Berger back at his conversation starting ways

Hot off the heels of his last popular online-survey efforts, the SciGuy Eric Berger has come up with another online survey that will probably be wildly popular — and cause quite a stir.

Last time Berger asked his readers for their thoughts on science and religion. Now he wants their opinions on global warming:

Here’s your chance to sound off on global warming, be you a believer, skeptic or undecided on the whole issue. The survey will cost you nothing, is ad-free and will help me better understand my readers. You can also tell me if you’re sick of global warming coverage.

One reason Berger does these online survey is because he wants to understand his audience better, which he hopes will allow him to serve them better in the future. With his science and religion survey, Berger learned that, despite being a science blog, many of his readers were religious. Berger is very careful not to offend religious readers, while many national science blogs are outwardly anti-religion.

His first survey proved to be quite popular too. He announced the results on July 2, and people are still commenting on the post. Each time people come back to read and post new comments, it drives Berger’s page views up. Plus, he is clearly building user loyalty, which is important for beat bloggers to do. 

It is possible to get good traffic with one-way communication, but with two-way communication like Berger employs, he gets lots of repeat traffic. There are only so many people Berger can target for his blog (unique visitors), but there is no real limit to the amount of traffic he can get out of his most loyal users (visits, page views and time spent).

The better of a community that Berger builds, the more of his users that he can convert into loyal users that frequent his blog several times a day. But that requires actively engaging in two-way communication. Berger is very active in the comment section of his blog, and now he is trying online surveys for the biggest — and often most controversial — subjects in science.

Online tools that foment conversations help build user loyalty.