Kiana is just a “small town girl” from Elkhart, Indiana (the RV capital of the world). She attended Miami University (Ohio) for undergrad and grad school where she studied Communication. She comes to us from PhaseOne Communication, a market research company located in Los Angeles.

She just saw these movies: Dark Knight and Journey to the Center of the Earth
Her favorite movie of all time: Tie between Gone With the Wind & The Color Purple
Her TV Taste: Grey’s Anatomy, Desperate Housewives, Flip This House, and CNN (obsessed with the news)
Favorite T.V. show of all time: The Cosby Show
Favorite color: Red
Favorite way to spend time: Exploring the city of LA with her boyfriend, enjoying a great meal, a nice glass of wine and good conservation with friends

Kiana will be managing projects for the West Coast Media and Entertainment Insights Group (Theatrical, TV Pilots, etc). Expect to see emails from her soon!

She can be reached at 310-736-3464, kwilliams@otxresearch.com, AIM: Kiana OTX, or MSN: KianaDW

What is SHA-1?

The SHA-1 (SHA= “Secure Hash Algorithm”) hash function is the most secure cryptographic hash function available. Encrypting the email address of your users into SHA-1 will protect your members’ privacy and your ownership of the email (since it is computationally impossible to decrypt a SHA1 hash) while allowing us to ensure the uniqueness of survey takers’ email addresses.

What does a SHA-1 hash look like?

The SHA1-encryption produces a 40-character string.

Example:

panelist@yahoo.com becomes: “dd7050b86e4273115e80b08be85580be304abbde”

How to add it to survey entry link?

&sha1=[40-digit SHA-1 hash] can be appended to any OTX survey entry link.

Example:

- survey entry link: http://survey.otxresearch.com/SurveyEntry.aspx?e=60170063-3788-4eb3-913b-a7c6ff2f4dbe

- survey entry link with SHA1 for panelist@yahoo.com : http://survey.otxresearch.com/SurveyEntry.aspx?e=60170063-3788-4eb3-913b-a7c6ff2f4dbe&sha1=dd7050b86e4273115e80b08be85580be304abbde

- survey entry link with SHA1 and PID for panelist@yahoo.com (member 12345): http://survey.otxresearch.com/SurveyEntry.aspx?e=60170063-3788-4eb3-913b-a7c6ff2f4dbe&sha1=dd7050b86e4273115e80b08be85580be304abbde&pid=12345

What’s the effect of using the SHA-1 hash?

There are no effects at this time. We will just collect the SHA-1 for every respondent you send into our systems.

In a few weeks though, we will turn on some additional security features based on frequency and past participation. These rules will add to the current existing ones based on panelist id (PID) and various cookies and objects, and will consequently make it more difficult for professional survey takers to take multiple surveys in our system.

 Dorothy will be working though, so don’t hesitate to contact her if you need anything!

ddotson at otxresearch dot com

AIM: DorAtOTX

Skype: dordotson

MSN: ddotson@otxresearch.com

Mobile: 646-667-7212

Dear partners,

The entire OTX team is joining me to wish you a very Happy New Year.

2007 has been quite a year.  With your support, we have managed to reach our ambitious goals for growth, and I am confident that next year’s Honomichl ranking will show how we continue to climb the ladder to the top.

Our growth in 2007 required us to increase the amount of sample we needed.  As you know, increasing traffic is not the only way to get more respondents – being able to convert traffic into completes is also key, so we spent a lot of time last year working on two priorities:  to help you send more qualified sample (what, when, how) and to improve user experience in our surveys (to decrease the number of break-offs and encourage future participation).

We are proud of the following achievements:

• We successfully reorganized our department to give more autonomy to our sample coordinators, now in charge of their own vertical from start to finish.
• We transitioned from Windows Media Player to Flash for the majority of our video surveys, while still providing a secure environment to our more copyright-sensitive clients
• We transitioned to Firefox compatibility for almost all surveys.  A few of our trackers are still IE-only for data integrity purposes but should be gradually transitioned in the following weeks
• We added the “try again?” prompt to let users decide if they want to try to find another survey in the router or term
• We launched the new FSA variable to let you choose between router or stand-alone sends at any given time
• We added many new features to the Knowledge Center (survey specs, price, helpdesk email address, termination report, etc) to let you manage your sample better
• We included standard survey quality questions at the end of all our surveys to build satisfaction norms and identify problematic surveys - more on this later…

With those accomplishments came also some new challenges.  At the end of the year, it became apparent to our Engineering team that our growth and the addition of new features would not be possible without a new architecture for our systems.  As a consequence, the past two months have included some scheduled server downtime to allow our team to upgrade our main database.  This major enhancement to our servers and database architecture will boost our surveys and reporting tools’ performance to unprecedented levels.  Our apologies if the system cutover affected your team and user experience.  The good news is that most of the work is now done, and you should already have noticed a significant improvement in our systems’ response.

Now, what’s ahead in 2008?  No revolution, but mostly a continuation of what we worked on in the past years, to support continued growth of our business:

• More quality control:  it is well-known that 2007 was also the year of online research’s first teenage crisis.  A number of publications and conferences have highlighted the need for online researchers to be more careful about the quality of data collected online.  While nothing new was learned in 2007, our clients have become increasingly vigilant about the quality of responses given online.  In particular, the industry has become more aware of the need to curb the number of hyperactive or “professional” survey takers and inattentive respondents.  In the short term, it means that you may continue to see a growing number of users which we will have to invalidate during or after they take a survey.  We will also officially start to collect a SHA1 encryption of our users’ address to improve our de-duplication efforts.
• Better user experience: taking surveys should appeal to anyone, not just a few “professional” survey takers, but to get there a few things need to change all along the value chain of market research.  If poor survey experience is a global problem, we are determined to play our role in a cure.  In 2008, we will continue to measure user satisfaction, and set ambitious goals with our clients to provide the best online survey experience possible. 
• Better fielding tools: finally, we will work hard to develop a new generation of tools to let you better manage the sample you send to us, and the time it takes to successfully handle our projects.

In summary, our plan is for 2008 to be the year of “sustainable growth”.  We are very excited to start the year with such an ambitious agenda, and we hope to be able to achieve our goals with your support.  Your feedback is very valuable, so please do not hesitate to contact us if you have any suggestion.

Sincerely,

The OTX Online Community Team:

Annie, Breanna, Chris, Don, Dorothy, Nicole, Nikhil, Olivier, Ted and Van

Van’s an LA native and was raised in the San Gabriel Valley, aka the best place to get Chinese food in LA! She attended both UCLA (for undergrad) and USC (for 1 semester of law school), but she’s definitely a Bruin at heart. She’s eclectic and enjoys a variety of music, TV, and movies.

She just saw these movies:

Enchanted, Bee Movie, and Lust, Cautio

And wants to see these movies:

The Golden Compass, Charlie Wilson’s War, Atonement

Her favorite movie of all time:

Casablanca

Her TV Taste:

Popular stuff like Heroes, Grey’s Anatomy, anything on Bravo, and the ultimate guilty pleasure - Gossip Girl

Favorite T.V. show of all time:

Friends

Favorite color:

Red

Favorite way to spend time:

Attempting to cook, baking cupcakes, singing karaoke badly, hiking, finding new places to eat, winning at Monopoly and other board games

Greatest accomplishment:

Travelling to Australia, Hong Kong, and Thailand solo

Your first impression of Van may be:

She’s quiet

You’ll find out that the real Van is:

Bossy

Van can be reached via IM at OTXvan. She is included on the Sample-MEI-West distribution list.

Today, the Sample team is excited about the release of the first results of a new syndicated offering by OTX and our partner eCRUSH. The blended sample concept allows us to directly partner with web publishers and allow them to monetize their community with market research surveys. But providing sample to the OTX router is not the only way to get insights from one’s community.

Teen Topix is a good example of how to leverage a publisher’s understanding of a particular audience and combine it with our market research expertise. Do not hesitate to contact us if you have other partnership ideas.
The Teen Topix survey taps into the complex lives of the 13–17 year old set—what’s important to them, their behaviors, and their outlook on life. 750 teens across the country were surveyed.

You can read the official press release here…

Our server (and consequently all live surveys) will be going down for 30 minutes tomorrow (Tuesday) night from 7 PM PST to 7:30 PM PST.

We’re doing some maintenance to make it stronger, faster, better for your users. Thanks in advance for bearing with us.

• You are a fan of Star Wars and want to celebrate the 30^th anniversary with this 30-minute parody
• You are a fan of the animated comedy “Robot Chicken” on Adult Swim
• You have troubles sleeping at night - the show will air every hour as part of a “Robot Chicken” marathon running between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m.
• You want to support a show animated by, among others, Olivier’s girlfriend

We’ve made it easier for you to determine the effectiveness of your targeting efforts and understand the experience your members are having in our surveys.

Simply hover your mouse over the question name and you’ll see what the actual question text is.

Stay tuned for what other enhancements are coming your way in the next few days. Of course, we welcome continued suggestions for new reporting tools. Keep them coming!