It's written by Douglas Schoen, and it's especially empowering in an area that is so important, but often so misunderstood --- Politics!



If you say, "Politics aren't for me," then you're in for a surprise!

Business people and entrepreneurs should not ignore politics, because there is one element of politics that is absolutely ESSENTIAL to success...and that is Polling.

There is "money-making power" in the ability to listen to your customers, because THEY ARE YOUR VOTERS. Finding out what they want and then giving it to them is like millionaire magic.

The techniques and tactics of political polling are relevant in almost every industry.

Behind the carefully crafted speeches and professionally edited commercials, is a political campaign strategist who above all knows what it takes to win the hearts and minds of voters.

In the last few decades, technology has brought about a huge shift in the tools available to such strategists, transforming their jobs and increasing their effectiveness.

Few people understand this better than Douglas E. Schoen, political strategist, and author of "The Power of the Vote."

Schoen writes, "It is my job to understand and explain what voters are thinking...Public opinion research gives me the tools to do that."

Public opinion research, or polling, is more than just a simple gauge of public support for one side or another. Polling is how politicians connect with their constituents to find out what issues and values are most important to them.

Advances in computers mean that instead of having to analyze a poll for days to get meaningful information, the results are now available almost as soon as the last of the

responses is recorded.

This allows people like Doug Schoen to continually keep abreast of how the public is reacting to any campaign. As he explains it, "Instead of simply setting strategy at

the beginning of a campaign, polls [can] now be used to evaluate tactics and determining the campaign's message and strategy on a day-by-day basis."

Business leader and Mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg, said, "He's [Doug Schoen] played a defining role in hundreds of political campaigns, and this book reveals the

inside story of how he does it. I recommend it to anyone who's interested seeing how sophisticated, state-of-the-art political campaigns work."

According to Schoen, a campaign can now literally "commission a poll in the morning, have the results by that night, and come up with a new strategy by the following morning." But conducting a useful poll and actually making that information useful are two very different tasks.

Before you can get useful data, you have to ask good questions. This means that first of all, your questions must be understandable for people, even if they don't have much education.

Next, you need to ask questions that will test your marketing messages. And last, you have to give people real choices. Schoen says, "If you just ask people whether they

like famine and poverty, of course people are going to say they don't. On the other hand, are they willing to pay higher taxes for programs that will help the poor?"

Doug Schoen tells how polling helped AOL circumvent a customer relations disaster and achieve previously unparalleled success by advising founder Steve Case to capitalize on his personal appeal, publicly acknowledge AOL's shortcomings, and present a new plan to upgrade the quality of their network.

Polling also helped craft one of the most effective marketing campaigns in American corporate history for the launch of Eli Lilly's anti-depression drug Prozac.

But according to Schoen, a good poll goes beyond just asking the right questions. "The key to meaningful results," he explains, "is having the proper analytical framework with which to interpret the numbers." In order to do that, you need to know something about the people giving you your responses. Even beyond getting their opinion, you need to learn who they are, whether or not they're likely voters, what their values are and how

strongly they hold them.

Schoen writes that "Ultimately, polling isn't about predicting what will happen. It's about trying to determine what you need to say in your communications to get voters to react the way you want them to." In democracies around the world, polling has become a vital tool for any politician that seeks to harness the power of the vote.

This book is the ONLY book available to help you understand the power of polling from person recognized as being the father of modern polling.