Just over 92% of the visitors to AndrewSullivan.com live in the U.S. Large city dwellers make up 46% of Andrew’s audience, 85.2% are male, 52.6% are married, 50% have a graduate degree and 31.7% describe themselves as politically conservative while 15.6% are independents.

When it comes to PBS podcasts, 63.8% of listeners find out about them through iTunes and 84.7% use iTunes to download them. Washington Week is the most compelling, with 62% of listeners always listening all the way through. Just over 52% have recommended PBS podcasts to friends and family.

More than half of business bloggers, 55.7% to be precise, have received a qualified lead from their blogs, with 45.9% of those bloggers closing business. Nearly 20% of bloggers say that more than 15% of their new business comes from their blog.

That’s just the tip of the iceberg of information you’ll find through this Google search that reveals detailed results of nearly 800 surveys created with the popular Survey Monkey software.

This is, of course, a huge problem if your survey requests personal information, includes open-ended questions that might prompt the volunteering of personal information or if you believe that the results themselves constitute information that’s sensitive and confidential for your company.

Here’s the good news: You can prevent this.

If you’re using SurveyMonkey, be sure to set your survey’s results-sharing status to disabled, even if you have no intention of sending anyone the link to your results. This will result in a “survey is closed” message being delivered to anyone who tries to access your results summary link.

Takeaway for marketers: Don’t forget: On the Web, virtually everything is accessible somewhere somehow by somebody. Make sure you have a good relationship with your engineering department to keep those important holes plugged as tightly as possible whenever you (or they) discover them.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 14th, 2006 at 6:00 am and is filed under Internet Stuff, Marketing Takeaways.