It used to be that people thought the Internet was only for porn and identify theft.\u00a0 Those days are long gone, but still many people…especially Internet marketers…continue to hold misconceptions over what the Internet is about.<\/p>\n
Specifically, many people still think the Internet is a marketing platform.\u00a0 It’s not.\u00a0 It’s a social platform<\/strong>.\u00a0 The vast majority of people don’t go on the Internet to buy stuff.\u00a0 They go online to find information and socialize with others (albeit electronically).<\/p>\n For example, if you’re like me, you probably spend more time communicating online with people you’ve never actually met…then you do with your neighbors living 50 feet from you.<\/p>\n Which brings us to today’s topic…video chat rooms<\/strong>.\u00a0 They’ve long been around, however, up until maybe a year ago they’ve had seedy undertones.\u00a0 That means they’ve mostly been used for porn.<\/p>\n But with the explosion of web video…and the technology associated with it…video chat rooms are now becoming more mainstream.\u00a0 In fact, they are an excellent way to engage and socialize with your audience…or have your audience socialize with each other.<\/p>\n Still, the whole idea sounds kind of complicated…as in how do you even get a video chat room on your site?<\/p>\n Enter Oovoo<\/strong>.\u00a0 They are a very progressive company that originally started out offering plain, old video chat services for cheap and even free.\u00a0 They also happened to offer some of the best video chat quality available.<\/p>\n And recently, they’ve introduced Oovoo 2.0<\/strong>, which adds the ability for web site or blog owners to easily incorporate video chat rooms into their sites.<\/p>\n How easy?\u00a0 Well, it goes like this:<\/strong><\/p>\n 1.<\/strong> Sign-up for an Oovoo account (you can go free or $10 a month, your choice).<\/p>\n 2.<\/strong> You click a few buttons to customize your video chat room.<\/p>\n 3<\/strong>. You copy and paste some code (a widget) into your web site or blog.<\/p>\n That’s it.\u00a0 You’re done.\u00a0 Up to six people at a time can enter the video chat room (without having to download any software first) and begin talking to each other.\u00a0 As the owner of the chat room, you can require passwords to enter the room, only let people in if you yourself are in the room…or just let your audience freely chat (via video) by themselves.\u00a0 It’s up to you.<\/p>\n The main drawback is that Oovoo is only available for Windows users<\/strong>.\u00a0 It also does seem to be a bit slow loading up in a browser.\u00a0 And there will be ad’s in the chat room (they’ve got to pay for the service somehow).<\/p>\n Beyond that, it can be an excellent tool for more personable communication with your audience…especially if you run some type of private membership group.\u00a0 In fact, the new Oovoo video chat rooms are something I plan to play with in my own “private club” over at ClubWVU.com<\/strong><\/a>.<\/p>\n