What’s this? The oddball, quirky and occasionally X-rated site that connects random strangers for video chat is a marketer’s dream? That doesn’t sound right. But that’s exactly what Travelocity , the popular travel brand known best for their mascot, the travelling gnome, is saying. In a recent interview with ClickZ , a news and advice site for digital marketers, Travelocity company spokesperson Joel Frey, discussed the Chatroulette marketing campaign and its successes: 350,000 impressions and 400 conversations between potential customers and its “chat specialists.” (Yes, Travelocity pays staffers to surf Chatroulette!) Sponsor According to Frey, Chatroulette was a “natural extension” to the company’s other social media efforts taking place on Twitter and Facebook. And despite the video chat site’s notoriety for its not-so-safe-for-work component (aka: the crazies who like to disrobe or worse on camera), the site is actually a great way to advertise the brand, says Frey, because no one in the wider world will know it was ever associated with those elements, unlike on Twitter or Facebook where a negative or disturbing Wall post or tweet can be read by everyone. On Chatroulette, the chatting staffer simply clicks “next.” The campaign uses Travelocity’s popular mascot, the gnome, who has previously shared his travels via TV commercials and more recently, on his Facebook page and Twitter account . (Travelocity also runs a number of other Twitter accounts for advertising their specials, publicizing their company blog posts, sharing news and more.) During office hours, the gnome “surfs” Chatroulette with the help of a Travelocity chat specialist and after hours he appears alone, holding up a sign with a clever saying of some sort about how time may be better spent traveling that chatting. For example: “Traveling from person to person doesn’t count. Travelocity.com.” Marketing on Chatroulette Worth It? Travelocity isn’t the only marketer to hop on the Chatroulette bandwagon. Previously, we covered clothing brand French Connection’s use of the site, which involved a contest where chatters had to attempt to seduce another Chatroulette user, a more risky sort of marketing effort. What hasn’t been known, until now at least, is how successful Chatroulette marketing would be. It wasn’t too long ago that marketers were warned to steer clear of the site, not only because of its unsavory element, but also because of the suspected lack of ROI. James Duthie, an Australian web strategist, recently warned marketers that Chatroulette fails to offer any tangible benefit. “There is next to no benefit for brands participating on Chatroulette,” he wrote on his personal blog. Brands using the site have “no [social networking] profile and therefore no crawlable links, no history and no ability to generate real web traffic.” As it turns out (at least in Travelocity’s case), Chatroulette may not be that bad of a marketing vehicle after all. “We’ve gotten a lot of positive buzz from this that we really weren’t at all expecting,” Frey told ClickZ . “The PR alone has totally captured the ROI.” Discuss

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Not every click is created equal. While publishers know exactly how many visitors per day their sites get, this aggregate data doesn’t say much about the actual value of the individual visitors and what they do on the rest of the Web. Social media analytics and monitoring firm Sysomos wants to bridge this gap with its latest product: Sysomos Audience . Using proprietary technology, Audience can automatically assign a certain value to individual visitors, based on the other sites they visit and other factors users can tweak in the service’s scoring engine. Sponsor Going Beyond Traditional Web Analytics As Sysomos co-founder Nilesh Bansal told us earlier this week, traditional analytics tools like Google Analytics tools help users get a good understanding of what a visitor is doing on your own site. This, however, doesn’t tell you anything about the sites that influence your visitors and the actual value of these visitors for you business. After all, somebody who tends to visit auto blogs is far more likely to buy something from your auto parts site than somebody who doesn’t show any interest in cars. Sysomos wouldn’t give us any details about how it tracks a user’s behavior across the Internet. Bansal told us that the company doesn’t use cookies and just places a small snippet of JavaScript code on the publisher’s site. Thanks to the data Sysomos already has in its Heartbeat and MAP social media monitoring and analytics tools, the company can easily identify the ecosystem around a certain topic. How Sysomos can tell that one of your visitors also went your competitor’s sites and read Autoblog  earlier in the week remains Sysomos’ secret, however. For publishers and e-commerce sites, this also means that they can now keep a closer tap on their social media ROI. After tweaking Audience’s scoring engine, marketers can now see exactly what the value of a given campaign on Twitter or the company’s blog was. You can also see what blogs tend to bring the most valuable visitors to your site and then specifically target this audience. We do have some lingering questions about how Sysomos can track a user’s behavior across the Internet and the potential privacy implications of this, but there can’t be any doubt that this will be a very popular tool among marketers, community managers and sales managers. Sysomos is currently testing Audience with a small group of beta testers and plans to open the service to all of its clients by the third quarter of 2010. Discuss

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Businesses are only as strong as their customer base, and the same is true for web based businesses and their audience of only visitors and clients. Many people don’t understand that maintaining and online audience is constant work, and if you can’t figure out a creative way to stay in touch with your online customers [...]

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Modular workbenches are essential for the growth of your business, particularly if you are in the manufacturing sector. This type of workbenches allows you to easily construct or arrange your production line according to the needs of your operations. With a modular bench, you do not have to worry about how to replace old workstations [...]

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