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Should Bernie Sanders give up?

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Is Batman vs Superman worth watching?

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Use Verified Voting Polls to Run Video Contests

Appalachian Trials — USA TODAY’s Top Outdoor & Hiking Blog — used our Verified Voting poll to run their latest video contest and give away over $10,000 worth of prizes.

They needed a way for their community to vote on the 12 final videos and make sure every voter was human to avoid suspect voting activity. It had plagued their contest for the Badger Sponsorship last year, making it hard to trust the thousands of voting coming in from around the globe.

Zach Davis, Author & Ringleader at Appalachian Trials, chose Wedgies to eliminate suspect voting and power their Reader Vote for this year’s contest because of our Verified Voting feature.

From working with Wedgies during my time at Tech Cocktail (now tech.co), I knew that these guys were the best at being able to parse out voter information. Seeing that they've added a verified voting option to the polls made the decision to use Wedgies a no-brainer. - Zach Davis - Ringleader at Appalachian Trials

Here’s how the Appalachian Trials (not a typo) Badger Sponsorship went down.

The Badger Sponsorship Video Contest

  When you give away $10,000+ dollars of prizes in a contest that relies on voting to help pick the winners, your readers are going to look closely at how you do it.

The Badger Sponsorship asks passionate thru-hikers to submit 90-second video explaining why they’re going to successfully hike the Appalachian Trail, Pacific Crest, or Continental Divide Trail in 2016.

These people care deeply about what this contest can do for them and have an eye for detail that others don’t. Appalachian Trials needed a reliable online polling solution they could embed on their contest landing page for their Reader Vote.

Wedgies Verified Voting made it easy to embed the poll, set a close date for voting and ensure voter accuracy for their Reader Vote — it was so smooth that they didn’t receive a single complaint about the voting!

This is the first year we've run the contest without complaints from contestants of unfair voting. Not only is it time consuming to offer explanations to upset contestants, but this sort of behavior tarnishes the spirit of the contest. - Zach Davis

The Contest Poll 

Creating the Badger Sponsorship poll with an image was easy.

They turned on Verified Voting with a personalized message for the community about why they were asking for emails..

When you turn it on, you can require email addresses from every voter — ensuring their humanity. You can also easily set a date for voting to end, embed your poll and share it on social.

Who gets your vote for the 2016 Badger Sponsorship?

Once the poll was embedded, they shared their poll on Twitter and Facebook to get more traffic and votes to help them make their final decision.

The 2016 Badger Sponsorship Finalists: Vote For Your Favorite https://t.co/9wRtnGhQwP #AT2016 #PCT #Hiking pic.twitter.com/6LBCOofmyk

— Appalachian Trials (@AppTrials) January 25, 2016

The Results

Once the poll results were in, Appalachian Trial combined the verified votes with votes from an Expert Panel to choose the winners.

The Reader Vote was accurate and verified by every voter submitting their email to participate in the vote. Not only were all the voters certifiably human, Applachian Trials had their emails they could export to create a specific list and email about the poll results.

Video contest success! They got the accurate vote they needed from their community and it was easy.

We were having some trouble with the poll embed on Android devices — a problem solely caused by the code in our theme — and they were able to offer up a solution within the hour.As a result, we received exactly zero complaints at the end of the contest, which is a first! - Zach Davis - Ringleader at Appalachian Trials

If you’re looking for advice on how to hike the Appalachian Trail, ask Zach Davis, author of Appalachian Trials. If you need help setting up Verified Voting for your contest, read this quick article or send us an email, we love to help.

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How to Share a Wedgies Online Poll

Get votes and engagement when you share your Wedgies online poll across social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr & Reddit. Start by embedding it directly in your website, articles, or platforms like Medium to get more traffic. Here’s how:

Embed Your Poll

Wedgies makes it easy to embed your online poll using HTML, iFrame, via our Wordpress plugin, or on Medium. Embed your poll before you share on social media if you want to get votes AND more traffic to your site.

HTML - To embed your poll in an article or on your web page, just copy and paste the HTML code and paste it onto your page.

iFrame - If your CMS (content management system) doesn’t support Javascript use this iFrame code to embed your poll.

Wordpress - Once you’ve installed the Wedgies Wordpress Plugin, just copy and paste the link from our embed page into Wordpress to display your poll.

Medium - Thanks to an integration with Embedly, all you have to do is copy and paste your question link into Medium to share your online poll in your article.

Share Your Poll on Social

Whether you embed your poll on a website or not, you can easily share it across all your favorite social networks.

Once you create your poll you get easy access to voting links you can copy and paste anywhere.

Click on “More Sharing Options” and you’ll find one-click sharing for Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr & Reddit.

Share Your Poll on Facebook

Create a new poll to share on Facebook or share one you already love from your dashboard.

Share Your Poll on Twitter

Create a new poll to share on Twitter or share one you already love from your dashboard.

Share Your Poll on Tumblr

Create a new poll to share on Tumblr or share one you already love from your dashboard.

Share Your Poll on Reddit

Create a new poll to share on Reddit or share one you already love from your dashboard.

Questions?

If you have any questions about embedding or sharing your online polls, we’d love to answer them. Send us a message or a tweet.

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What The Bernie vs Hillary Debate Reveals About Online Polls

Who won the democratic presidential debate? Hillary or Bernie? 

The internet is torn. Headlines from major media outlets claim a resounding victory for Hillary Clinton, but focus groups and online polls run by those same outlets tell a different story. 

 Every available metric, including Google searches, shows Bernie as the favorite on the night — so what gives?

What Does it Mean to Win a Debate?

All that matters in the end of any election are votes.

Candidates gather votes to their side by showing the public they agree on the same issues. Debates are designed to show the public how the views of the candidates compare, so that people can decide who they like the most.

So, one way to judge a debate is by who had the most correct and therefore, relatable position on the issues. That’s how the experts called the debate. The problem with that is subjectivity  rules the less expert popular opinion. So, who decides on what’s correct and relatable?

Political experts and the media? Or, the people who vote?

Presidential debates are won by getting the American people, the voters on board, not the experts. But, they have to be the right votes.

The Damn Emails Moment

In the biggest moment of the debate, Bernie captured everyone’s attention by sticking up for Hillary — including Clinton voters who could be swayed to his side.

Politico covered this moment well, with the Sanders campaign calling the Clinton emails the “intercepted pass” Bernie needed to reach Clinton voters to his side.

Inarguably, this moment got Bernie a lot of attention, but how do we know if it shifted the right voters to his side or not?

Media outlets ran focus groups, realtime social media polls, and embedded online polls to "find out".

The Focus Groups

In a CNN focus group after the debate, 10 people thought Bernie Sanders won vs the 8 that thought Hillary won. 2 of the people who raised their hands for Bernie also raised their hands for Hillary — not very scientific.

Fusion brought in the millennials, a dozen 18-to-34-year-olds, to see what they thought and that panel voted 8 to 3 for Sanders.

Fox News also ran a focus group of democratic voters from the key swing state of Florida, and they thought Bernie won the debate.

Trouble with these focus groups? Small sample sizes and questionable controls.

CNN’S Real-time Facebook Poll

To cast a wider net, CNN asked “the kids” on Facebook who they thought was winning the debate in real time.

All the responses were heavily in favor of Bernie Sanders — with the overall win given to Bernie — 75% to Hillary’s 18%.

What was missing from CNN’s real time poll? Shared data about the “kids” that voted.

What country were they from? What states did they live in? How old were they? Were they Republican or Democrat?

We all know this data is available in Facebook Insights, so why can’t it be applied to the poll?

Online Polls from Time & Slate

Bernie was also the overwhelming favorite in a number online polls — two of the biggest coming from Time and Slate.

The Time poll has 273,886 votes and Sanders with 59% of the votes and Hillary with only 12%. Surprisingly, Jim Webb is in second with 27% — surprising because focus groups and experts agreed he didn’t do so well.

The Slate poll, with over 97,000 voters, shows Bernie with 67% and Hillary with 15% — Webb also got 15% here, showing that people might like him more than we think.

What was missing from these polls and other online polls? Again, data about who voted.

Polls After The Debate

During and right after the debate, we all relied on opinions from Washington insiders and the online results to tell us who won.

Politico reported that, “Clinton campaign officials also said they were skeptical of online metrics that can be manipulated through paid marketing that campaigns launch on social media, and that are in general unscientific.”

Their concerns are valid.

After waiting for more methodological polls to come out, they show that Hillary won among democratic voters.

But, waiting for scientific polls to be conducted over the phone or email doesn’t make sense anymore — there’s no reason to wait.

Online Polling is the Future

Google Analytics, Facebook Insights, Kiss Metrics … the list of ways we can collect comprehensive online data is a long one.

The old methods of scientific polling need to catch up to the 21st century. Social media gives us a powerful way to quickly aggregate voters, collect their votes, and collect their data at the same time  —  a way that lets us collect data first and apply statistical analysis second.

You don’t need to put as much work in to create a representative sample up front when you can collect 100s of thousands of votes right now and narrow survey data down to representative samples after the fact. But, online polling needs work to realize its full potential, too.

So who Won the Debate?

Hillary took the win after all the dust settled.

But, this event shows why scientific polling and online polling need to come together.

It’s the perfect example of what Wedgies online polling is working to solve for. We’re going to make it possible to make online polls scientific and predictive.

The next Republican debate is scheduled for October 28th. It's the perfect opportunity to engage your readers by creating a poll. Try it out.

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How to Create a Wedgies Online Poll

Learning how to create a Wedgies online poll can get you more traffic to an article, help you make decisions, and get you more social shares and engagement across your networks. Here’s how to create an online poll with Wedgies.com:

Step 1: Poll Question 

Coming up with the right question is the first challenge. It needs to be 100 characters or less so that you have room for answers and can easily tweet your poll. Poll people on what they want for lunch, or find out what people think about news and product announcements. 

For example, when Apple announce their electric car, we came up with this question to share.

Step 2: Poll Answers 

Two choices work well when you’re focused on sharing a poll on social channels because it makes it easier to display and engage with. But, don’t be afraid to add other options, especially if you're embedding your poll—people vote on polls with many answers, too. Add emojis for flair.  

Step 3: Poll Image 

People are visual creatures and choosing the right image for your poll will help it get shares and votes. You can upload files from your computer or use links from image sites like imgur. Once you find the right image, you can crop it quickly and you’re ready to customize your poll display. 

Step 4: Customize Poll Display Options 

Each of these options gives you the power to customize your poll for the unique way you want to use it. If you want to share your poll as is, skip these options and click “Preview Poll” to create it and share it.

Make the Results of this Poll Private

Hide the results from users after they vote so that you can publish results at a later date.

Hide 'View Results' from Voters

This option hides a CTA over the image to view poll results before voting and can encourage more votes.

Hide Vote Totals from Voters

Show the percentages, but hide the vote totals from each answer.

Hide Your Profile Picture from Voters

Don’t want your profile pic on the poll? No problem. Hide it with this option.

Hide Social Sharing Buttons

Eliminate social sharing buttons from your poll to avoid distracting from other actions.

Set End Date

Set an end date for voting on a contest or end voting right now.

Step 5: Preview & Share Your Poll

At this screen your poll has been created. Take a look and see if you want to make any changes before you share your poll. modify your online poll size and more appearance options for a custom embed on your website, blog post, or article. Share your poll with the embed options on the page or learn how to share your poll here.

Now that you know how, create your poll here.

Please message us if you have any questions or suggested improvements. Thank you!

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Improved Poll Analytics Dashboard

Now you can easily see where your polls are getting votes, views, and shares from with our improved poll analytics.

Analytics are available for every poll on your Wedgies dashboard. Try it out for yourself by clicking on the ‘Analytics’ tab for any poll, or take a look below to get a quick look at the updated feature. 

Where You Get Your Votes

When you share a poll across multiple channels, it’s easy to see where you’re getting the most engagement.

Where You Get Your Views

Quickly see the number of your poll views by channel and a list of your top 10 traffic referrers.

Where Your Polls are Shared

Find out which social networks are getting the most shares for your poll so that you understand how to focus your future efforts.

Head to your analytics dashboard and click on the ‘Analytics’ tab on any poll to access this improved feature.

Have any feedback on our updated analytics? We’d love to hear it, send us a message.

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No Sleep Till SOTU

 How Wedgies powered online polls for the White House SOTU livestream.

"We want to run polls for a big event toward the end of January. Is it possible to remove your branding?" 

Our startup is named Wedgies. We get that question a lot. 

What made this conversation different was that the White House was asking. And the event was kind of a big deal. 

The State of the Union. Also known as SOTU. 

If you don’t remember what you learned in High School Civics, the US Constitution requires the President to address Congress periodically to update them on the “state of the union”. 1965 was the first time the State of the Union address was televised publicly. These days, SOTU is streamed live on Youtube from Whitehouse.gov and they wanted online polls to go with it.

We said yes. 

At Wedgies, we help everyone from publishers like the Wall Street Journal collect poll data from their readers to regular people deciding where to go for lunch as a team. If it can be voted on, Wedgies can power it. 

"We will be hosting the livestream of the State of the Union on a special page we are developing on Whitehouse.gov. We want to let viewers vote on questions in real time during the speech using your platform." 

“How many visitors are you expecting to that page?" we asked. 

They told us the number of visitors they were preparing for. "Will you be able to support that?" 

We said we’d be ready. 

Now we had an agreement with the White House to power polling on Whitehouse.gov where our polls would be viewed by millions of Americans over a two hour period. 

Wedgies needed to scale up to handle that many voters, and scale quickly. We only had 30 days. There was a lot of work to be done. 

 Preparing Our Playbook 

No team goes into a game without a playbook and we needed to develop ours. 

We had a big goal set by our customer, and hundreds of thousands of concurrent users isn't a number you can really test against while load testing and scaling. 

We started by breaking that number down into other metrics we could measure and test against. 

We created plays, or a series of checklists, that we knew we would need to do before or during the SOTU. Once we had them set, we ran our playbook past every expert and service provider who would talk to us. 

We asked them to challenge our assumptions and some of them were extremely helpful. A lot of them thought we were crazy. While we load tested we found bottlenecks that needed to be fixed. And, we found failure scenarios that were added to our playbook. e.g. What do we do if we lose a node during the event? 

Over those 30 days we adopted #NoSleepTillSOTU as our company hashtag. Somewhere between the early morning load tests and late night emails I started to have the same nightmares I had in college. You know, the ones where you are taking a final in a class that you somehow went all semester without attending? 

 That’s the one. 

 Go for Wedgies 

Finally, it was January 20th, 2015. The day of the State of the Union. We had our playbook filled with checklists and started running through them early in the morning. We ran some last minute tests, continued to monitor everything, and set up our situation room. 

Everything looked solid. 

An hour before the event, we dialed into a phone number provided by our contacts with the administration and I found myself on a bridge conference call with the White House tech team. I pictured everyone else on the line seated around a table in a dark room like CTU from the TV Show 24. 

"Jimmy from Wedgies here." 

"Welcome, Jimmy from Wedgies."

I double-checked our checklists. There was one empty box. I had called an audible and decided not to run a small load test against production.

Earlier in the day, President Obama's tech team started pushing our polls to the landing page as a test. We were already getting significant traffic to the polls, but nowhere near what we were expecting that evening. 

I decided not to run the load test so we wouldn't cause any potential slowness during their daytime testing efforts that could result in Wedgies not being used that night. 

That turned out to be a near critical mistake. 

When the first poll powered by Wedgies hit the Whitehouse.gov page, there was an empty box. 

Something was not responding! My heart dropped the way only a developer's can when something has broken production. With the added weight of a startup co-founder and CTO watching their product show up blank on the SOTU livestream.

After a quick diagnosis the team concluded there was one very likely reason. The Load Balancers, the front line of our system, weren't quite ready for the load being thrown at them. And if that was the case, the only solution was waiting a short amount of time for more load balancers to spin up to handle the load.

"Is Wedgies good?", the voice on the other end of the line asked. 

I swallowed hard and crossed my fingers, "Wedgies is good. Go for Wedgies."

The next wave of traffic hit us and the polls popped into existence on the White House's website. For the next two hours we continued to monitor our servers. Everything was running smoothly now, like we thought it should from our testing. At the end of the night we had served over 5 million polls to the State of the Union livestream viewers! 

We celebrated with a big group hug, turned Heroku down, and went to Arby's for dinner. 

The next President of the United States is going to look at the current Administration's records and wonder why they paid for 'Wedgies' in January of 2015. We’re looking forward to that call! 

We started Wedgies because we believe voting on the Internet can be better than it is. It was an honor and a challenge to power voting via polls during such an important event for a democratic country. We can't wait to see what 2016 brings. 

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WSJ Asia 2020 Tokyo Summer Olympics Social Poll Case Study

At the end of June, over 40,000 WSJ Asia readers voted on a social poll about which sport should be added to the 2020 Olympic Games in Tokyo. Spoiler alert: bowling beat karate!

WSJ Asia covered the Tokyo organizing committee’s announcement of the 8 sports shortlisted for inclusion at the 2020 Olympic games on their Japan Real Time blog with an article that included a Wedgies social poll.

News coverage about decisions are always ripe for a poll—especially one as big as adding a new sport to the 2020 Olympics. WSJ readers were sure to have an opinion and jump at the chance to share it. The poll fit perfectly with the Tokyo decision story and got readers talking about the article.

Make sure to vote for bowling on this @WSJ @wedgies poll! http://t.co/WT3j0HLAgy #bowling #olympics pic.twitter.com/ZoxWels7XR

— Rolltech (@rolltech) June 26, 2015

The poll was shared thousands of times over Facebook and Twitter—driving a substantial amount of new voters and readers back to the original story and poll. It also gave WSJ Asia data for an interesting follow-up story that all the people who voted would want to read. Here’s how it happened.

The News

On June 22nd, the Tokyo Organising Committee announced a shortlist of 8 sports being considered as an addition to the summer olympic games. With sports like Bowling, Karate, and Baseball being considered, a huge audience of avid fans were waiting to share their opinion about which sport should be added.

8 Sports Considered for 2020 Olympic Games

1. World Baseball Softball Confederation – WBSC

　World Bowling - WB

　World Karate Federation - WKF

　International Roller Sports Federation – FIRS

　International Federation of Sport Climbing - IFSC

　World Squash Federation - WSF

　International Surfing Association - ISA

　International Wushu Federation – IWUF

The Olympic committee wouldn’t be narrowing the list down until July 22nd, or making a final decision until 2016, but that was no reason to keep WSJ readers from making their own decision with a Wedgies interactive poll. WSJ Asia created a poll and embedded it in their Japan Real Time story on the announcement.

WSJ Japan Real Time Article

WSJ Asia runs a blog called Japan Real Time, catering to its readers in Japan about breaking news. The WSJ staff jumped on the new summer Olympics sports announcement and published an article with their interactive poll on the same day—riding the wave of the discussion.

Instead of the story reader engagement going into the comments section to die, the poll brought in 40,000 votes in just 2 days. Page views were amplified by thousands of shares on Facebook through the interactive polls share buttons—along with shares across Twitter and Tumblr.

With interest still rising, they posted a follow-up story 48 hours later.

The Results

WSJ posted this followup article with a breakdown of the poll results after collecting over 40,000 votes in two days. Bowling and karate topped the list, with the closest straggler over 16,000 votes behind. Bowling was the clear favorite, with much of the Twitter chatter reflecting that result.

WSJ Asia, like other premium Wedgies users, have access to analytics for each poll, and they’re able to see the stats on the number of times the poll was shared over Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr shares. They can also find where referral traffic comes from, getting an idea of how their audience finds them.

Coverage of this announcement led to two articles which prompted thousands of likes, shares, and tweets that amplified the discussion around this story for WSJ. This is the perfect example of how to use social polls to add value to real-time news coverage.

Anytime you cover a story based on a decision or vote, a poll can get you more traffic and shares. It’s easy to create and embed a Wedgies poll, try it out here.

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Embedly + Wedgies Make Polls Easy on Medium, Storify & Reddit

Wedgies is excited to announce that we've integrated with Embedly to make it easy for you to embed polls in your favorite platforms like Medium, Reddit, Storify and many others.  If you're not familiar with Wedgies, we make beautifully designed, responsive polls that embed in your content or website and work across Mobile, Tablet, and Desktop.

Top publishers like Engadget and Wall Street Journal, along with other media companies and independent publishers, use Wedgies Polls in their posts and articles to engage readers.

What does our Embedly integration mean for you if you publish content? It means that whenever you include a wedgies.com poll link in your posts on Medium, Reddit or Storify that your link automatically turns into an interactive embedded poll!  

Polls are a great way to interact with your readers and collect structured feedback in realtime, eliminating the unorganized chaos of comments. We like to say, "Not every reader has a comment, but they all have an opinion."

Wedgies polls will match the visual identity of your site or publications, are responsive to work across platform and make it easy for your readers to share their votes out to social media. Wedgies' polls also work within Facebook, Twitter, Wordpress - we're excited for Embedly to give us the power to bring polls to these new platforms as well. 

Medium

Medium is quickly becoming the platform for thoughtful, long-form web content.  Until now, there hasn't been an easy way to collect opinions within Medium. The Medium comment feature is great for qualitative feedback, but it's difficult to use if you're trying to collect organized responses. Now, you can paste a Wedgies Poll url into your Medium story, it will create an embedded poll when published, and users on all devices will be able to give you their opinions.

  Learn more at: wedgies.com/medium

Reddit

Reddit is the promised land for content discovery and has a fanatical user base that creates lively discussions around just about any piece of content. But, it's a tough nut to crack for publishers and whatever you do, it better not look like marketing. If you're asking them to do something that's not a part of the community's behavior, they're not going to do it and you'll be chased out. Luckily, Redditors already use offsite polling to stir conversations in the community and we're excited to give them a way to do that right inside of their reddit posts.

See how to post a poll to Reddit: wedgies.com/reddit

Storify

Storify is the place to aggregate social content that creates compelling realtime news updates and to gather social content from multiple networks into one story. We're excited to incorporate our social polling features into Storify and make it easy for journalists and content curators to use interactive polls to collect data from all their social channels.

Learn how to embed a poll in Storify: wedgies.com/storify

Whether your goal is to get more social shares and incremental traffic on a new editorial article or to find out what people think about an upcoming event in realtime, embedded polls make it easy.

Wedgies integration with Embedly helps you collect the opinions you’re looking for without sending people away from your community or content—win, win.

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New Wedgies Poll Analytics  📊  ✅

More data is a good thing when you can use it. That’s why we designed the new analytics feature for each poll on your dashboard, to help you make more informed decisions from your poll data.

What You’ll Learn from Poll Analytics

How many voters your poll has and which channels those votes came from

How many views your poll has and which channels those views came from

The number of times your poll was shared and to which social network

To get started, go to your dashboard and find a poll you want to see analytics for. 

Click on “Analytics” and dive in.

Votes By Channel

First, you’ll get a quick look at the unique vote tally for any given poll. Then, you can see where your votes are coming from—and learn where your voters hang out online.

Views By Channel

Learn what channels are getting the most views for your polls and see a breakdown of the Top 10 referrers— getting a clear view of where your poll is embedded.

Shares By Channel

Voters can share every poll with their own followers and this section tells you which social networks get you the most shares. Your own shares of the poll will count here, too. 

We’re always excited to improve the data we provide and would love your feedback. Wedgies customers have already started using poll analytics, check them out and let us know what you think. 

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Do you like 🐍 or 🐪?

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Will #Orion or #Dragon get to Mars first?

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Pick your favorite! Wesker or John Marston?

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Red Vines or Twizzlers?

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Hey Final Fantasy fans. Who is more legendary, Cloud or Sephiroth?

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It's Fight Week! Who will be crowned the interim UFC heavyweight champion at UFC 180?