What can Chatroulette teach you about marketing?

One of the things I regularly tell my clients is that the biggest mistake they can make is to assume their customers care. This is not to be overly cynical or defeatist, it is simply to acknowledge that for most customers, deciding what brand of X to buy is not something they spend too much time thinking about. This is even more so when they are not in the imminent purchase phase.

Attention spans are shortening all the time. A fact that marketers ignore at their peril.

Take the fad-du-jour of Chatroulette – the random webcam chat service. When you go on the service, you are assigned a random partner and can decide whether to chat or hit next and move on – a step that's become known as 'nexting'. Unsurprisingly, the time it takes for most users to hit next is not very long.

In a recent experiment, New York-based filmmaker Casey Neistat timed how long it took before he was nexted by other Chatroulette users. He averaged 2.9 seconds.

Your time starts now

Now apply this to your marketing. If you have just a couple of seconds to make a connection, what should you do? Talk about your brand? Talk about your product? Talk about what you want to talk about? Next.

The truth is, you need to do whatever it takes to engage customers immediately. Once you're nexted, you're history.

So what to do? Three things:

1 – Be interesting

Sounds obvious but the key here is to be interesting to your customers (not to your marketing department or your management, not what you think customers should be interested in – but what they are really interested in). If you don't know what this is, find out.

2 – Be useful

Most marketing (and almost all B2B marketing) is about helping customers solve problems. It is not about blasting out a message on a wing and a prayer that it will convert into leads. B2B sales take time. They need nurturing. Batch and blast is not the way to do this. If you want customers to engage, you need to help them get stuff done.

3 – Be social

As we all know, customers are more fragmented than ever before. Take IT buyers, the days when you could simply place an ad in Computing and Computer Weekly are long, long gone. This means that there is no way to guarantee you can get in front of all your target market. However, you can be sure they are talking to each other. So, if you are succeeding in being interesting and useful, it is a relatively small step to enable them to talk about what you are doing with their friends and peers.

And then there's eye candy

One final note, the aforementioned Casey Neistat repeated his experiment substituting his friend Genevieve (as he put it "a really pretty girl"). Nine out of ten people talked with her for a minimum of two minutes or until she nexted them. Now that's making an impression.

I'm embedding Casey's movie below, it's well worth a watch. Right, next...

chat roulette from Casey Neistat on Vimeo.