For the most part, video chatting is a second or third step in today’s high-tech social networking progression. It’s something you do with friends or acquaintances after you’ve already met them via some other social forum.
Sure, services like OOvOO, Ustream and Google+ have facilitated group video experiences (with varying levels of success), and Skype has been connecting folks willing to exchange usernames or numbers for years. But typically, users don’t make their first connections with these types of video chats.
Image Courtesy of The Verge
Sean Parker—of Napster and Facebook fame—is hoping to change all that with the launch of his new video chat platform, Airtime.
Airtime is an online video chat platform that connects users based on common interests from Facebook, as well as their location and mutual friends. When you sign in, you set the criteria for your connections, and then you relax and wait to see who appears.
Airtime arrives in the controversial wake of another random video chat service, Chatroulette, which became notorious for the risqué behavior of some users. (So over-the-top risqué, in fact, that the site had to implement measures –like “safe” mode, etc. –to protect users from the exhibitionist tendencies of others.)
What sets Airtime apart from Chatroulette—besides Sean Parker’s major investment and support—is how it uses digital integration to make random connections much less random. Airtime takes the information users provide on Facebook to create targeted introductions, based on the idea that these data-based connections are more likely to lead to lasting interactions among users and between users and Airtime itself.
Of course, contextual and behavioral targeting have been mainstays of online advertising for years now. Savvy marketers know that when they gather meaningful data about customers, and then align this data with their products and services, they’re able to engage target audiences with appropriate, customized offers. Because they’re so relevant, these offers are far more likely to meet with a positive response—and ultimately, convert to a sale.
Now, it appears social networking entrepreneurs are catching on to the power of this type of data-driven Integrated Marketing Management. By using a similar, integrated data analysis approach, Airtime hopes to make successful introductions between video chat users and build more “stickiness” into its service.
And as I see it, that’s exactly how Airtime will catch on where Chatroulette simply hasn’t: Airtime will be using all the data it can get its hands on to discover what users actually want.
What lessons can you learn from Sean Parker and Airtime? How could you be using your data to improve the customer experience and provide more value to your target market?