My name is Alex, and I recently finished the Surveys course on the Associate of Applied Science Degree in Business Management at Hubbard College of Administration International. This course really opened my eyes in terms of how surveys are made, conducted and how useful they are. I actually started out on this course thinking this would be something I probably wouldn’t ever use.  After starting, I grew to like it more and more and now enjoy creating the questions and just knowing the technology in general. Surveys of course are used to get your public’s opinion, so that you can better market your product to them.  Sounds simple enough right?  However, what happens when you don’t survey correctly?  The result is a waste of time and money and can even hurt your once well thought-out image. An example of incorrect surveying is writing whatever questions come into mind whether they are relative or not, and just jotting down the person’s answers.  This information is then often used to market to target all of your publics at once. You want to create questions that will bring out human emotion.  In fact, one of the duties of good public relations is to handle human emotion and reaction. Otherwise you won’t get your communication across to the publics you want to.  For example, have you ever tried to communicate to someone that is very angry?  This doesn’t work very well does it? Another mistake often made is having a specific public in mind when marketing; more specifically, thinking you know who the specific public is before even asking. You can’t just say the “teenagers under 15 public” is your public.  If your product is a science-fiction romance novel, your public would be the “science-fiction romance novel public”. I didn’t have any of this data before and just knowing this has made a tremendous difference in how I operate in doing surveys. I can see the possibilities and how the technology taught in the course can be applied to any business or activity. The thing to remember about this is that it’s just listening to your public and using their input to better service them. Throw this data into our school systems or politics and you’ll get a government that is actually putting into place what it finds from your valuable information. People love when others listen to their opinions and are sometimes shocked that you actually used that data to better yourself or organization. I have already started using this towards my band and look forward to what results I will get from doing so. I highly recommend this course!