You're the Pollster
By Thomas J. Madden, Chairman and CEO, Transmedia Group
There isn’t a dizzying day that doesn’t poll by when we’re not hearing about polls.Polls for politics. Polls for consumers. Surveys about sex. Rankings of health products. Percentages of deplorables.Today all sorts of polls report what people believe, want, expect, trust, hope for, loathe or like the post or most, and lately who has the highest unfavorables. Or deepest buckets of deplorables.To this mix, I suggest we add our own personal polls.Why? Self-polling can tell us so much about ourselves, about our appearance, our weight, how our breath smells, the appropriateness of our hairstyle, how smart we are, how fashionably we’re dressed.Most importantly, personal polling can give us a sense of our own favorables and unfavorables. You don’t want to go through life Trumpishly with high unfavorables, do you?
While many of us never attended Quinnipiac University or ran a political campaign, or hired a professional pollster, here’s a Quinni-quick how-to-poll personally:
- Whenever riding an elevator up or down, ask your temporarily captive audience to take a good hard look at you and from 1 to 10 with 1 most unfavorable and 10 most favorable, how your dressed, what they think of your hairstyle and how white are your teeth.
- When having lunch at a restaurant, go the tables around you and ask the patrons to smell your breath and vote 1 to 10 (avoid eating anything garlicky in advance).
- Stop passersby on a street and ask them to take a selfie with you (if they agree and smile, give yourself a 10 or if they tell you to drop dead, you’re a lowly, untouchable one).
- After doing poddy and washing your hands in a rest room, ask a fellow rest room user to guess your weight. If you’re a male and they guess you’re the same weight as Trump or size Hillary, if you’re female, you had better shape up, stop polling, start dieting or maybe relocate to the North Pole.
[author] About the Author: Thomas Madden is CEO of TransMedia Group, one of the largest independent PR firms in Florida, where it currently operates. The firm’s clients have included AT&T, American Red Cross, City of New York, GL Homes, Jordache Enterprises, McCormick and Schmick’s, Rexall Sundown, Stanley Steemer. [/author]
