's headed.  Among other things (i.e. validity of data), our goal is to incessantly look for ways to improve Crowd Science Demographics, and our research methodologies to provide the most genteel styles of inviting your visitors. We know the importance of keeping your audience engaged, and that's our main priority.  

A big thanks to those that have taken the time to provide their input. We know we can't do it alone, so your feedback is much appreciated.  

From time to time, my entries will consist of tips on how to optimize Crowd Science Demographics.  And with that, I'll leave you with my first tip: How to START Data Collection.

Tip 1: How to START data collection

So you've passed the hurdle to join and successfully completed the sign up process (sorry again to those who couldn't make it in, but you will soon, we promise).  You continued the process by adding your site, then adding our script tag to your pages, and then you wonder what's next?

1. Return to your site's Overview page. If you are signing back in, click on your account's name on the Dashboard. You'll be directed to the Sites tab where you can click on your site's name to get to the Overview page.


2. Next, we recommend that you preview your invitation before going live.  On the Overview page, click on the Invitation Settings link, select one of the four types of invitation from the drop-down menu, and then click on the "Test on website" button.


3. Once you're satisfied with the way the invitation looks on your website, and are ready to begin data collection, go back to the Overview page, and click on the START link.  Done. You are now on your way to knowing your audience.

About the beta (and me)

Well, now that the launch is behind us and we have things more or less under control, I thought it was time we gave a little bit of information about the beta and where we’re heading.

But before I do that, I should introduce myself. My name is John Martin, and I’m CEO and co-founder of Crowd Science. I’ll be posting here along with the rest of the team about the product and the research/analytics industry and maybe a little about building the company, but you can also follow me on my personal blog or on Twitter.

So, last week we opened the public beta of our first product, Crowd Science Demographics. As part of the coverage from TechCrunch and Mashable, we gave away a few hundred invitations. Apart from some traffic-induced hiccups on the morning of the launch, we’re doing pretty well capacity-wise, and with a little luck we’ll open up some more spaces later this week.

What are we working on right now? Apart from some amazing new reporting features that we can’t talk about just yet…

• We realize that the application is pretty thin on documentation, and are in the process of filling in all of the various nooks and crannies with instructions and descriptions and are working on a proper help system.
• We have some new tools for testing and customizing invitations in the works.
• We’re just about ready to switch on the inline survey system that we’ve hinted at on our website.

And, of course, we’re doing lots of research on research, trying to figure out what’s working in the field (and more importantly, what isn’t) and why.

As always, feedback is very much appreciated. You can leave a comment here or send us an email or start a thread over on our Get Satisfaction page.

Launch press coverage

The Crowd Science Demographics launch was an exciting milestone for everyone on the team. And the press coverage was amazing. Here are a few of the links:

• Jason at TechCrunch
• Kristen at Mashable
• Dan at VentureBeat
• Techmeme
• Devour

Thanks all, much appreciated!

Launch morning update

It's launch morning and mentions on TechCrunch, Mashable and Techmeme are proving to be effective. Response has been fantastic so please be patient as we try and bring in as many publishers as possible into our beta. Not everyone will get in but we'll start sending out more invites as we make room.

Say hello to Crowd Science Demographics

Today, we’re very excited to announce the launch of the public beta for our website audience measurement service, Crowd Science Demographics.

Crowd Science Demographics is a free service that helps publishers learn about their audience and provides the opportunity to better target advertising space on their sites. It’s like Google Analytics, but focused on demographics and attitudes rather than clicks.

We collect data by inviting a small number of visitors to take short, topic area-specific surveys that have been carefully constructed to yield reliable and useful responses. Results can be viewed in our reporting interface, exported for further analysis, or shared using our media kit hosting service.

Head over to our overview page for more information, or to the join page to sign up!

Thank you to all of the Crowd Scientists for their huge efforts getting this thing live.

Welcome!