If the primary political pollsters were completely candid with the public they would clearly convey that election polling has become far more of an art than a science.

While most of these polling firms prefer phone banks to collect voter input, many do use the web as an adjunct to their phone efforts. Their resistance to the web is vast and ranges from concerns over the sample integrity to doubts about the scientific veracity of the data collected. Nowadays its far more common for political pollsters to use web surveys to drive people to their non political panels for off election year research, which is where the money is.

Thanks to Powerfeedback and SurveySwipe, political polling for the Presidential election in 2012 is about to be turned on its ear! SurveySwipe is a quantitative based survey application built for, and designed specifically to run on mobile devices, including the iPhone, Android, Blackberry and Windows Phone devices. The “ah-ha” moment comes from the fact that the polls can be launched rapidly, dispersed to huge and varied demographic audiences without geographic boundary, and results are garnered within hours of deployment.

Media outlets, campaigns, advertisers, and others will benefit from this offering in many ways, and with Smartphone growth overtaking feature phones and seeing a huge sales gain, the audience will continue to grow exponentially.

We have arrived at the doorstep of no longer having to wait for people to be home to express their opinions to a phone data collector, or to complete a web survey according to Powerfeedback principal Scott Gingold. Simply stated, Powerfeedback and SurveySwipe are taking research to where the audience is and have completely reversed the traditional “push” versus “pull” nature of political polling and market research in general.

For more information on how mobile data collection can benefit your organization, please contact us.