I concur with most everyone's opinion that if it wasn't Randy, how did they get our emails (a rogue employee comes to mind as a possibility) and how could the special room be set up?

During the chat, I made the point that this "focus group" fell far afield of any legitimate approach to such an endeavor and any research quality was so biased as to be worthless. I received a private message from RanFlyer saying that he was trying to get a rough cut of responses to structure more research. I pointed out that the fact that it was 25 minutes late starting and was so unstructured resulted in a noticable group dynamic that would certainly contribute bias to any responses/results. The answer I received was that bias can be useful ( or some such) and that he only had a few more questions that "they" wanted answers for. When I asked who "they" were, I received no more answers.

Not being privy to his motivations, if indeed they were HIS motivations, I do not want to be critical of the general concept. However, as an owner of a marketing research firm, I would certainly hesitate to attach any confidence to any analysis of responses.

An amusing thought (and not just my own) is that the whole exercise was intended to demonstrate to someone the degree of response he could generate on short notice and thereby demonstrate the potential of such a group in terms of [marketing, sale, etc.].

There were so many people in the room, I had to leave for a while because I was getting carsick trying to read that fast!

I would also like to add that some participants were calling for Randy to have "chat police" throw out the users in the room who were instigating and perpetuating questions as to whether it was Randy or not. In all fairness, the bizarre set of circumstances leading up to the chat, the fact that the user Randy was in the room under had been created the same day, and the fact that he didn't respond to repeated requests to confirm his identity in some way contributed to those who were suspicious and I personally feel the suspicion was warranted.

Just my two cents worth... an interesting hour.