How voting works

• For entertainment and contests: Its fun for callers to enter their opinion, and to find out what everyone else thinks. Topics are unlimited: Who's going to win the big game? What's your favorite music/band/movie/star? Who's the prettiest/most handsome person in the club? What's the best booth on the trade show floor?
   
• For marketing: Get opinions from callers about your products and services. What's their favorite beer? What night of the week is best for Disco Night? What radio station do they listen to? And to help make it worth their while to enter, you can sponsor a prize.

For example, at the 2006 Consumer Electronics Show, IMU handled voting in two separate competitions, to determine the best product or technology introduced at the CES show. (Click here for more information on how IMU was used at CES.)

Below are details on how IMU's voting system works.

Voting sessions

There are two voting sessions -- "Voting A" and "Voting B". Having two voting sessions allows you to configure a new voting session while an existing voting session is going on. Each voting session has a number of options which are explained below.
   

Display options

Show Gauge

When checked, this option will show a bar-graph-like gauge in VMU. Such a gauge gives the user a visual indication of the relative popularity of each voting category.
     Having a visible indication can be bad, in that in may influence the voting habits of viewers. On the other hand, this may be a good thing as well, because it encourages people to vote for the winner, or for the underdog.

Show Total

When checked, this option will show the total number of votes in VMU. Showing the total number of votes can give the viewer some indication of how active the voting session is going, and may encourage their participation.
     The Show Total option may be especially useful when the Show Gauge option is not checked.

Show Percents

When checked, this option will show a numerical percentage (such as 39%) instead of an absolute number (such as 584) along with the gauges. In general, a percentage is preferable for voting applications.

Voting options

Allow duplicate votes

When checked, this option will allow users to send votes over and over, and such duplicate votes will be counted. If this is not checked, each user will only be allowed to send one vote, and subsequent votes that are sent from the same user (during that voting session) will be blocked.

Allow change of vote

When checked, this option will allow users to "change their mind" and send new votes for another voting category

Count votes option

Most of the time you want to count votes. But at the end of a voting session, when you want to stop the count and merely display the voting results, you uncheck this option.

Example VMU voting display

An example VMU voting display is shown below. In this case, the Show Gauge, Show Percents, and Show Total options are checked.

Activating and deactivating a voting session

To activate a voting session, simply click on the Activate Voting A, or Activate Voting B buttons. Once you press the button, a new voting session will begin. VMU or LivePRO will show the voting session, along with the gauges, totals, and percents, depending on the options you have chosen.

To deactivate a voting session, simply click on the Deactivate voting button.

When voting is active, IMU will count the results and put any voting messages into the Voting folder of the Message list.

Editing (creating) a voting session

You can edit a voting session, or create a new voting session by pressing the Edit button. This will show the Voting settings dialog box. Voting sessions can be Key word based or Phone number based.

Key word based

In general, if you only have one message sending/receiving device (modem), then you must use key words to determine voting categories. In the example below, the letter "H" counts as a vote for Heineken, "B" counts as a vote for Budweiser, and "M" counts as a vote for "Miller".

 
Note that you can actually enter multiple key words for each category. If you look closely above, you will see that "B" or "Bud" or "Budweiser" are the keywords for the second voting category. You separate multiple keywords with the "pipe" symbol | which is entered as a shifted backslash on the computer keyboard.

Multiple key words can be handy if there is the possibility that users may misunderstand the instructions, or when a voting category is famously known by several names. In the example above, many people know Budweiser as simply "Bud" so it is reasonable to expect that some people will send Bud as a text message, even when they only need to send the letter "B".

Likewise, if you were to create a vote for the New York Yankees, the key words might be "NY", "N.Y.", "Yanks", "Yankees", and possibly several others.

Phone number (device) based

In addition to the key word based method of tallying votes, IMU also offers Phone Number (Device)-based method of tallying votes. In this case, IMU will count any message sent to a particular device, as a vote for the corresponding category.
 

 

Using the device-based approach allows you to have multiple devices (modems) -- one for each voting category, and this eliminates the possibility that someone will accidentally send in the wrong keyword for a voting category. Using multiple devices may also allow higher voting volumes by spreading the message load across the multiple devices.

Voting question

This is the text that will appear at the top of the VMU voting panel, and also in LivePRO. The second text box allows you to enter text that will appear if you have the Show Total check box checked in the IMU Voting settings.

Answers and keywords

This section allows you to enter a caption that will appear in the IMU window, the keyword for the corresponding voting category, and the color of the bar in the bar-graph gauge.