Surveymonkey and Online Polling

Looking online I found this post entitled "18 Awesome Survey & Poll Apps" and decided to investigate. Here's how the post begins:

Customer feedback and market research are among the critical factors that determine the success of a brand. If you care for your customers or are a true believer in a democratic process before rolling out a new product/feature, polls and surveys are the right tools. Online surveys are by far the fastest and cheapest modes to collect information and feedback from users.

We’ve put together a list of online survey and polling apps for you to get a better understanding of your customer’s mindset. Do read on. 

The 18 different survey tools offered are: Polldaddy, SurveyMonkey, Zoomerang, Wufoo, eSurveysPro, Pollcode, Constant Contact, Acepolls, Twiig, Micropoll, 99Polls, Survey Gizmo, FreeOnlineSurveys, Mineful, Checkbox, GetResponse, Inquisite, and LimeSurvey.

All 18 guarantee three things: fast, free, and aesthetically pleasing. I'm familiar with ConstantContact as that is the platform we use at my work to send emails (I've never created a survey) and I've done SurveyMonkey surveys before. I decided to visit their website to see exactly how they were advertising their product. SurveyMonkey has a nice little 30sec video that tells you all about their surveys and promises you "all the information you need to keep your business going" and all you need to do is "Write your questions. Get your answers. Instantly." I'm certainly not trying to say that SurveyMonkey or other online survey tools are sham's or not to be trusted––I'm sure there are instances where these tools are helpful and appropriate––but I think we do have to question whether or not these types of polls could ever be scientific, the validity of their sampling group, and whether or not this is a sort of one-size-fits-all approach to polling.

Some potential pitfalls I see in these approaches to online polling:

• The "one-size-fits-all" polls: Although each website or app offers "hundreds of custom templates" and multiple question types, there's only so much you can do. Thus I think its worth asking if a survey designed to see whether your wedding guests want chicken or fish should be the same as a survey designed to measure public or customer opinion? 
• Fast response: Obviously there are situations in which it would be beneficial to have rapid responses to analyze, but to me the idea of quick, immediate data runs the risk of a lot of non-attitudes. Are people responding because they actually care about the outcome, or are your employees responding simply because they have to? 
• Respondent Demographic: One of the main problems I can envision with internet polls is the fact that they're usually distributed based on email addresses and email addresses don't have a demographic. Certainly you cold put questions in your survey to find out information such as age, gender, etc. but there's no way of knowing that information simply from a list of emails. As with ConstantContact you're simply given a giant pool of addresses to "send all" to, so how would you even begin to obtain a representative sample? It seems like the only sample you could get is a simple random sample, which could be useful in some cases, but it seems like it would be very difficult to try to make any sort of statement about respondent demographic from emails alone. 
• Lack of Knowledge: We all get spam email much like we all get spam phone calls. Email addresses are bounced around out in the internet and just because a company has your email address it doesn't mean you have any interest or knowledge pertaining to their product or question. While you could simply choose not to respond, I think email based surveys do run the risk of polling people with very limited knowledge on a subject who respond simply because. 

These are just some of the questions that I thought of, but I'm sure there are plenty more potential pitfalls in the world of online polling.