Poll Everywhere is a tool to live poll an audience using text messages and tweets, direct to your PowerPoint slide. The live text walls and charts update instantly. Genius Idea: Say you’re running a contest and want to have the audience help pick a winner. Or maybe you’re a professor and want to get student input. Maybe you just want to make an interactive presentation or poll your Twitter followers. What’s the best way to poll the group? Electronic clickers are expensive, but guess what? Everyone’s got a phone.
That’s where Poll Everywhere comes in handy. Poll Everywhere utilizes everyone’s mobile phone and transforms them into electronic polling devices. How, you ask? By text message, of course! The process to create and implement a poll is amazingly easy. Pick from three poll types: multiple choice, free choice, and “goal poll”, set your question and answers, the ways people can respond, and poof! You’re done.
The magic of Poll Everywhere is not in creating polls, but in how users can respond to them. There are four primary ways: through an embeddable widget, text message, mobile web, and most recently, Twitter (Twitter). In this instance, I have created a simple poll asking everyone “What’s your favorite social networking site?” And yes, there are four ways to vote.
Poll Everywhere really shines when you’re presenting to an audience, are on the move, or just want to poll your Twitter followers. The Poll Everywhere widget can be downloaded as a PowerPoint Slide and will live-update as each user votes. If you want to find out more about your audience, just ask them to whip out their cell phones and text to 99503 their desired response.
Twitter is the newest method. Just tweet to @poll the code that corresponds to your choice. So, if you want to choose Facebook (Facebook) in the poll I have embedded, tweet “@poll Facebook”. “Twit” for Twitter, “MySpace (MySpace)” MySpace, “Bebo” is Bebo, and “Other” is “Other” in this instance.
Accounts start free, but free accounts can only have 30 responses. Plans start from $15 a month to a heart attack-inducing $1,400 a month. That plan, Platinum, allows 50 people in a business to gather up to 20,000 responses per poll and customize the responses and data (which may be worth the price tag for large companies). Regardless of price, the usefulness of Poll Everywhere is apparent, especially for anyone who gives presentations, performs market research, or has a lot of Twitter followers he or she wants to understand.
” Mashable