This is going to take more than one blog post, but yes, I did. So the forehead-slaps should fall into 3 categories:1. Who is buying anything in these tough times; 2. Phone bank/telemarketing is a dying industry; and 3. Don't you really have enough to do already?
We'll ignore that last one, since it is really not germane to my business site, and I can respond to the first pretty briefly: it took a lot of thought, and some highwire balance financing which is still making me woozy. Mostly, I'll return to this topic later on the travails of being a small business entrepreneur/job creator fighting/cajoling Wall Street banks, the SBA, and the maze of hassle that is trying to make it in America when you are the little guy -- and the messaging lessons we learn from such experiences (hint: I won't be saying that "pro-business" Republican attitudes are really helping the small fish succeed).
But I'm going to string together several posts about why I'm doubling down on what is, no question, an "old" technology in a time of rapid social media growth and changes in the way we communicate, and I'm going to explain it because I think it tells you a lot about how I actually conduct the nuts and bolts of surveys, and I'll take you behind the curtain on the tradeoffs, assumptions, and gaps in knowledge inherent in what we are doing to predict election outcomes in 2012. And ALL pollsters are making tradeoffs, assumptions, and have gaps in knowledge -- we just zealously guard such information as all part of the magic.
But the big, simple explanation is that I did it all for YOU, my clients/potential clients. In a time of great uncertainty when it is getting harder and harder to even know how to get accurate polling results, I've decided to double-down on what has given me the best results, to own my product from start to finish, and to bet on very old techniques, done well out-performing all the whiz-bang new techniques cropping up every day. Stay tuned!