Mobile Panels and Surveys are the Latest Trend

It was just a matter of time before surveys went mobile.  Welcome the latest entrant into the mobile survey sphere -- Thumspeak.  This is a terrific tool that allows businesses to recruit a mobile panel of respondents and collect feedback via phone.

Research Access has a terrific industry news write up on this trend.  I'm going to give you my impressions of Thumspeak in this article.

First Impressions

When you land on the website - you'll see right away that they are recruiting panels of mobile users AND business customers.  Right away, I'm clear that if I'm going to use this application and the panel of mobile users, I have to be clear that my sample is "self-selected" to include people who use apps on their mobile phone.  I know, a lot of people do -- but I still think that the kind of person that's going to take the time to do a survey on their iPhone is psychologically different from a person that uses their mobile device in a purely utilitarian way.

Registering is easy.  It takes less than a minute to fill out the form and start your free trial of questions.  You get to create a survey with 5 questions.

I created a quick mobile survey questionnaire and got this email as a response.  I sort of wish they had given me this FIRST - I think I would have asked better questions.

Here is what happens immediately after you clicked on the submit button. (1) Thumbspeak staff will quickly approve the content of the questions just to make sure it is appropriate for our audience. (2) After approval, our system will deliver your questions to our mobile opinion network for a quick 100 answers. (3) We then package your results with an incredible amount of data so you can gain insight from on-the-go mobile users.

We also include at no additional charge the following about each respondent;
- age
- gender
- location
- education
- household income
- race
- marital status
- employment status

They also give you a link to give feedback -- I'm going to do that right now.

Click over to Thumspeak and explore it for yourself.  What's been YOUR experience?