The new Kauffman Entrepreneurship Survey results show just how strongly Americans support entrepreneurship and view it as the backbone of our economy.

And a blog survey on the same topic is a great way to “piggyback” the popularity of those data.

Not only will your blog survey get people coming to your blog to take it, the blog survey results will give you something to use to generate buzz about your blog.

Anytime you can link survey results like these to original data you collect from YOUR peeps–like what you get from a blog survey–that’s great fodder for social media and even the press.  It can REALLY help you generate traffic.

You can do this 2 ways.

Here’s an example of the first way:  One of my clients just finished a survey of her list that included some questions on attitudes about the economy.  Lucky for her:  She can take these Kauffman results, link them to her results, and she’s got a gold mine.

By showing how the national data connect with what HER list members think,

• She’s got something awesome to talk about in her blog and newsletter, something that will interest people and generate comments;
• She’s got something to talk about in Twitter, on Facebook, and in other social networking sites;
• She can write lenses for Squidoo and articles for HubPages and Ezine Articles;
• She can bookmark all that in social bookmarking sites;
• Because her survey was sound and done scientifically, she can even write a press release describing how her results relate to the findings from a national survey.

That’s a LOT of return from 1 little block of questions in a survey.

But you can profit from this too, right now, by using the second way of connecting with national survey data:

Do a blog survey, asking what YOUR peeps think about entrepreneurship and the economy.  Here are some examples of questions you can use for your blog survey, taken right from the Kauffman survey:

Even though Wall Street has collapsed, I still believe in capitalism centered around entrepreneurs.  Response options:  Strongly agree, agree, disagree, strongly disagree.

How important are entrepreneurs for the health of the US economy?  Response options:  Very important, somewhat important, not very important.

How important are entrepreneurs for creating jobs in the United States?  Response options: Very important, somewhat important, not very important.

And you can do this easily.  Although I don’t like Poll Daddy for doing big surveys (because last time I checked, they weren’t encrypting their data), you can get a free account at Poll Daddy to put a blog survey on your website.

A blog survey like this is a great way to get the conversation going and generate comments.

You can also do a quick poll at LinkedIn or Facebook.

So do a blog survey today–start asking your peeps what they think and reporting the results!

When it comes to survey results, people often go to one of two extremes:  They either decide that “all surveys lie” and they should never believe them, or they haplessly believe the results of every blog poll on the Internet.

As with most things, the best approach lies somewhere in the middle.

Why should you care?  Although we stress the importance of conducting regular surveys by putting a survey system in place in your business, you should go even farther in harnessing the power of surveys:  You should be paying attention to survey results related to your niche and using those data effectively, because very simply, it can help you make more money.

To do that, though, you have to know what results to believe.

The simple fact is that people CAN’T pull the wool over your eyes if you understand some basic information about surveys.  In fact, if you know the information we’re providing in the “Turn Surveys Into Cash” knowledge modules, you’ll have everything you need to be a good “survey consumer.”

But because we want EVERYONE to be able to use survey information effectively in their businesses, we’re providing some of the tips here.

To make it clear, I’m going to use an example from the social media space.  One of my Google Alerts (and if you’re not using Google Alerts to find data in your niche, you should be) highlighted a press release describing some surprising results from a new research study:  It shows that people who provide care to a disabled spouse actually live LONGER than those who don’t.

This important study puts a new twist on social support, because it shows that not only RECEIVING social support extends your life (we’ve known that for a long time) but GIVING support does, as well.

If this is true, it’s definitely something I want to report to my social networking audience on my blog.  But if I report results from a BAD survey, I’ll look stupid.  So how do I decide what to do?

• The first thing I did was to make sure it was a “real” survey, not some blog poll.  It was.
• The second thing I did was to see who conducted it.  Turns out it was done by the Institute for Social Research (ISR) at the University of Michigan and funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF).  ISR is a well-known research institute, one of the best in the nation (they were smart in the press release–they gave a description of ISR at the end).  This certainly doesn’t GUARANTEE the results are solid, but it enhances my confidence.  And NSF is an independent agency whose standards for funding research are really high (I know because I’ve served on NSF review panels).
• So far, so good.  Now I want to know something about the sample.  The information in the press release looks good, and when I get more detailed information, it still looks good–the sample was large (1,688 independently-living couples) and drawn according to solid, scientific principles.
• Third, I wanted to know if they controlled for other factors.  We could see a relationsip, or correlation, between caregiving and living longer that was really due to some other factor the researchers didn’t control.  So, for example, if the caregivers were all wealthier than the non-caregivers, we could really be seeing an effect of the economic situation, not caregiving itself.  In the press release, the authors told us they controlled for such things as age, gender, health, net worth, education, employment status, and race.  Those are the critical factors in this kind of research and they enhance my confidence that the relationship between caregiving and living longer is “real.”

In the end, I decide the study looks really solid, so I report on it to my blog readers.

These are some of the steps you should take to make sure that survey results are solid.  Knowing how a sample was drawn, what the response rate was (the percentage of “invited” respondents who completed the survey), how the analysis was done are all critically important.

It’s also important to know who funded the survey.  I’m much less likely to believe research results if the study was funded by a group with a “vested interest,” whether that’s a drug company or a political party/interest group.

So the next time you see survey results reported somehwere, look carefully.  If they don’t provide the information you need to ask these questions, then ask for it.  Be an “informed consumer” of data.

And USE data regularly in your business, whether it’s to report on new findings in your niche or to get ideas for new products and markets.  Once you get in the habit of doing that, you’ll understand what a powerful tool you have at your disposal.

Based on recent poll results, CNN declared the Presidential race between McCain and Obama a “statistical tie.”  How can that be, when the numbers show Obama polling 47% and McCain 43%?

To understand it you have to consider the “margin of error” of the poll.  Polls such as this one use samples to estimate public opinion and, statistically, they place the estimate within a designated range.  In this case, the margin of error was + or – 3%.  That means the actual number of Obama supporters could be as high as 50% or as low as 44%, when we add and subtract the margin of error from the estimate; that clearly overlaps with the range for McCain, which could be as low as 40% or as high as 46%.  Thus, the race is currently a “statistical dead heat.”

What does this mean for you?  It means when you conduct surveys in your business, you need to be very careful not to attach too much meaning to small differences in percentages, particularly if they come from very small samples.  If you find that 44% of your customers either agree or agree strongly that a product is good, but 40% either disagree or disagree strongly that it’s good, the 2 camps are basically equal.  And you may need to look carefully at the reasons that such a large proportion of customers is expressing dissatisfaction.

This recent poll, then, provides a wonderful reminder of why we need to be careful when we interpret our survey data, so we ensure that we’re coming away with the information we need to make good business decisions.