1 topic 5 blogs: Mobile Surveys

The question posed to the group of 5 Bloggers this month was: “Mobile surveys – For/Against, Pros/Cons, Right Situations/Wrong Situations?” Links to my fellow bloggers Annie Pettit¹, Joel Rubinson², Josh Mendelsohn³ and Bernie Malinoff⁴ can be found below.

I feel quite strongly that mobile surveys should never attempt to replace conventional survey methodology. The range of device capabilities, penetration of mobile in the population, and the small screen sizes allow only very clear and concise questions – something that researchers aren’t very good at to begin with. The amount of time required to finish a survey and the relatively low penetration makes using a cellphone cost prohibitive for the respondent and a logistical nightmare for researchers to even attempt to compensate them for their time. However, in some countries where cellphone penetration is quite high and “practically free”, as in unlimited, the opportunity to use this method to deliver a survey is perhaps more realistic.

Take South Korea for example, in a recent survey 30 percent of the population reported accessing the internet on a mobile device. A friend of mine who once lived in South Korea, used to get a kick out of watching grandmothers in the subway send txt messages like they were teenagers. Until this kind of saturation occurs and device capabilities streamline I think researchers will do nothing but waste time, money and effort with trying to pull data. However, that does not ignore the opportunity to create a push for information.

Twitter is a great example of consumer push. Consumers update their status with 160 characters and talk about brands they use, movies that they see, and identify what they care about in regards to current events. This is where I feel the future sits at the interface between market research and mobile devices. If we can convince consumers to share their immediate perceptions with us, both positively and negatively it could open up an entire realm of data that could be used in service environments to create valuable feedback loops and with products to understand what consumers despise and are delighted by. Text analysis is a field that has been in the limelight for the last few years and will be for the on-going future as companies try to develop methods for sifting through the wealth of data that is available.

How does this relate to mobile-surveys? There are literally millions of panelists out there, if panel companies could convince their panelists to link mobile devices to their accounts and share 160 characters with them every time they liked or disliked a product or service the data stream could be amazing.