Is Your Research Sample Keeping Up With Your Listeners?

Do you still have a home landline phone? Chances are you don't. Not having a home landline phone would make you like a majority of the country. If you still have a landline – and some of us do, for one reason or another – you know that most of the calls that come to your landline are crap and you've started doing everything you can to avoid those calls. Avoiding spam calls to your landline would make you like the huge majority of landline owners who screen calls one way or another.

When you get right down to it, if you're conducting research on landline phones, who are you talking to? Only a dwindling minority of those who have landlines will even answer your call today. Nielsen's had to get around this reality by starting most of their outreach for new respondents at the mailbox. As Nielsen gave up the landline phone, we at NuVoodoo did, too.

Imagine, you answer your home phone and find yourself in a music interview (or a perceptual interview, for that matter). You're begged by the interviewer to continue for "just another minute or so." In exchange for your precious time, you're given, well, nothing. It's a sharp contrast with interviews conducted in the online space. NuVoodoo respondents know how long the interview is going to take and how much they'll receive for completing the interview before they begin. They're compensated respondents – just like the people who keep diaries or wear meters for Nielsen.

Because our team has been working with online samples since 2008, we know how to filter out the duds and those not paying attention or those trying to game the system. Our Jerk Filter™ and proprietary systems are the best in the business. These systems get better with every interview we complete online. And we've completed well over a million online interviews.

Online, you could allow referrals among friends, "crowdsourcing," but Nielsen hasn't adopted that – and NuVoodoo hasn't either. Our samples include NO station-supplied database members, NO respondents recruited from a radio station website and NO one who's been cajoled into the "correct" answers by a telephone agent. Respondents can't opt in to one of our samples. We pick them – they don't get to pick us. And, given the efficiency of conducting research online, we don't have trick our clients into accepting half-samples rolled together to achieve a decent sample size.

We give respondents a window to complete the interview at a time of their choosing. In longer interviews, they can take a break whenever they want. They complete the interview when and where they want, on the device that works best for them. These days, many of our interviews are completed by respondents on a smartphone. Some respondents prefer to complete the interview on a laptop or desktop, and our platform is optimized to work perfectly on whatever device the respondent uses.

With competition fiercer than ever, it's critical to have the right respondents in your sample. We've said for years, "Nothing is better than bad research." We're serious: not having research is better than having research that might lead you to the wrong decisions.