SodaHead: The opinion maker
By Vivek | May 4th, 2007 at 10:14 pm ET
I had written about SodaHead couple of months back when they had just launched. At that time it was not exactly clear where they are headed. Yesterday I had discussion with SodaHead team in which we discussed among other things their product strategy and future plans.
What SodaHead is offering is not exactly new in the market, but the way the application is being implemented is going to make the difference. To understand SodaHead’s advantage, let’s at the existing options in the market for running a poll - Vizu, Polldaddy, Grouptivity, Circleup, and few more. Each of them is a great idea and solves some very specific problems. Out of all of them, Polldaddy has gained max traction with users/bloggers. But one big fundamental piece that is missing is viral spread of polls. You put out a poll, it stays on your site. You might put it on 5 different sites of yours, or maybe on your blog network. Distribution is still limited. Well that is not exactly viral in the viral sense of things.
As compared to that SodaHead presents an all together different use case. You create a poll at SodaHead, and embed the poll widget on your blog. Any user coming to SodaHead.com can vote on it and if he finds it interesting enough, he can grab the embed code and have the poll running on his site. As poll creator you don’t need to manage permissions or authorize or do anything. Users just grab the code and embed it on the site. Frictionless viral spread. Besides that the big difference at SodaHead is that users can also comment on your poll, or just leave votes. The comments part is really important ’cause it let’s users express their opinion instead of being another yes/no guy on a poll that gets 200 votes. That piece of information is really important to capture, otherwise as a poll creator you would never know the real thinking behind the vote. This combined with easy widgetization and spread of SodaHead polls would drive many more comments to your poll which otherwise you wont get if the poll was running just on your site.
Bigger aim for SodaHead team is to become opinion maker of the web. Anytime you want opinion of the masses, you should think of SodaHead being the perfect place to get started. If and when SodaHead gets this kind of traction, it would for sure challenger the authority of Yahoo Answers and likes ’cause these applications can deliver lot of information but without an opinion.
Links:
Sodahead
on May 6th, 2007 at 6:32 pm
Vizu.com has allowed people to comment on polls or to “rip” or “copy” polls they like as described above for over a year. With Vizu, you can even customize the colors on a poll that you copy to fit the look and feel of your site.
If you come across a Vizu poll on a site, you will notice the “copy” and “comment” links beneath the answers on any poll on which you vote. If you’d like to see a variety of Vizu polls embedded in a blog, go to Vizuble.com.
If you are searching for polls to add to your site, you can go to Vizu.com and search through 1000’s of polls that you are free to export to your site with coloring that matches your site. Just hit the “export to your site or blog” link that you will find on the answer page of every poll.
on May 7th, 2007 at 7:11 pm
Dan’s probably a hire from Vizi.com, at least the way that comment was written it seems pretty obvious.
I’ve tried using Vizu’s widget and PollDaddy’s widget. As far as customization is concerened i think its a tie, as far as comment is concerend. Dan’s right, you can comment, but you have to leave the widget and the page the widget is on to do so.
I’m assuming SodaHeads’ key differentiator here is that this all takes place within the widget.
Also, it would be nice if one of these companies allowed for video embeds in the question and answer choices.
Another difference i noticed about SodaHead is that there is an actual thriving community there as opposed to the other sites.
on May 7th, 2007 at 11:50 pm
Joseph,
You are right on that.
Dan,
It is a kind of pain to decipher all the varied branding messages your product sends out. $100 for Answers, and free polling with a social component that is hidden somewhere on the site.
on June 25th, 2007 at 4:37 pm
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