America.
"The traditional corrections that we make in survey research adjust for small imbalances, not for large groups or for people who have no chance to play the game," Kohut says. Net polling will work, he predicts, when the 30 to 40 percent Net penetration figure of today gets nearer to 80 percent.
Kohut attributes Harris' success predicting last November's elections to the fact that major issues aren't difficult to measure online. Subtle or dynamic issues are much harder. For example, Kohut says, no matter how you conduct an opinion poll about the popularity of Moammar Khadafy, the findings will be negative. "In close elections, you will be as often wrong as you are right."
Although many public-opinion pollsters doubt the Net's validity, the tried-and-true techniques that traditional researchers trust are the ones that have given them problems for years. Mail surveys take months to complete and telephone interviewing is becoming increasingly challenging.
"Telemarketers ruined the telephone-interviewing enterprise," says Fred Bove, executive VP of Net researcher Socratic Technologies. The pervasiveness of telemarketers has prompted people to feel all unexpected calls are an intrusion into their private lives. As a result, the number of people refusing to participate in phone interviews increased from 40 percent in 1988 to 46 percent in 1997. And that doesn't include folks who aren't at home or who use an answering machine to screen calls.
Offline research is equally obsessed with the concept of random sampling, which became widely accepted in the 1940s. Random sampling ensures that each person in a known universe has an equal chance of being selected. But while telephone or mail studies can draw names randomly from the telephone book and invite people to take a survey, no official list of e-mail addresses exists. Even if one did, unsolicited contact in the Net world equals spamming - hence the Harris-Greenfield suit.
While response rates to e-mail surveys were high in the early days, Bove says, "Spam is starting to do the same thing to e-mail surveys that telemarketing did to phone surveys in the 1980s."
Net researchers aim to simulate random sampling online in a variety of ways. E-commerce and content sites can intercept visitors randomly as they hit designated Web pages. Others randomly draw e-mail addresses from an opt-in database of clients.
The convenience of Web-based surveys struck Digital Marketing Services founder Dennis Gonier back in 1995. "Instead of intruding on people by dialing phone numbers and interrupting their dinner, we adopted an invitation approach."
Gonier's down-home style and industry savvy convinced America Online (dossier)'s Ted Leonisis not only to partner with DMS in 1995, but to take a 70 percent ownership in the company. "It took Ted 20 minutes to say yes," says Gonier. Then a major research firm, the MARC Group, grabbed the balance and held on until AOL bought DMS outright in June.
DMS now enjoys the exclusive ability to recruit research subjects from AOL's 18 million members to participate in studies on the Opinion Place research forum. The DMS incentive program on AOL gives survey takers credits toward their online fees or other goodies.
At first, some research clients weren't sold on the AOL idea. AOL members were often thought of as novice Web users - not typical of the Internet population, but not typical of the U.S. population, either. And rewarding people to participate in research has always raised eyebrows about whether those being surveyed were simply "professional respondents" who love responding to surveys for the free stuff. But the completion of several side-by-side online and offline studies has shown that both techniques led clients to the same business decision.
Most importantly, online research is gathered much quicker and often at a lower cost than offline research. DMS now counts not only blue-chip consumer-goods marketers like IBM (IBM), Kodak and Procter & Gamble as clients, but has also forged strategic alliances with many of the major traditional research companies, including Custom Research, Roper Starch Worldwide and
