Tribal Tool-Kit

International sporting events such as the Commonwealth Games and the Olympic Games are often used by host countries to highlight their positive attributes, which in turn are meant to increase trade and tourism. To do this they often wow us with opening ceremonies, amaze us with carefully crafted cultural stories, and persuade us with the experiences of the thousands of people who attend the events.

Unfortunately, with the high demands of modern media networks, minor errors start to appear as major ones, and major errors appear as a total debacles. Thus trying to win over an audience in this environment is extremely difficult.

Interested in how well the organisers had done so far in promoting India, we asked Twitter and Facebook their reaction to the Delhi 2010 Commonwealth games via one simple question…

“When you think about the Delhi2010 Games, what is the first word that comes to mind?”

And this was the result….

While the result offer interesting insights into the minds of the people who have completed the survey, it is important to highlight a few characteristics of this survey that have impacted the result and possibly impact the way it should be perceived.

1. Number of survey participants

Having done a brief search (finding channel 10 data on Australian TV Watching Community- Throng site) on viewer-ship  of the Commonwealth games “Day 1″, I discovered that between 670,000 and 1.3 million people had seen various events through out the day. This suggests that the 66 people who took part in the survey may not provide the best overall representative reaction to the games. This result  is however still representative of the group of people who took part and representative of part of our tribe.

2. Frequency of words

Asking survey respondents to only give one word means the chance of getting a wide range of frequencies is much less than it would be if we asked for three words from each respondent. Tribal Tool-Kit mini survey allows you to choose one, two or three words to enter. This time we chose only one word to force people to put more thought into their response, honing it into something more valuable. Tribal Tool-Kit also allows cleaning of results to avoid typos, and completely meaningless responses, though we did not use the feature this time.

So what is the overall result?

While this survey is just a bit of fun, it does suggest to me that while Australian’s think the games are a “boring” “shambles” verging on “chaos”, we still enjoy winning “gold”.

Want to try you hand at setting up your own survey. Why not sign-up and give it a go…