Postmedia Network has partnered with GeoPollster to launch a mobile polling tool that uses the mobile geolocation app Foursquare.
Billed by Postmedia as “part real-world election game, part mobile polling experiment,” the system securely takes in user data on which of Canada’s five national political parties they currently support. It then binds that info to the user’s Foursquare account so that every time they “check in” to a Foursquare location, the system records a vote for that party.
This creates a map of which political party holds sway in a location at a given time, be it a store, street, city or province.
“We’re not sure what we’ll discover, but we’re excited to find out,” said Jonathan Harris, regional vice-president, Postmedia Digital, in a release.
“Most traditional polls are conducted by cold-calling random Canadians on landline telephones and can miss a growing demographic that relies more on mobile devices and social media to connect with each other and the world,” Harris said. “It got us thinking: What would polling data look like if anyone with a smartphone could answer ‘who will you be voting for?’ anytime and anywhere they wanted?”
The service first launched through the National Post‘s website and through Canada.com’s Decision Canada site. Yesterday, Postmedia expanded the roll-out to include all of its daily newspaper websites.
