Bloggers investigate KLR VU
Part 1 is here
By July 25, 2008 blogger scrutiny began in earnest when unrepentant old hippie noticed chatter about a new poll by a company calling itself KLRVU.
The company, whose figures regarding Canadian approval contradicted reputable polling companies, had been hired by Campaign Life Coalition. The company data regarding Canadian opinion about The Order of Canada being given to Henry Morgentaler was noted at Lifesite and in a press release.
Plagiarism was found on the company website. KLRVU had taken a Survey US page, replaced the word America with Canada, and cut and paste the US site page, right down to the spelling mistakes.
Bouquets of Grey grabbed screen shots of both sites, highlighted the errors and pointed out the plagiarism.
Because the Survey US phone list didn’t work for Canada, KLRVU had to come up with something to explain their use of robot-calling for their surveys. Bouquets of Gray, July 25, 2008.
We have already pointed out that KLRVU has plagiarized a page of SurveyUSA and compared the two pages, with images of the opening paragraphs. The rest of the page is much the same–a rip-off of the SurveyUSA page, with minor changes.
But copying-and-pasting material and revising it for a new location is often trickier than one would assume, as can be seen in the section where KLRVu explains how it got your number.
News of the companies incompetence spread online and Bouquet of Gray found more errors.
Here again, we see a few more changes. Most importantly, SSI is replaced by a Canadian company, Infolist Canada. Like SSI, Infolist Canada is described as the largest and most respected provider of data. But this is surely incorrect, since (as SurveyUSA tells us, SSI is the largest). Indeed, Infolist seems literally to have no public profile: no webpage, no phone number, no nothing.
By July 26, 2008 perhaps noticing all the cyber laughter and unwanted attention, Bruinrooge began to fix his KLR VU pages. It came to light his company had used infoCanada out of Mississauga for it’s phone list, not Infolist Canada out of Toronto. Bouquets of Gray continued to methodically take KLRVU apart.
There’s a lot to be embarrassed about here. To his credit, however, Mr. Bruinooge has spent today trying to clean up the mess he created. Unfortunately, he hasn’t done a very good job of it. He has rewritten some of the text to remove the plagiarism. But he has not got it all, and what is left is a frightful mess: ungrammatical, incoherent, and unfocused.
The screenshots at Bouquet of Gray are worth taking a look at.
As Allan Bruinrooge tidied his new companies web presence, nothing could negate the reality his push poll had used robot calls and called what they had done, polling.
And, what do you find there? A detailed description of “Voice Broadcasting”. What’s that, you ask?
Voice Broadcasting is a message delivery service that plays a pre-recorded message on a customer’s answering machine, voicemail service, or even to a “live” person. …
…Further down the page we learn
KLRVU specializes is supporting High Volume Voice Broadcasting customers. With an aggregate voice broadcasting capacity of more than a million minutes per hour KLRVU can provide you with that rare combination of unbounded capacity, low prices and exceptional service.
Most Canadians aren’t going to look at methodology. Lifesite and Campaign for Life Canada didn’t bother correcting their article and press release.
To add insult to injury in an already badly handled push poll, a Campaign for Life Canada member went on radio apparently unaware the company they’d hired was being thoroughly investigated and discredited online.
As Bruinrooge went through the third clean up his website, he added something the end of July which no reputable company would dream of.
Klr Vu claimed that if people did not participate in it’s robot-calling poll you were skewing their polling. Declining to push a button in a Klr Vu robot-call was, according to Klr Vu, rescinding your chance and surrendering your voice to your next door neighbour.
Bouquets of Gray ends the dissection of the push polling company with a common sense question.
The point is that the result of a poll might be skewed if people don’t participate. But this is precisely the problem with KLRVU’s notorious Morgentaler poll. KLRVU claims to have called 157,115 Canadian households with the question
“Do you believe abortionist Henry Morgentaler deserves the Order of Canada?”
Of these 157,115, only 13,324 answered. But even if we accept KLRVU’s numbers (which seem inflated), 144,000 must feel like the hypothetical premier-hater in KLRVU’s example — they have not had their opinion recorded.
But the question has to be asked. If non-participation removes from citizens their voice and thereby undermines the validity of a poll, shouldn’t the 144,000 non-participants in KLRVU’s Mortengaler poll also discredit its results?
You’d think Klr Vu would have called it a day, but they didn’t. Once more they caught public attention in August 2008 when Allan Bruinrooge jumped into a political polling. KLR VU set it’s robot-calling sights at a Guelph by-election. (The by-election was pre-empted by a federal election call in September 2008)
Reaction on political blogs was predictable.
Even David Aken picked up Klr Vu’s shoddy marketing and methodology. Allan Bruinrooge told Aken he targeted Guelph because he wanted to raise his company profile. Why would anyone hire a discredited company to poll for a by-election? Scott Tribe, moderator of The Progressive Bloggers aggregator wrote Allan Bruinrooge about his Guelph poll methodology and also received a response. Bruinrooge joined The Blogging Tories in July, but never posted.
One of the questions raised in the investigation of Klr Vu’s Morgantaler poll and the Guelph by-election poll is why Allan Bruinrooge claimed membership in the MIRA.
There is no listing for his company on the corporate membership page of The Marketing Research & Intelligence Association. Klr Vu states on it’s webpage that Allan Bruinrooge is an individual member of the MIRA.
Have you blogged about Klr Vu? Drop us a line and let us know if we can use and link your post in full or in part.
