You have to love the hype. Or maybe not.
The title of this post is taken from an email I got this morning from a company in the UK that, you guessed it, wants to do surveys on Web-enabled phones for us. It goes on to say, ” According to a November report by the BBC, there is a notable 25 percent increase in people accessing the web from mobile phones. This compares to a mere 3 percent growth in internet access from desktops. The report predicts that this new wave of mobile access to the web will increase even more in 2009.” Does this mean that more people are now accessing the Web from their mobile phones than from desktops? Not exactly. One missing fact: the percent of mobile phone users who use their phone to access the Web.
I am reminded of another bit of news in this morning’s email: Internet penetration in China increased by 43 percent last year bringing the current level to 22 percent. Big increases on a small base are misleading.
But back to the mobile story. As I reported back in November there was interesting commentary on this both in a paper at the ESOMAR Panels Conference and at the follow-on Online Forum. The country at issue there was Germany but it’s hard to imagine the situation is much different elsewhere. Surveys on mobile phones have three major problems:
- While more and more phones are Web-enabled, people make limited use of the functionality because it’s just too expensive. In Germany, for example, roughly two-thirds of mobile phones are Web-enabled but less than 15 percent of mobile users actually access the Web from their phone.
- There is a significant bias toward young people, and I mean really young people with a heavy dose of teenagers.
- The interface is very challenging. Just porting over what we are used to doing on the Web is the road to failure. Questionnaires need to be dramatically shorter and presented much differently on the small screen.
What troubles me most about this is the way in which hype overcomes good judgment. The imperative to innovate with technology in MR has created a frenzy of new applications surrounded by hype and false claims that I think confuse clients and ultimately devalue what we do. I am fond of citing Colm O’Muircheartaigh’s definition of error in surveys: “work purporting to do what it does not do.” The issue here is not just one of survey error. The issue is basic business ethics.