It’s all in the question
Research. It’s part of writing pretty much anything. You have to know what you are talking about to talk about it and have anyone care what you are saying.
The topic on my plate right now is beyond my ken, and broad enough that individual interviews won’t yield a large enough amount of data to be relevant. So it is time to write a survey. And we all know how little time there is to connect to a person when asking them to take a survey.
It is important to create a short enough poll to keep the interest of our customers, prospects, or even non-customers. But it also needs to be long enough, and detailed enough, to yield relevant and useful results. This requires a level of skill in asking the questions and fashioning the possible answers. I guess we’ll find out over the next few weeks if I have this skill, or how easily I can learn it.