Like YouTube in 2006 and Facebook in 2008, 2012 will go down as the year that online polling joined telephone polling as part of our electoral process. This victory for online technology wasn’t a foregone conclusion. The criticisms leveled at online polls, especially before this election cycle, reminded me of many of the avoidance tactics I used to hear from companies that were afraid to embrace social media. But in this election all but the die-hards made room for online polling, just as marketing teams have now near-universally gone social. (Full disclosure: the phone-versus-online polling issue is on my radar because I’ve just joined Vision Critical, a tech solutions company that owns Angus Reid Public Opinion, one of the online pollsters.)