TECHNOLOGY

High Resolution, Real-Time Polling Application for Enhanced User Engagement

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Overview

Background
Gathering and analyzing perceptions is a central problem in both research and industry, but existing methods have not yet met the challenge of today’s environment for collecting public opinion. Traditional survey-based polling is struggling with the challenge of reaching an increasingly large population who are unavailable or unwilling to be reached by landline phones. “Dial tests,” which typically require giving people physical access to specialized hardware, are expensive and small scale, and they allow only a single dimension of response (positive vs. negative). Natural language processing (NLP) of social media, particularly Twitter, is emerging as a new way to tap into people’s naturally occurring opinions expressed in real time, reaching a huge population of socially engaged participants who want to be heard. However, pulling valuable information out of human language is a complex and often unreliable process; and crucial information for cross-tabulating and interpreting data (e.g. gender, income level, political leanings, consumer behavior, etc.) is frequently unavailable.

Innovative Technology
React Labs technology brings together the best of all these approaches, providing an innovative, integrated solution to the problem of gathering real-time reactions to events. At the core of the React Labs platform for real-time polling is a mobile app that lets users react to an event moment by moment and collects temporally fine-grained, interpretable data about their responses. The React Labs platform occupies a “sweet spot” between traditional polling and social media analysis: it allows researchers to collect crucial crosstab data and to carefully design questions for maximum value and interpretability while also creating significant engagement with users and collecting their temporally fine grained, unmediated real-time responses.

Applications

- Polling during political events
- Assessing consumer reactions and advertising effectiveness
- Creating user engagement with live or broadcast events

Advantages

- Offers easy configurability and scales up to very large samples
- Creates strong engagement with participants
- Collects detailed, temporally fine-grained reactions
- Yields interpretable data for analysis

Contact Info

UM Ventures
0134 Lee Building
7809 Regents Drive
College Park, MD 20742
Email: [email protected]
Phone: (301) 405-3947 | Fax: (301) 314-9502