Bad (Survey) Monkey - Garbage in Garbage Out

I have made many comments before about how I feel that there should be a total ban on Survey Monkey and its usage by unqualified users.

In today's world of validation at every turn - just in case we make a slight mistake - we now have tools to track our every move and there seems to be an obsession with asking the customer or user or audience a question at every turn.

However this is bad.

Comparing Survey Data to Actual Behaviour is like a night and day revelation.

Let me cite a specific example.

BTC - who is a one man publishing machine from Radnor PA - uses survey money or rather abuses it. Just take their latest survey...http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/ancillary_fees

It distorts the true nature of the actual results. Indeed today the effectiveness and value of surveys are now far less. Yet users and marketeers continue to use Survey's as a surrogate for behavior tracking.

Let me cite a recent study by ASTA on GDS. In the survey - the share of systems bares no relation to actual traffic through those systems.

Thus you get what you pay for... garbage in and garbage out.

But perhaps the best question of all on the BTC survey is the last one:



Hardly a survey question would you think?

Cheers