It’s a webcam site where you login to chat with complete strangers – you are randomly matched with a stranger and you both have the opportunity to find a new person to chat with at anytime.
People tend to quickly click, click, click through the people that they find matched with them until they find someone that they find ‘interesting’. Unless you do something a little interesting, wacky or happen to be an amazingly beautiful person – you tend to get passed over very quickly.
While much has been written about ChatRoulette and whether it is offensive, dangerous and moral – as I was spending a few minutes on it earlier in the week (where I must have been having a bad hair day because I was ignored by 99.9% of people I was matched with) it struck me that what I was watching was a visual of how people increasingly use the web.
Click, click, click.
- They don’t stay till long – they’re always clicking
- They are always looking for the next best thing
- They only pause if they see something that is interesting, intriguing or completely relevant to them
- They are ruthless
- They are impulsive
- They will judge what they see within a split second of arriving on a site
- They rely upon instinct and first impressions
As bloggers – the reality is that people are making these kinds of calls about our blogs every day as they click through to them from different sources. The blank faces that you see scrolling past on ChatRoulette could be the faces of your readers – clicking onto your site, making a quick judgement about your site and what its worth and then in many cases moving on.
PS: after 3 minutes on ChatRoulette and being ignored by 100+ people I decided to experiment. I put on a clown wig, I stuck two CDs to my glasses and put on some 70’s disco music (hopefully no one took a screen shot of me doing this).
The rotation of people I was being matched with slowed down – one in 5 waved – one in 10 even chatted with me.
The take home lesson
- do something different
- be unique and original
- make people look twice
- snap people out of their ‘click click click’ stupor
Do this and you might just make people pause long enough to connect (or you could just make a fool of yourself).
Further Reading: The Power of Uniqueness – 19 Starting Points for Being a Unique Blogger.
