Chances are that electoral politics will revert to past norms after this crazy cycle, but the same can’t be said for political polling, whose norms have long been blown to pieces.

Remember H. Ross Perot, who ran for president against the first Clinton and the first Bush back in 1992? He memorably said that you could hear “a giant sucking sound” as U.S. jobs vanished overseas.

The giant sucking sound in today’s politics is the sound of dollars vanishing down a telephonic vortex, as pollsters use antiquated dialing methods in expensively futile attempts to reach Millennials, Hispanics, and other mobile-centric voting demographics.

MFour can help plug the gap. Pollsters and politicos can get the reads they need on voters who only use smartphones by using our voter-match capability. It connects them with proven voters among our million-member all-mobile panel, including otherwise hard-to-reach Millennials, Hispanics and African Americans. Voter matching is demographically representative through the 50 states. 

Besides filling poll quotas, our voter-matched panelists generate speedy responses because they are uniquely engaged with survey-taking. They've all downloaded MFour’s smooth-functioning Surveys on the Go® mobile app, and are eager and quick to respond. Pollsters can connect with them to fill their missing cell phone quotas fast, and at a sane cost.

They'll silence that giant sucking sound they hear when smartphone-using voters vanish from their radar. 

MFour Senior Solutions Executive Alex Colao can tell interested readers more. Message him at acolao@mfour.com.

More MFour:

Will the NFL Tear Us Apart?

Nine Things to Know About App vs. Email in Survey Notifications

MFour’s fast-growing staff now includes Anna Pabiadzimskaya and Anthony Nguyen, who’ll bolster the Operations team as Research Associates. They’ll help carry forward our commitment to top-quality service in fielding and monitoring clients’ projects. Their arrival continues an expansion that will see MFour double its staff to more than 100 in early 2017.

Anna is a recent graduate of California State Polytechnic Institute, Pomona, with a degree in Business Administration. She’s done marketing research with Lieberman Research Worldwide, and marketing and social media work for the nonprofit Hands For Africa.

Anthony arrives with a recent degree in Business Information Management from the University of California, Irvine. He’s done marketing work for Beacon Pointe Wealth Advisors. Anthony knows what it means to never skip a beat, having hosted a weekly electronic music and hip hop show on KUCI in Irvine.

Teamwork is fundamental to MFour’s company culture because it’s the most enjoyable and productive way to live and work.

It’s also fundamental to the results we generate for market research firms and leading companies and brands that trust us to deliver the data solutions they need, on-time and glitch-free.

Choose MFour, and you’re betting on a team in which different departments mesh and communicate with each other. Our cooperative, mutually supportive internal culture plays a big part in ensuring  you’ll get the data and insights you need to make smart reports and recommendations on the business decisions your bosses or your clients have to get right.

Like a championship pro football team whose offense, defense and kicking game all step up to complement each other, our Solutions executives, Operations staff and Labs & Engineering experts stay on our games to make each project score.

These days, the intense pursuit of teamwork is right in front of our eyes. Less than two miles south of our seventh-floor perch, with its panoramic views of a good swath of Irvine and Newport Beach, stretches the campus of the University of California, Irvine. From our windows we can make out the sports complex where the NFL’s Los Angeles Rams are in their first week of pre-season training.

Our team is back after their 20-year detour to St. Louis. But is it really “our team?”

An MFour staff that pulls together to get your questions answered isn’t exactly meshing with a cohesive answer to this one. We fielded a quick office survey and the results are in: when it comes to pro football, we’re a study in division and disunity, although we’d prefer to call it “diversity.” Football-wise, we have, shall we say, a marketplace of opinions.

Here, the 49ers, Raiders and Cowboys each have multiple fans. The Seahawks, Bears, Steelers, Giants, Cardinals and Texans also get outspoken support. The data suggests that our new neighbors, the Rams, have a way to go to be embraced.

Does this division over the important matter of pro football make MFour less of a team? Should you worry that, come Mondays, we’ll be bickering about what went down on the field on Sunday, instead of focusing on designing and fielding your research?

No way. Lively and friendly disagreement among peers is a social adhesive, not a solvent. Within a culture fed by a mutual goal and founded in mutual respect, banter and repartee aren’t just a lot of fun, but a pathway to cohesion and productivity.

Our little in-house disagreements over sports keep us laughing and joking and talking to each other. And when people start talking to each other, you never know where the conversation might lead.  Banter that begins with “my quarterback’s better than yours” can turn into a discussion of a project and how we can make the data and insights faster, clearer and farther-reaching for the client.

As this song by the terrific 1970s band Badfinger says, “successful conversation will take you very far.” 

And that's what the MFour team is all about.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JS2Ag7OwGRs

Get the Only All-Mobile DIY Solution

Tune in Wednesday, August 17, at 11:30 a.m., Pacific, for "MFourDIY: Getting Started," a webinar focusing on the industry's only all-mobile, do-it-yourself survey building platform.

Who’s the Facebook of market research? Why, MFour, of course.

No, we don’t have quite the same balance sheet as Mark Zuckerberg’s social media juggernaut, at least not yet. Facebook this week again announced quarterly earnings of “blockbuster” proportions, as New York Times put it, ringing up $6.4 billion in revenues and $2 billion in profit.

But looked at in a certain way, there’s one measure by which MFour outdoes Facebook.

Silicon Valley’s most successful concern is nearly all-in on mobile: Facebook reports that 92% of its 1.71 billion active monthly users check in via mobile devices. MFour is 100% mobile.

OK, so Facebook has approximately 1,700 times as many active users as MFour has active panelists. But the core, proven principle of market research is that a limited number of properly representative respondents taking well-designed surveys will get the job done. And that’s what we’ve been providing since 2011, when we debuted the first and still only all-mobile survey app.

MFour designs and continually advances software that powers the utmost in  functionality and versatility for surveys taken on smartphones and tablets. Along with the tech, we cultivate an engaged, proprietary panel of U.S. respondents who take those surveys solely on their phones and tablets, generating the reliable, demographically representative data our clients need.

More than one million active users have downloaded our native app, Surveys on the Go®.  And unlike online panels, they embody the full spectrum of U.S. consumers, with full complements of the Millennials, African-Americans and Hispanics who elude research that clings to the fading online survey approach.

A smartphone-focused panel plus a state-of-the-art mobile survey experience translates into quality data that’s fast enough to meet tight deadlines and validated to ensure sharp insights leading to effective business decisions.

All joking aside – and you do realize we’ve been joking, right? -- our kinship with Facebook comes from a mutual recognition that the world has gone mobile, and that responding accordingly with smarts, enthusiasm and an innovative spirit is the key to success.

Contact MFour to learn more about how to thrive with us in the all-mobile world.

Email can hurt you.

No, we’re not talking about certain Democratic party luminaries.  

We’re talking about market research, where email is the road to nowhere when it’s used to invite people to take surveys by clicking a link to an online questionnaire.

 Here are four facts documenting the dead-end dysfunctionality of email invitations:

• Users of mobile devices open only about one third of the emails they receive.
• Just one in 10 of those who open an email invitation will click to access the survey.
• Consequently, only 3% of the potential mobile respondents approached by email are engaging with the survey. Even fewer will actually complete it.
• A different study, by a division of IBM, shows the same 3% response or "click through" rate for emails received on all devices, not just mobile.

It doesn’t have to be that way. You can avoid driving down the dead-end street of email-enabled online research. Take the all-mobile, native app route instead, where app-based notifications for in-app survey-taking engages panelists at a far higher rate. 

Which leads us to the five other things to know in making the app vs. email comparison -- then acting accordingly.

• More than one million active panelists in the U.S. have MFour’s Surveys on the Go^® app on their smartphones or tablets.
• They get their survey notifications with an in-app push, a capability made possible by a proprietary technology known as GeoNotification®.
• The push arrives with a distinctive “ca-ching” – the sound of a cash register – which signals exactly what this is about: a chance to earn by taking a survey.
• Consequently, 50% of those pushes get the reaction our clients want – engaged respondents embarking on their surveys, which 95% of them go on to complete. 
• Result: App-based mobile notifications are nearly 17 times more effective than email alerts (50% vs. 3%).

Conclusion: We’ll leave it to you.

For more on how mobile app surveys compare to online surveys, check out this essay in GreenBook by Michael Smith, our Chief Product Officer & Director of Panel.

MFour’s App Tracker shows the apps our panelists use, and lets you target surveys based on each Android-using member’s app profile.

These articles in USA Today and Forbes reported data we collected on motives, demographics and experiences of respondents who have the Pokemon Go app.

App Tracking can work for you in looking at lifestyles, behaviors and how a company’s app stacks up against its competitors’.

We’d love to brainstorm ways to make App Tracker generate data and insights you need. Please get in touch to chat and learn more.

Remember the sound of a video cassette recorder in full-on rewind or fast-forward mode? If not, count yourself lucky. That high-pitched rattling, shuddering noise was annoying on its own demerits – and the displeasure only deepened because it would go on for a clattering eternity while you waited for the clunky machine to take your tape back to the beginning, in case you wanted to watch it again.

At the time it was the best we had, and it got the job done.

The news, from CNN, that the last VCR manufacturer will stop production later this month got us thinking about how creative destruction is the essence of technology. DVD and DVR killed the VCR, and now video streaming is threatening the DVD.

There are obvious resonances in this for market research. We, too, are living through the creative destruction that’s needed to move us forward.

Few VCR users were deeply invested in their machines. They were only too happy to snap up a DVD player. But in MR, the investment in yesterday’s technology – the online survey -- is deeply embedded. There’s still reluctance to take the next step forward to superior, all-mobile survey technology.

The analogy can only extend so far: quaint as they will be, the last VCRs to ship out the door of Japan’s Funai Electric will get the job done for whoever still has videocassettes to play. The same can’t be said about online surveys. That method is broken – as GreenBook’s most recent GRIT report about the state of market research made plain while sounding a loud, clear call for innovation. Panel quality is disintegrating – and data quality and efficiency are disintegrating along with it. The potential panelists are looking at their smartphones instead of computer screens. That's where they prefer to take in their world, and respond to it -- including taking surveys. 

Once you recognize the problem, the solution speaks for itself: find a way to make surveys work on smartphones.

Some say there is no good way – which, if true, means market research will wither and die. But in MFour’s experience – and that of its million-member all-mobile panel and the clients who benefit from the data they provide – life has just begun. The state of the art in mobile delivers so much more than online research ever could – GPS-enabled geolocation, for starters.

Soon there will be no choice between online and mobile – just as there’s no longer a choice between the VCR and its much-superior successors. Online’s destruction isn’t coming – it’s at hand. And that’s the most creative thing that could happen to market research.

See below for more information – including explanations why some supposedly mobile methods are badly compromised, rightly-distrusted, and mustn't be allowed to define what properly-designed all-mobile research can achieve. MFour executives recently have contributed these three essays to leading market research publications. We hope you'll find them illuminating. 

Mobile has advanced beyond the online survey approach

GRIT Says Panel Woes Are Jeopardizing MR’s Future. There’s An Answer.

The World Has Moved to Mobile. Will Market Research Ever Get in Step?

The reptile demanded a recount, and the reptile won.

As part of our recent survey of 1,000 Pokemon Go players, we asked respondents to pick their favorite Pokemon creature.

We reported that the winner was Eevee, a cute cross between a rabbit and a fox, with Charmander, a gap-toothed, dinosaur-like fella with a flaming tail, placing second.

On further examination of the data, Charmander edged Eevee by 16 votes, picked by 12.1 percent of the panel to Eevee’s 10.5 percent. Squirtle the two-legged turtle was third, just 4 votes behind Eevee. The famous Pickachu got 9.4 percent for fourth place.

The main issue was the many variant spellings our respondents gave to the write-in question, some of which your faithful blogger failed to tally as votes for Charmander. So any way you want to spell it, Charmander is the champ.