Market Research
A few weeks back I signed up to take part in market research if and when they are looking for my demographic. Every now and then I get a call from the people at Ingather asking me a few questions to see if I qualify for their current project. As is the case most of the time I am not what they are looking for. In the past they were looking for Heavy Beer drinkers and frequent fast food customers. The phone call usually ends with an “I’m sorry you did not qualify for this one but we’ll keep you in our database…” Finally a few weeks ago I barely qualified for a project dealing with the Internet. According to the woman on the phone I almost over qualified. Anyway, this was a two parter. In total we are to recieve $135 for particpating(obviously why people do these things.) The first part took place last night. And by the looks of us it seemed a pretty diverse collection of participants. You could almost tell the regulars, who probably along with selling plasma try to make a living at these things. I thought it quite humorous. There were about 30 of us that they brought into a fairly large classroom like auditorium. Were instructed to take a seat with a computer in front of us. For the next 90 min Some guy who was a Trainer with the company doing the research took us through two products. The first was called Pluck It was basically a tool that ran in your browser to help manage and utilize boomarks and RSS feeds. The second was called A9 owned by Amazon it is a new search engine / bookmark manager. We were able to try out these tools and practice using them a bit. At the end of the little training session we were instructed to use these as intensly as we can for the next two weeks. We have a scheduled day to return where we will take part in a focus group to discuss these tools. At the conclusion last night they handed us each an envelope with 60 bucks cash for attending. After the second session we will recieve another payment for 75 bucks. Some of the easiest money I’ve made! My guess is that Google was behind the research and using us to research more ways to take over the world 