“Today we meet with John Merrells, CEO of Embrace Mobile, at the Hatfactory in San Francisco. Merrells’ company provides market research surveys to mobile phones. He tells us a bit about how a simple idea on the face is actually quite complex in implementation. With hundreds of cellular service providers and thousands of mobile devices around the world, mobile surveying poses some interesting challenges.”

Embrace Mobile provides data collection services to the market research industry. A simple idea, but the really good ones are simple! The benefits are similar to presenting an opinion poll online, but there’s much more that you can do with a phone. A well designed mobile survey can provide quicker responses, higher rates of response and higher quality results. There are number of key advantages to reaching the respondent via their mobile phone.

• Quick Response – The phone is always on and always with the respondent. If the respondent is well incentivized to participate an immediate response can be sought. For example reaching out to political party members after a crucial television broadcast.
• Immediacy - The respondent can be reached at exactly the moment that their opinion has been formed. Often online and offline survey mechanisms collect data after the fact, not at the moment. For example, solicit an opinion from a traveler at the moment they step off the plane: ‘Welcome to San Francisco. How was your flight?’.
• Relevancy – A survey presented at the wrong moment is an interruption and an intrusion. A survey presented at the right moment can be considered both a courtesy and a part of the customer experience. By analogy, for example, a hotel desk clerk who enquirers during your stay as to your satisfaction with your room is considered to be doing a good job.
• Context – The mobile phone offers additional contextual information to the market researcher. If the respondent is willing their device can be enabled to reveal their location and activity with the device. With this additional contextual information respondents can be highly targeted and surveys can be highly specific.
• Mobility – The respondent can be reached where they are, not when they get home or to their desk. For example, testing advertising effectiveness at music festivals or sporting events.
• Demographics – The mobile phone is the most ubiquitous technology with the broadest demographic reach, more so than the PC or even the landline telephone. It is now one of the few ways to reach the youth market.

Interesting stuff and we’re currently developing more services for the Market Research and Advertising industries.

I’m happy to report that we’re gaining traction with our Mobile Market Research product, MSurvey, and are launching it in the US this October. As such I want to enlist your help. We need a panel of friends to occasionally test our service with. As many countries and as many phones as possible.

Questions you may have.

What does this mean? Well, we’ll text message some questions to you and you’ll answer them. For example:

Coke or Pepsi?
Rate your lunch from 1 to 10.
How many shoes do you own?

How often would this be? Once a month maybe… as part of our system testing, or as part of a roll out into a new country.

What’s it cost? SMS charges, possibly international, depending upon where we originate the messages from. Or, data charges for GPRS, if we find your phone does that and we send you a URL to a web page.

But my phone is a brick from 1980? That’s good. We want to test with bricks too.

But my phone is too new and sexy? That’s good too. We want to find phones our software doesn’t well work with.

Do I have to always answer the questions? No. It’s nice if you do, but we only need a sample.

You’re going to text me in the middle of the night? Possibly… but if you’re in the TZ of your phone number then we’ll defer any messages until reasonable hours.

What do you get? An enormous sense of well-being at helping a startup, and free drink tokens, if you can catch up with me.

So, if you’re up for playing with some new technology then email me with:

1) your mobile phone number, including country code (or name), eg +447793746121
2) your phone make and model, if known…. eg… Nokia – 6320

If you have some friends who might help too that’d be great. Just fwd this post to them(We could do with some friends in Spain, Greece, Japan and China!)