karalyne

This summer I am interning for Alabama Congressman Mike Rogers -R. One of my daily task is to scan through all the newspapers, in his district, seeing if anything was written about him.

As I was scanning, I came across the headline of Senators use Podcast. I was shocked. Podcast are fairly new and many students at Auburn University have never heard of such. I was shocked that our nation’s leaders are using them to get out what matters to them most. This webite has some examples.  Another Example

 A podcast is is a method of publishing files to the Internet. This is a great way for senators to not only get their opinions out to the public, but also bring awareness to our nation’s issues.

This week has been the dreaded exams week and what a better way to procrastinate studying than play on the facebook. While clicking on different options, I came across some interesting statistics about the Auburn facebook community.

33% of females at Auburn University that are members of the facebook are in a relationship.

4% of females at Auburn are in a complicated relationship.

3,121 photos were uploaded yesterday.

2,131 Auburn people were poked yesterday.

7.6% of Auburn loves to watch Old School

5.5% of Auburn live in Birmingham

Some of these statistics to me are not very accurate. Many girls and guys play around about being in a relationship with others. For example, one of my friends said she was married to one of our best guy friends.

That goes along with poking too. First of all, poking is this option to tell someone that they are good-looking or that that person has a have crush on you.  Many people like to poke just for fun and get someone’s hopes up when it says you have been poked.

Over all I think the rest of the statistics are fairly accurate, everyone loves to upload pictures to leteveryone see what they have been up to and since Birmingham is the biggest city in Alabama, many people from it attend our school.

The facebook is so addictive! I recommend you not to join!!

Well, I have found a blog I love! Gray Charles is a blog all about the American Idol, Taylor Hicks. I have found myself really into this season mainly because my best friend’s dad was Taylor’s dad’s roommate in college! Also, my fiance and I watched Taylor perform on our first date at Lester’s in Orange Beach, Alabama. 

The site is very informational for the upcoming shows. This week, the contestants have to perform a song from the year they were born and a recent song. Taylor is singing, “Play that Funky Music White Boy” and a Beatles song that was just released.  He first chose “Night Moves” by Bob Segar, but was told it did not have much difficulty.  Kathrine McPhee is singing KT Tunstall’s “Black Horse and the Cherry Tree.”

In a survey conducted by the Birmingham News paper, with 65.6% of the votes, Paris will head home this week. A little over 7% think Taylor will be heading home. =( 

 I, unfortunately, love reality television and this just makes my obsession worse. Everyone watch the final 5 compete tonight on Fox’s American Idol. Vote for Taylor!!

 

Today, we had our WEGL clients come into class and listen to our presentation. They were quite impressed about our findings. Some areas that we discussed with them are the time a day students listen to the radio, what their likes and dislikes were about the station and should WEGL do a pod cast.

Many students said they listen to the radio from 2 p.m. to 6 p.m. followed by 6 p.m. to 10 p.m. We figured students are driving around doing errons during the earlier times and for the later times sitting around doing homework while listening to the radio. We recommended to WEGL that they play alternative/rock music during this time since this is what type of music students preferred to.

We found that our coding for likes and dislikes was quite confusing. With almost 2000 responses, the open-ended questions came with many comments. The likes and dislikes were pretty equal with 23% of the responses. Many people liked it, but there was more than likely a negatvie followed by the “like it” comment.  The negative usually was the format or the frequency of the station. The dislikes were the format period.

As for the pod cast, many students for not familiar with one. Our client was quite surprised, but we informed him that we were actually unaware of one until we had the PR Style and Design class. We recommended that WEGL should look into doing a pod cast in the future, but now was not the time due to the lack of awareness.

Overall, our client was very impressed with our findings. WEGL will use them to implement new marketing strategies and also when formating the station.

This Monday, our group is presenting our findings for our WEGL survey. Our presentation will be done through power point slides with graphs of our findings. Thank goodness we used Formsite because this program automatically tabulates the responses and we are able to use the graphs it has provided for us!

We also have to turn in a written report about our findings including procedures, findings and methodolgy. At first we were all going to get together at the library and write it togther, but none of us could find a time that was good for us to meet. So we decided to use a Wiki, something Robert taught us last semester! He was so proud of us! We split up the responsibilities and have began editing each other’s work. This is allowing us to work when we can and still get the paper done. Wiki’s are great for a group project!

Today in class, our group got together and started to hand out jobs to each member in tabulating our results. We had a total of 1,982 responses in a three day period. For the most part, tabulating will be easy because of the website we used, Formsite.com. This site will show us cross tabulations, pie charts and graphs (lucky for us).

But we did have two open-ended questions. The question read “If WEGL 91.1 were to offer talk shows on a podcast. What would you be interested in downloading?” Many participants read the question as “would you be interested in downloading?” Flaw #1, many answered with a yes or a no. At least when looking over the answers, it will be easy to tabulate. The other open-ended question, is what the participants feelings were toward the station. We are now going to have to decode these answers and find what some of the top repeated feelings are.

Another flaw we found, was a multiple choice question that allowed the participant to check all that apply. Because of this, we will not be able to tell the station what type of music most people listen too. Looking at the results, 1,378 people like alternative rock while in second place, with 967 people, like country. We will not be able to report to the station what Auburn students listen to the most.

These are just a few flaws so far we have found. We do not find them very threatening to our survey results and accuracy. The station really wanted to know if students were even aware of the station and what source do they receive their music from. Those results are great.

Well, I totatlly have faith in my school. Yesterday afternoon around 3:30, our WEGL survey was E-mailed to the student body. By 6:00 we already had 998 respondents. That is so many that Robert had to up his monthly subscription with Formsite, the survey design website we decided to use. We found out that since he had to up his subscription that many students responses could not be tabulated due to maximum capacity. Robert figured up that we lost about 400 responses.

Today in class, we checked on our status. We had almost 1800 responses. I was totally shocked. Robert expected us to have only around 400. Boy, did we blow him away. Even when looking at some of the results it amazed me how the male to female ratio was pretty even. Also, we figured up that our margin of error as of right now was around 3%. 

Before the survey was sent out, we planned on cutting off the responses after Friday. We are now hoping for at least 3000 responses. This would represent only 13% of the student body, but for a class survey we find this very successful!

In a January 2005 USA Today poll, Nearly two-thirds of those under 30 years old don’t think Social Security will be able to pay them any benefit when they stop working. 57 percent of people 20 to 49 years old agree.

 For one of my classes I had to write a speech on Social Security and just how safe is it for our generation. When I first started to look for information, I came across this poll and was schocked. I never really thought of retirement.

In a speech given by President Bush at Auburn University in Montgomery last year, he said if we do not modernize the Social Security system then it will go bankrupt by the time we are ready to retire! He would like to use an alternative plan using private personal accounts. By the sound of it, the plan seems great and we would receive better benefits than using the Social Security system.

Towards the end of my search, I found a statement that said Americans aged 18 – 34 are more likely to believe in the existence of UFOs than in the future existence of Social Security. That is pretty outlandish, but a great way to get one to see just how serious this problem is! Hopefully within the next few years, Bush will do something about it and not pass it off to the next president like previous ones.

For our group assignment in conducting the WEGL survey, my group and I have decided to use Survey Monkey to create our survey.  Survey Monkey’s purpose is “to enable anyone to create professional online surveys quickly and easily.”

We found that by using this program it would allow the participants easy access to our survey via the web and make it easier on us when gathering and analyze the results.

Survey Monkey allows you to pick between 15 color variations and allows for 17 different types of questions, such as single choice, multiple choice, rating scales and drop-down menus. Other features include: no limits, create skip logic (conditional Logic), require answers, randomize answer choices, add a logo, generate popup invitations, custom redirect, filter results, share results and download results.

With all these features, it is obvious this is a great program that will allow us to ask our questions, get the responses we need and be able to analyze them.

We are planning on sending out a school-wide E-mail with a description of the survey and the survey link following. We are in hopes of getting at least 400 respondents.

For my marketing class we had to analyze the Sullivan Ford Auto World case study. To explain, in brief, the owner of the company died and the daughter had to take over. The company was not doing that well and the daughter was wondering why.

Whenever a customer buys a car, a research firm retained by the Ford Motor Company, sends a survey to the customer about their purchase. The daughter used this survey to try to decide how to help the company recover from its lost.

 The survey was sent, by mail, to the new purchasers within 30 days of making the purchase. It asked to use a five-point likert scale to rate their satisfaction with the dealership sales department, vehicle preparation, and the characteristics of the vehicle itself. The survey also asked how likely the purchaser would be to recommend the dealership, the salesperson, and the manufacturer to someone else. Other questions asked whether the customers had been introduced to the dealer’s service department and been given explanations on what to do if their cars needed service. Finally, there were demographic questions.

Dealers receive monthly reports summarizing customer ratings of their dealership. From this summary, the daughter noticed the overall level of satisfaction with the service at Auto World was consistently low, placing it in the bottom 25% of all Ford dealerships. The worst rating was promptness, convenience and the appearance of the service department.  Also, when asked to use the dealership again, most said they would use another Ford dealer or “some other place.”

I believe this survey was very vital to the daughter’s decision to either spend money and make the company better or accept the offer to sale.  She noticed that there was much more than expected to get the company back to where it belonged. It had to regain its reputation, which we all know is very hard to do. If it was not for the survey and the information that it brought in, the daughter would of never really realized why sales were down. This survey was very beneficial.