VentureBeat

SodaHead, a company that provides a polling widget for web publishers that it also uses to prompt discussions on its own site, is seeing some decent traction. It has gained more than 600,000 members total since launching last September, and has logged a total of more than four million comments on its site.

To use SodaHead, you create a poll widget on its site, then embed the widget code into your site, similar to competitors like Polldaddy and others. But SodaHead has its own community, unlike its poll-widget competitors, where members can see polls from across the site and comment on them. There’s also an “answers” section where users can ask questions and provide answers to each other.

When I used a SodaHead poll to ask VentureBeat readers if they thought Facebook should let them aggregate and export their Facebook friends’ email addresses, a discussion on the topic emerged on the SodaHead site. See below. This discussion would have driven additional traffic back to my article containing the poll — except that SodaHead doesn’t link back to the sites that use its polls, so it didn’t.

The company has recently raised an $8.4 million round from Mission Ventures, on top of a previous round of $4.3 million from Mohr Davidow Ventures and angel investors. Mission Ventures managing partner Robert Kibble says that ”SodaHead’s community and upcoming initiatives are very exciting and I believe SodaHead will be one of the biggest sites on the Internet.”

That may be a bit optimistic, but I can at least say that SodaHead is useful.

SodaHead is one of many companies that offers a polling widget that you can embed on a blog or social network. Others include Polldaddy, Pollection, JS-Kit, Vizu, and others. But SodaHead differentiates itself by being focused on social interactions.

Poll Answers

SodaHead pairs polls with features such as discussion forums and Myspace-style user profiles, so users can both vote and discuss the issue presented in the poll, and do things like comment on each others’ profiles.

To demonstrate, here’s a poll with a hot question of the day in the tech blogosphere. Should you, as blogger Robert Scoble thinks, be able to use third-party service Plaxo to remove information from Facebook friends’ email addresses from their profiles (our coverage)? I agree that you should — after all, if somebody both Facebook-friends you and displays their email address on their profile, they are literally sharing it with you already. Not everyone agrees — so, if you want to talk about the issue more, use SodaHead’s forum that comes with this poll. You can either access the forum through the widget or go to it directly, here.

Back to SodaHead, the company. It launched four months ago, and has gained the most traction, it tells us, with musicians and their fans on Myspace. Many artists and managers are looking for new ways to interact with their large Myspace fan bases. Popular acts that use SodaHead include Plain White T’s, My Chemical Romance, Avenged Sevenfold. Others include include Pajamas Media, Hilary Clinton campaigners, OK Magazine, college newspapers and others.

The Los Angeles-based company reports 300,000 monthly unique visitors and 2.4 million monthly page views. It says it has done basically no public relations work, received no press coverage, forged no partnerships and done only limited advertising.

It was founded by Jason Feffer, a former vice president of operations and founding member at Myspace, and Michael Glazer, a former senior vice president of technology at investment bank Jefferies. It has raised $4.3 million from Mohr Davidow Ventures, angel group Tech Coast Angels and prolific angel investor Ron Conway.