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Chatroulette: The Last Exorcism Campaign

August 21st, 2010 Posted in Chatroulette, Social Media, Viral No Comments

I didn’t realise anyone was still using Chatroulette since the hype died off, let alone running campaigns through it, but for what it’s worth, this is a pretty cool (but predictable) campaign for “The Last Exorcism” horror movie. It features a girl interacting with people through the web cam, giggling as she looks to unzip her top for the guys on the other end, before her eyes go a little crazy to some provocative sound effects…

Where Social Media Monitoring Services Fail

May 17th, 2010 Posted in Chatroulette, Monitoring, Social Media, Stats, Twitter, Viral, Youtube 2 Comments

It doesn’t matter which social media monitoring service you use. None of them do what you want them to do. They’re good at doing part of the job, but not all of it. And sadly, they probably won’t ever be good at doing all of the job because you have to do it.

Social media monitoring, whether done with free services like Google Alerts and custom searches, SocialMention.com or even free versions of great tools like Trackur; or using paid services like Radian6, Sysomos, Alterian, HubSpot or Scout Labs, are all software platforms. They’re computer algorithms and search spiders that collect information and put it together in a place where you can find it. Some of them do a decent job of organising and stacking and sorting all that data so you can hit a button and get a pretty chart or graph, too.

But none of them do what you want them to do. They only do half the job.
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5 things we need to know about Chatroulette

May 12th, 2010 Posted in Chatroulette, Latest Trends No Comments

Good article by Allanjit Singh, digital strategist of 360° Digital Influence at Ogilvy PR Worldwide Singapore, he explains five things we need to know about the new pyscho-social online phenomenon built by a 17-year-old Russian student.

1. Sometimes bored teenagers create more than just graffiti.
If you’ve recently had a conversation with a teenager, you probably would have heard of Chatroulette (http://chatroulette.com/), the psycho-social phenomenon sweeping across dorm rooms all over the world. The site, built by 17-year-old Russian student Andrey Ternovskiy in late 2009, gets about 30,000 users on a typical night and generates one-on-one webcam connections between you and another randomly chosen user. It’s reminiscent of the Internet Relay Chat (IRC) of yesteryear but with video.

The default interaction on Chatroulette is roughly three seconds long: assessment, micro-interaction, click ‘Next’. Whether driven by unbridled curiosity or pure boredom, users seem contented to sit back and “channel-surf” through amateur musicians, minute-sketch-artists, exhibitionists, or whatever else is out there until someone worthy of decent interaction catches their eye. To date, more than 30 million unique users have visited the site and celebrities such as Katy Perry, Ben Folds and Kate Moss have reportedly been sighted on it.

2. So what if you don’t have a proper revenue model?
The web is full of great ideas that are not groomed by venture capitalists into economic success stories. The founders of YouTube and Facebook didn’t sit around building business plans, they simply unleashed their ideas on the general public. Just like how the Scotch brand became synonymous with adhesive tape, Facebook has done the same with social networking.

There is no term to describe Chatroulette but not having a label could be a good thing. The service uses seven high-end servers with a network throughput of seven gigabits a second and almost all of the expenses are paid for by four links on the bottom that serve as advertisements. The focus right now is on keeping the site and its features fresh, and working out what the right mix of offerings are. Once Ternovskiy figures out the right formula that will keep people coming back for more, businesses and advertisers will work around it.
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