Mobile Data Collection

I read a fascinating blog post from Michael Mace at mobileopportunity.blogspot.com, called "The mobile data apocalypse and what it means for you". I won't paraphrase Michael's comments, which were insightful as always, but I urge you to read the article if you are considering how to incorporate mobile technology into your business.

There is growing concern that wireless data usage is about to explode. The main culprits for this will be web browsing and multi-media streaming, which have grown by leaps and bounds since the launch of the iPhone. 

Personally, I agree with Michael that the doomsayers' estimates of expansion to the point of implosion will turn out to be far-fetched (I look forward to his next article on that subject). Smart people will find ways to reduce data usage and to solve the bandwidth problem, and may even allow unlimited data plans to be viable over the long term. But there is also little doubt that we are heading for at least some uncomfortable congestion on the wireless super-highway, and possibly worse.

I am often asked why downloadable applications will matter in mobile computing when the wireless web provides an easier and more ubiquitous solution to many problems. I am a bit fan of the wireless web, and I believe that any serious mobile strategy has to recognize the web browser as a key channel for communicating with people on mobile devices. But you can't beat the responsiveness and performance of an application that is installed on a device, just as Windows applications are still more usable in most cases than their web counterparts.

Hybrid applications are an ideal solution for many business tasks. E-mail software is a good example. While mobile e-mail is highly dependent on a wireless network, it also leverages the power and usability of the device on which it runs. The e-mail client connects to the network as needed to send and receive e-mails, but it does not depend on a persistent connection or clog up wireless bandwidth unnecessarily.

The mobile web is getting better everyday, and that is turning out to be a double-edged sword. As web usage soars with the explosive growth of Smartphone and Netbook adoption, the very thing that is driving that growth -- anytime, anywhere access to information -- is likely to cause some major hiccups along the way. I'm betting on the mobile web long-term, but in the meantime I'll be quite content to keep my data safe and sound on a mobile device, and run applications that use the inherent power of the computer that I call my phone.

Hardware markets have never been so attractive. 


Check out the hot deal on the ASUS Eee PC with Windows at $285.

MCAPI used to only apply to PDA Survey Software, but with the introduction and proliferation of Netbooks, and powerful mobile survey packages like the ones offered by my company,  now you can easily deploy complex surveys to small and large screens alike, depending on your project need.

If you are an academic researcher, you may want to take advantage of Google's and WPP's offering of $4.6 million in funding for media research grants on a variety of topics, including online and offline media interaction, relevance and effectiveness measurement, audience types and engagement, and verticals and new media.

Our company specializes in diary research tools that have been used extensively to study media exposure, linking it to environment, mood and other consumer behavior. So, using our mobile data collection tools may be a perfect solution for research you conduct with this grant money.

As it gets harder for businesses (and researchers!) to reach people, the buzz about the affect of social networking applications is starting to get louder in our ears...

Apparently some people are wondering if the rise of direct forms of customer interaction like voice of the customer programs will make the use of Mystery Shoppers for mobile data collection a thing of the past.

Judi Hess, president of MSPA calls mystery shopping "a means to measure customer service, product knowledge, and sales ability." More important, she says, it offers subjective, targeted feedback that companies just can't get from less structured kinds of feedback, like social networking tools or surveys.

Ok, I can buy that. Read more here (you'll need to sign up for a free account).


Tom Anderson in particular is pushing us to think about the role of Social Networks and what he's calling "next gen marketing research". He recently interviewed representatives from Facebook and LinkedIn. It's just a start, but you can see that the social networks are starting to think about the convergence of these worlds, too.

Click here for the Podcast


All three of them will be a highlight of an upcoming ESOMAR panel session. This will be one you don't want to miss...



These are great articles to get us thinking about engagement, the future of survey conducting and the way we deliver insight from the market... But one of my favourite approaches comes from a seasoned researcher right here in Canada.

More on that next week...

I've found myself pondering the effect of mobile technology on the future of research, and figured it warranted a blog post.  I've been involved with both handheld surveys and wireless technology for most of my career, and throughout that time I've been amazed at both how quickly and how slowly things change.

Mobile technology itself moves incredibly quickly, but adoption of technology can range from lightning fast to incredibly slow. Market research professionals are analytical and pragmatic by nature, so it is understandable that researchers have been slower to embrace new technology than many other industries. Ironically, market research is often a key driver for decisions which drive technological advances, yet it can take years for those advances to be reflected back into the research process itself.  

Methodology is central to any decision relating to survey research methods.  When new techniques are introduced to "improve" tried-and-true processes, it is important for researchers to understand all of the implications of the potential change before implementing it en masse.  So research about research, or more specifically about new techniques for conducting research, is very important. But this is easier said than done, as most researchers are so busy generating revenue through existing methods that they lack time to explore new ones.  The academic community breaks a lot of ground in this regard, but it takes time for academic research to reach--and to be embraced by--the commercial market research sector.

Recently I have seen mobile research being embraced as a reasonably mainstream approach for survey data collection.  It is still "leading edge", but it is no longer "bleeding edge" -- at least for face-to-face interviews and diary studies.  While the application of mobile survey software is still a niche play today, we are about to see it extend beyond its traditional application to touch every other aspect of survey research -- including web surveys, phone surveys, mystery shopping and other methods.

What intrigues me more than anything is where this bottom-up thinking will really lead the research industry. While we are busy planning for the evolution of survey research to involve mobile technology, I believe it is equally important to see things from the top-down: i.e. to realize that researchers are losing control of people's attention, and consumers are increasingly recognizing the value of their opinions.  Will the methodologies of today be effective in the future, or do we need to reshape our thinking to embrace emerging realities?

I believe the future of mobile survey research looks a lot different than the past.  We will not simply see old methods enhanced by new technology; entirely new methods will emerge around the cultural phenomena that shape our societies around the globe. There is no limit to the opportunities that will be enabled by social networking and location-aware technology, which will be bundled into mobile technology that will make today's most impressive devices seem as archaic as early PCs appear today.

Those of us who wrap our arms around the cultural changes that emerge as a result of new technology, rather than just trying to shape new technology to meet old and tired methods, will realize amazing new opportunities for mining insight from consumer opinions. There will be many false starts and a lot of experimentation, but in a few years we will look back at the way we did things in 2009 and be amazed by how dramatically human communication -- and in turn market research -- have changed within a very short time.

I'll share some of my predictions on this blog over the coming months. Today I just wanted to get the thread started with some background thoughts...

I recently read that in this economy "opt out is the new opt in". 

Yeah right.

This was literature on a site (which I won't mention) that sells marketing lists, so I had to chalk it up to wishful thinking rather than benevolent distribution of informed market information.

For those of us that take this stuff seriously and know that blatant Spamming erodes respondent cooperation, we need to know that even when we think we're following the rules, local laws might derail our efforts. As as we move too add SMS survey invitations to our toolkit, the landscape is getting tricky to navigate.

Now, marketers who advertise products and services such as alcohol, tobacco and gambling cannot market to any phone number or address which is registered on a do-not-contact registry within Utah or Michigan. It's all about protecting families, and you can check it out here.....

"But I don't advertise tobacco! I'm in research!"

Maybe... But my point is that we need to be careful. Extend this to our world of mobile data collection for a moment, and is it really so hard to believe that similar legislation could be introduced to protect certain groups.... like children for example, a segment for whom we already need explicit parental consent before we can engage.

"One odd aspect of the laws enforcing these programs is that even if a consumer double-opts-in for an SMS campaign and verifies that he or she is 21 or older, marketers would still be in violation if that person previously submitted their mobile phone number to either state’s do-not-contact list."

Could you be unwittingly inviting minors to participate in your mobile marketing survey? Or are you treating SMS invitations with less ethical scrutiny than email? Might be time to re-scrub that list...

Here is an article of interest I ran across this week:

Cheap Phones are Big Business

A new report from Juniper Research forecasts that by 2014, annual sales of low-budget mobile devices will be up 22% from this year. This is good news for those looking to do mobile data collection in low-income environments or developing countries.

I ran across this article recently that highlights the results of a report that the Center for Disease Control put out on wireless substitution (aka canceling your land line for a cellphone).

There were some very interesting results:

• Over one in five U.S. households (20.2%) are cellphone-only, an increase of 2.7% over six months ago.
• One in every seven homes (14.5%) took all their calls on cellphones despite having a landline.
• More than three in five adults living only with unrelated adult roommates (60.6%) were in households with only wireless telephones. This is the highest prevalence rate among the population subgroups examined.
• Nearly two in five adults renting their home (39.2%) had only wireless telephones. Adults renting their home were more likely than adults owning their home (9.9%) to be living in households with only wireless telephones.
• Men (20.0%) were more likely than women (17.0%) to be living in households with only wireless telephones.
• Adults living in poverty (30.9%) and adults living near poverty (23.8%) were more likely than higher income adults (16.0%) to be living in households with only wireless telephones.

This information is certainly handy to market researchers as it helps them figure out the best groups of people to use mobile marketing surveys on rather than other survey methods.

But then I began to wonder, why would the CDC need to do such an in-depth study on mobile phone usage? Shouldn't they be focusing on health-related data collection?

Well, it turns out that most major survey research organizations, including the CDC's National Center for Health Statistics, do not include wireless telephone numbers when conducting random-digit-dial telephone surveys. Therefore, the inability to reach households with only wireless telephones has potential implications for results from health surveys, political polls, and other research conducted using random-digit-dial telephone surveys.

So, to combat this problem, the CDC conducts in-person surveys to collect information on health-related issues. During this interview they also take the opportunity to collect information on household telephones: is your family wireless-only or landline. This information is released via the report above twice a year.

I think it is great that the CDC is aware of this problem, but why keep conducting random-digit-dial telephone surveys if you've already proven with your own study (not to mention all the other mobile phone vs. landline statistics that are out there) that you will get biased results?

Seems pretty obvious here that the best answer for the CDC, as well as the other major survey research organizations, is to switch to mobile data collection.

A recent survey done by Pew Research Center shows that Americans have cut back on most electronic items, due to the recession, that they used to see as necessities three years ago.

One of the only items that did not see this decline in importance is mobile phones. 49% of people see cell phones as necessary, which is the same as in 2006.


So, with mobile data usage on the rise and the necessity of mobile phones not decreasing, even during a major recession, it is clear that mobile research is a still a viable option.

People are willing to cut back on cable television, cars and household appliances, but never fear, they will still have their mobile phone with them even in this down economy.

You will be able to reach them anytime and anywhere with a mobile phone survey to get the most up-to-date market research data for your market research needs.

The April 2009 edition of the Marketing Research Association's Alert! Magazine includes a feature article, Research in a Mobile World, by Mark Cameron, President and Co-founder of Techneos.

The article is filled with a variety of information including, the basics of a mobile survey, how mobile research can work today, and the future of mobile data collection.

I want to expand on my recent post about viability for wireless surveys on respondent devices...

People carry their mobile phone with them just about everywhere they go, and they increasingly view their mobile device as more than just a phone. The landscape is ripe for survey conducting anytime, anywhere, so why hasn't mobile market research completely blown up yet? 

If you take the cost of wireless data out of the equation, then the answer largely lies with the vast array of devices on the market.

Compare the infrastructure question to telephone surveys. Every landline phone transmits voice - it's the main purpose of your home phone. You have decisions to make regarding your CATI software, RDD and sampling strategy. And getting people to pick up and stay on the line and talk to you is a problem, but when you place that call, the phone on the other side will work no matter what brand of phone is in use.

Now move to the Internet... On the web, you have respondents choosing to interact with you through Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Opera, and now Chrome. Your email invitation might get filtered out as SPAM, but there's a relatively small number of permutations that your survey software has to deal with when it serves up questions and answers on a computer screen.

Executing on a cellular survey provides a completely unique challenge. The number of devices, operating systems and even capability within a company's product line are staggering. Add to this that some users might only be able or willing to respond to you by SMS, not over the web, and it becomes clear that choice in the mobile marketplace is a problem.

Corporations don't develop with the notion that compatibility with their competitor is good. In the ever-changing world of mobile devices, they just want to get the next handset out, and get it out fast. Things don't always work as you'd expect...



I wish I could link to the source, but hearsay will have to do for now. At a recent wireless summit, a prominent panelist mentioned that when Transformers the Movie came out, they wanted the accompanying wireless app to work on every mobile device. It took 20,000 versions.

So which methodology do you choose if you want to reach respondents?

Do you go with a strategy that takes advantage of the iPhone, which sold 3.8 million phones in the first quarter this year, or do you choose an application that has been customized to excel on a wide variety of devices, or do you go with SMS - something everyone can use, but limits your research options?  It's a tough choice, because your sampling strategy needs to be considered in tandem with your method of data collection.

Will the market eventually show convergence, or will mobility follow the laws of entropy? Only time will tell...  

A recent post on this blog linked to some interesting stats:

• Worldwide mobile phone penetration continues to climb at a break-neck pace, with 4.1 billion mobile subscribers at last count (that's a global penetration rate of 61.1 percent).
• 1.27 billion fixed line subscribers (18.9 percent global penetration)

In areas like North America where traditional telephone research is a hefty percentage of the data collection that gets done, researchers might have a heart attack for the implications on their sampling plans! It's tempting to think that maybe moving to cellphone survey are just around the corner to relieve our response rate woes! 

Being at a company that specializes in wireless surveys, we're in a very exciting time. But I also have to have a dose of realism - Not all phones are created equal. 

In this story about Smartphone viruses, I learned that Smartphones currently make up about five per cent of the total mobile market, and the most popular smartphone operating system, Symbian, has 64.3 per cent of the smartphone market (3.2 per cent of the entire mobile market).

The line between smartphones and feature phones is blurring with the entry of WebOs, Android and the like. But have you ever browsed the mobile web on anything other than a Palm, Windows Mobile, iPhone or Blackberry? It's miserable.  My Samsung SPH-a920 is awesome - I'd recommend it to anyone, as long as you don't brwose the mobile web.

Setting aside connectivity problems for a moment, and just thinking about the hardware people own, wide acceptance of a mobile phone survey via the mobile web is probably further away than we would like to admit. Perhaps survey applications, text msg surveys and IVR will be our best options for doing a cellular survey in the short to mid term.

According to a CTIA wireless surveys, mobile data service revenues increased 39% in 2008 over the previous year and amounted to almost 22% of all wireless service revenues.

Steve Largent (President and CEO of CTIA-The Wireless Association) had this to say about the survey on mobile devices:

"Wireless technology is an integral part of everyday life for more than 87% of the U.S. population; changing and improving the way we connect and interact with the world around us. The wireless industry consistently evolves, innovates, competes and grows every year at a rapid pace, and 2008 has carried on this remarkable trend."

With mobile device usage on the rise, have you looked into doing your market research via wireless surveys?

Worldwide mobile phone penetration continues to climb at a break-neck pace, with 4.1 billion mobile subscribers at last count (that's a global penetration rate of 61.1 percent). Compare this to only 1.27 billion fixed line subscribers (18.9 percent global penetration).

The graph below shows this dramatic evolution unfold over the last 10 years:



In comparison, the PC industry is forecased to see its sharpest unit decline in history.

Prevailing economic conditions will accelerate this trend, as users consolidate pricey communication services into cost-effective, all-in-one mobile devices.

And for the first time ever, half of all new connections to the internet will come from a phone in 2009.

So how does this play out in market research? Well, I'd say it might be time to take a serious look at mobile data collection if you haven't already.

Mobile market research has been around for awhile now, but with the dramatic increase in mobile phone subscribers in the last few years, it is quickly becoming a permanent and important fixture in the market research industry.

A mobile phone survey or PDA survey allows you to reach people worldwide quickly and easily, and in many cases costs less than paper surveys.

Why not look into mobile survey software as a viable option for your market research?

Our goal is to provide you with:

• interesting insights about mobile market research
• information on how mobile research is changing the research landscape
• the latest trends in mobile technology and what it means for survey research
• up-to-date information on mobile survey software and mobile data collection
• tips for creating a great survey on mobile devices

These are exciting times we are in as the world becomes increasingly mobile. 

Join us in watching the mobile phone transform into a valuable research tool and subscribe to our RSS feed now to make sure you are notified whenever we post.



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