Face value

Even as market research companies exploit Facebook-style social networking concepts to increase survey participation, increasingly they are relying on old-fashioned face time to learn what makes you tick.

For the first time, the Internet in 2007 surpassed the telephone as a vehicle for administering surveys, according to a new study by the Council of American Survey Research Organizations. Port Jefferson, N.Y.-based CASRO found telephone surveys dropped last year to 36 percent of all polls conducted in 2007, down from 50 percent in 2006.

With Web-based surveys holding steady at 38 percent, however, it was in-person focus groups that registered the biggest increase, which more than doubled from a 5 percent level the past several years to 12 percent in 2007.

If they are statistics only a statistician could love, they also demonstrate a significant shift in how market research companies are deducing what consumers love ”“ or hate.

Some market research companies have long relied on focus groups due to their particular expertise. For instance, with a focus on youth market research, surveyors with Stamford-based Just Kid Inc. often meet children in public forums such as schools and malls where parents or school officials can maintain oversight, according to Michelle Poris, the company”™s head of quantitative research.

After years of raw data flooding in from Web-based channels, a broader set of companies now prefers person-to-person surveys ”“ in part due to a corporate drive to obtain quality data as opposed to sheer quantity, according to Jim Follett, chief executive officer of Survey Sampling International L.L.C. The Fairfield company provides sets of survey participants for market research companies, depending on the nature of a poll to be undertaken.

“It is not easy to get to know the person filling out a Web survey,” Follett said. “A lot of companies think you can just take a (paper-based) survey that takes 40 minutes to fill out and put it online, but it doesn”™t work that way.”

Greenfield Online Inc., an SSI competitor based in Wilton, recently studied the degree to which survey respondents will “fudge” answers to get a prize in return for completing a survey.

SSI and Greenfield Online are just two entities in a sizeable cluster of market research organizations that call Fairfield County home, including Greenwich-based Affordable Samples Inc., founded by SSI veteran Jim Sotzing; and Greenfield Online Inc., an SSI competitor in Wilton whose stock is publicly traded. Others include:

Ӣ de Kadt Marketing and Research Inc. of Ridgefield

Ӣ Directive Analytics L.L.C. of Norwalk

Ӣ DYG Inc. of Danbury

Ӣ FocusVision Worldwide Inc. of Stamford

Ӣ InsightExpress of Stamford

Ӣ RelevantView of Westport

Ӣ RTi of Stamford

Ӣ Sponsorship Research International of Norwalk.

The reduced reliance on the telephone is an ironic twist of sorts for SSI, whose founders Tom Danbury and Bev Weiman achieved industry renown by manually transcribing business telephone numbers from volumes of Yellow Pages into a computer database.

For SSI these days, the quest to get closer to consumers means taking its operations to the far reaches of the globe. The company is in talks to acquire a South American company, which would open a new market for it, even as it moves its headquarters this summer from Fairfield to Shelton to accommodate a growing U.S. work force. SSI has 150 employees and is advertising to fill a dozen positions. The company has nearly 200 or more employees in Europe and Asia, the latter region the company”™s fastest growing market.

“As the Procter & Gambles of the world take their business global, there is pressure on us to go global as well,” Follett said.