The social media lessons of Chat Roulette

Go to Chat Roulette or watch this brilliantly made video http://vimeo.com/9669721 to view the new zenith in speed dating.

By virtue of a frighteningly powerful ‘next’ button, users can scroll through other users as they sit in front of their webcam-enabled PCs. Not bothered about the person you’ve landed on? Hit ‘next’. Want to chat? Go ahead, but remember they can hit next at any moment too.

It is a quite remarkable thing; the brutal judgmentalism of it. For anyone is but a click away from being removed from your life forever, and you theirs. For those of us interested in such things, Chat Roulette represents a fascinating peak in the evolution of social media. For others, it seems a new opportunity to indecently expose one’s self but there’s no accounting for people.

For a certain, shameful period (about a week) in my life, I added the ‘Hot or Not’ application to my Facebook profile. Like Chat Roulette – though much more directly – it invites its users to make instant judgements on the attractiveness of others. Hit next, rate the picture you see out of ten and move on. While taking a briefly obsessive interest in my own ratings, I also grew an horrific indifference to the effect my ratings might be having on their recipients. Oh, well, they’ll never know it was me and they should have put up a better picture.

Chat Roulette is Hot or Not on steroids for, apart from the instant judgement you face on the basis of your, erm, face, there is also the constant assessment of your ‘chat’ entertainment value. No time to make up for a boring opening, no time for anyone to get to know the ‘real you’.

Dragging this back to digital marketing, I’m wondering what the implications might be. Perhaps brands should employ armies of participants to hold up their slogans for others to stumble across? Perhaps it’s an opportunity for a new lease of life for the stand dollies one still sees at trade shows to chat on behalf of your product? Or perhaps Chat Roulette is just a great metaphor for the power that we, as customers, now wield. If brands want to engage with us, they have to accept that our attention span is tiny and our ability to go somewhere else almost infinite. And we make brutal use of our power to ‘hit next’.

So what lessons might Chat Roulette hold?

1. Be in it to win it. If you’re not on Chatroulette, you can’t be stumbled upon. If brands aren’t present in their customers’ networks, they have no opportunity to engage.

2. Be valuable. To gain that one second’s worth of dither before they press next, you have to do or be something interesting. Brands must provide value – entertaining or useful content and applications, for example – to gain the right to their customers’ attention.

3. Engage. When a Chatroulette user has gained the rare opportunity for conversation, it’s no use coming over all shy and retiring. Brands that aren’t used to talking with their customers have to learn. If you’re not sure, take a lesson from good old Zappos. This brilliant example of a real Zappos online customer service conversation shows that just being human might be a great place to start.

That’s it. Hit ‘next’.

Image Credit: gordontarpley