Last Friday’s print edition of the Guardian included the “Ultimate Summer Pop Quiz” — an original take on the pop quiz format. It features a gloriously, insanely difficult set of over 100 questions such as: “The opening lines of which post-punk song were inspired by the above passage from ‘Notes From the Underground’ by Fyodor Dostoevsky?”
Having only managed 31 answers (and 24 guesses) over the weekend, I took to the Web on Monday to see who else was doing it — and if the quiz was available online so I could send it to friends.
The problem? The Guardian made it pretty hard to find this quiz. The quiz was nowhere to be seen on Monday’s Music section homepage. instead, I had to search Google for “Ultimate summer pop quiz Guardian” to find the specific page for last week’s Film & Music section. And even then, the link to a PDF file of the quiz was small and easily overlooked. It was, in fact, placed in a completely different story. I had to use Google’s caching option to spot it.
What about the buzz? Were people talking about this quiz? I searched for Web pages linking to the quiz PDF and found… just one result! And that was from the comments to a Guardian article.
What a shame. This quiz was ideal viral material. Half the fun was competing with your peers to be the first to find out that the uncle of Randy Newman who received 45 Oscar nominations was Alfred Newman. But most people couldn’t access the quiz easily, and thus couldn’t complete.
What could The Guardian have done instead?
- Make it visually obvious. At the very least, the Guardian could have put a button graphic promoting the quiz on the Music section page. That button also could have appeared on the site’s home page as well. (They promoted the quiz heavily in print: I seem to remember it was on Friday’s Guardian front page.)
- Permalink. From the perspective of many Web users, if content can’t be linked to easily, it might as well not exist. Readers should be able to easily bookmark the quiz, Digg it, etc.
- Interactive format. PDF is a nice format to e-mail and print, but it should never be the only way that you publish important or popular content online. It’s not friendly to search engines (which hinders traffic), it’s harder to interact with, and many people don’t know how (or can’t be bothered with) the download and printing process. There should have been interactive format version of this quiz — a regular Web page, not just a PDF file. People could answer the quiz questions online, and then e-mail their results to a friend. The quiz answers will be revealed in this week’s print supplement — which is a compelling reasons for quiz-takers and their friends to “stay tuned.” The Guardian also could offer a calculator for the math section. (“Take that claim to have sung a million love songs. If each song has an average length of three minutes, how many days would it take to sing them all?”)
- Easy sharing. The Guardian could have included an “e-mail to a friend” feature in the online version of the quiz.
- Discussion. People do talk. That’s the genesis of “buzz.” The Guardian could have offered on (or linked from) the quiz page a discussion forum or comment thread devoted to the quiz, as well as to searches related to it. Imagine how much traffic that might generate — and how much it might increase the average time spent on the site.
- Social media. Of course, the Guardian could have talked up this quiz on Twitter, Facebook, and other popular social media services. They could have invited people to take or critique the quiz.
- Treasure hunt. To really make this an event, why not turn this quiz into a treasure hunt and litter the Web with clues or red herrings?
I’m sure you can come up with more ideas.
But let’s focus on the really important question: how many answers did YOU get right?
