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There is this place in Chicago called Fieldworks and they do all sorts of research for marketing companies (like the Direct Marketing Association). They get groups of people together (usually a big variety of them) and have a specific topic in mind for that particular group setting.

One of the groups that I was called to participate in was on text messaging and cell phone advertisement and something called short codes (that I didn't know what they were until later on in the discussion). They wanted us to talk about mobile coupons and how we felt about them compared to getting coupons online or in the mail. I think the group was pretty split up on how they felt. The younger people (like me) really liked the fact that you didn't have to get a ton of paper junk in the mail everyday and that you didn't have to print it out to be able to use it. The older people were more skeptical but even people in (what I would guess to be) their 50's thought it was a good idea. Only the way older people like one 70 year old women and an older man really didn't see the appeal to getting mobile coupons but even they said they don't like getting all of that junk in the mail every day.

And for the second part of the group meeting we were left alone to look at a website www.textmessageblog.mobi/. Well actually, we thought that we were alone, but really they were watching us and listening to our comments through the glass and microphones hidden in the room. It was basically a website about text messaging and different plans and people would blog about their opinions on it. I think they just used that website as a way to get us talking about different cell phone and text messaging plans so they could get our views on them and see which ones we had and how we felt about them. We all talked about how we loved our plans and how some of us had unlimited text messaging and we even got out our phones and were talking to the older people and teaching them how to text and it ended up being really fun. It was probably the most fun I have had with a random group of people and I ended up getting paid a lot to do it!