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The Blog Poll Platform You Should Avoid

(Updated)

Polls are an easy, simple way of getting immediate customer/reader feedback, and also letting the voters know what their community thinks.

There are a number of good products to chose from, like dPolls often seen on TechCrunch, the platform GigaOM is using (whatever it is), Blogflux and Majikwidget seen at Guy Kawasaki’s, PollDaddy used by the ReadWriteWeb …etc. I tend to use Zoho Polls, which, other than its native display also allows me to easily chart out the results using Zoho Sheet. All these apps have a clean interface, are easy to use and immediately display vote results right where you voted (in the blog).

The one you should avoid is Blogpoll. My friends at Atlassian put out a poll, and after voting, and a ridiculously looong wait, this is what I saw:

WTF… where’s my poll? Ahh, perhaps that blue bar that says “your title”? Yes. If you scroll down, you can actually see your poll results in a tiny box, surrounded by a jungle of advertising.

Now, I understand the economics of a free service, but guess what: when you overdo advertising so badly that customers have too look for what they came for … chances are, they won’t be repeat customers. And that’s the end of your service.

(P.S. Jon, I hope you’ll still invite me to the User Conference…)

Update (3/15): Jon is now running a poll on what’s the best poll software… cast your vote over at Atlassian.