Introduction: Judie Lannon in the editorial in Market Leader in January this year wrote about open source creativity: “It seems that every major technological advance requires an event of huge significance to legitimise its presence and demonstrate to the doubters and laggards that something big has actually happened. “It is arguable that the US election serves not only to demonstrate that the log cabin (or as the global age requires Kenyan goatherd) to White House myth is alive and well, but also that the internet’s promise is now a reality. The internet energised millions of people around a cause” From now on, no political campaign and eventually no advertising campaign will be fought without a vast amount of creative activity being harnessed by the internet for the candidate’s or brand’s benefit. ‐to‐reach groups e.g. the young and business people, and the unique advantages of mobile surveys which include: increasing number of mobile internet sites, the very personal nature of the mobile, the high level of respondent approval, fuller verbatim comments, sampling by location, better surveys in developing countries. Examples of the arguments for mixed mode studies will be given together with examples of the misunderstanding regarding SMS, WAP1, WAP2 HTML among professional researchers and the general public. ‐ ware development, the perceived intrusion of online into people lives, the difficulties in protecting respondent privacy, consumers as co‐creators devising their own questionnaires, using client data bases and confusion of critical mass of data and reliability of data and above all from WAPOR’s point of view, the lack of consistency of survey research codes of conduct across countries.

Scope: This paper examines the cynicism which still exists around online research—be it via the channel of personal computer or via the channel of cell/mobile phone. We shall look at the growth of online methodologies across countries and some predictions of future growth.

We will look at the evidence of the shared advantages of online computer and mobile phone will be shown and the unique characteristics of each: Response rates, speed of response, access to difficult

The paper then covers the threats which online research of all kinds bring to our profession. These threats include: The deliberative blurring of research and other marketing activities, brand ambassadors posing as researchers, observers without survey research training, the blurring of professionals, semi professionals and consumers on social networks and online focus groups, no certainly of our knowing who we are interacting with, too few trained ethnographers and semiologists, researchers failing to inform respondents that they cannot proceed with any survey without first gaining voluntary informed consent, difficulties in gaining permission of respondents, the slow development of soft

The paper will end on how consumers are changing and how these changes are impacting on questionnaire design, sampling and the use of panels and continuous research and ad hoc surveys. Specific examples will be given from employee attitude studies, consumer satisfaction studies, B2B studies, political polling, media surveys.