MyColts research for fun and profit

Surveys are proving to be one of the most popular and the most reviled features inside mycolts. People love to create surveys, but some folks are using surveys to stock up on “colts cred”, which causes other members to get too many sureys in their inboxes.

Alas, pleasing all the people all the time remains our full-time challenge.

Anyway, I have been pondering lately what is the best way to gather feedback from the mycolts community? Should I do a focus group? Should I send out a survey myself? Or what? Not surprisingly, the users are starting to do this work for me. One industrious user posted a 4 question survey to see what other fans are thinking about mycolts.

Here are the results (so far):

What is your favorite area on mycolts?

What is your favorite network?

What is the most valuable feature on mycolts?

Which feature needs the most improvement?

Only 80 people have taken the survey, so the results are far from scientific. Plus, when you take a look at where people are actually spending their time (see Omniture stats below), it’s easy to see how survey results can be misleading.

MyColts pages receiving the most traffic from 7/15 to 8/14

From this data it is clear that people like to check out other peoples’ profile pages. They also spend time in their dashboard, which by they way is where one finds the tools to manage one’s profile page. They also spend time with their inboxes. All these pages rank ahead of the “home” page, which is interesting since the “home” page on colts.com is by far the dominant page.

We’ve been learning a lot by watching what the fans actually DO on the site. I’ll post more soon about moderation challenges and resources (i.e. what it takes to host one of these sites). Those seem to be the biggest questions out there among folks considering launching their own “social” sites.