Online Survey can be as good as any other established online marketing channels provided you know:

1) why you want a survey done?  and

2) how you are going to use your survey results?

If you are clear with these two points then probably you are in right position to launch and invest in online survey.

Here are some of the benefits of online surveys:

Direct Feedback From Your End User

A well planned survey can have you ready access data of your target audience opinion and expectation from your products. All you need to do is to design your survey questionnaire carefully.  You do not have to speculate on customers’ expectation and try experimenting with the features and positioning of your product.

Surveys Can Go Viral
If your survey has good reward or unique value associated, it will create buzz and people would be interested in sharing and talking about it. You can expect a good number of participation only when it has some good or incentive(s) attached.

Media Coverage

Make your survey participation big enough and draw inferences from survey wisely to make it press worthy. Do online and offline press releases based on your survey and have a chance to make your brand visible everywhere.
Frame your questions intelligently. Keep them short and crisp! It is important to have good number of people actually completing survey, hence keep a budget aside to market it as well.

Brand Recognition & Recall

If you are a start up or launching a new product, survey can be an effective tool to reach out to your prospects. Since you engage your prospects/customers for 2-3 minutes in the process, your brand gets easily recognized and recall is strong. Your audience feels good for voicing their opinion and can be even loyal if the voices gradually start reflecting in products/services.

link:example.com- if you use link operator (in Google) for your website to check backlinks and believe that whatever results shown are accurate you are probably mistaken. This was probably never a good way to check backlinks, but most of us have relied on this method since the time we learned the basics of SEO.

Though I am little late in updating you on this, but I felt this post will still help a lot more webmasters who still believe using link operator they would measure the actual popularity of the website.

Matt Cutts in one his video has updated that Google actually not emphasize much on this functionality and rather discourage this practice so to prevent spammer to gauge the actual strength of backlinks your site has. He says spammers and competitors may spy on the backlinks you have using reverse engineering and exactly knowing what sites are linking in to your site.

He agrees that the number of links displayed using link operator are relatively a small percentage of the actual number of backlinks your site has.

He suggests to login to webmaster account and check the actual number of backlink Google knows about your site.

Check out the video to know more on link operator and should link operator will give you the correct result of sites linking back to you.