Cool Marketing Thoughts

I’ve reported almost two weeks ago something was cooking at 3Bubbles. Yesterday I was on TechCrunch to check something about the Mabber Mobile IM and I saw they had integrated the 3Bubbles function already, so I went to the 3Bubbles website to see what was going on.

3bubbles unites chat and blogs to create real-time conversations in the blogosphere. If you add a link to ‘Live Chat’ in the footer of your post, say next to the comments and trackback function, you’ll enable your readers to interact about that specific post in a pop-up window that shows up when the link is clicked. It displays a chat function, with a very easy-to-join method. It looks like this (example of the Live Chat linked to the post about Mabber on TechCrunch):

I’m still waiting for an invitation to join the beta. The 3Bubbles blog says that those who’ve signed up for the public beta will be hearing from them shortly, so patient as I am, I’ll expect an invite soon.

However, from the looks of what I’m seeing, this isn’t the application I’ve been waiting for, and I’ll explain to you why.

This chat interface is really nifty, I agree on that, but it’ll never replace the comment section on a blog. First of all, I see no sign at all of a traceable time/date history of the conversation, so you’ll never know who said what on which day. Very often, the comment section of a website can reveal relevant information, links or leads to new stories which can be linked to the commenter who has posted his thoughts. This is not the case with the chat interface. So in fact, the 3Bubbles chat is an additional tool that stimulates interaction between your readers.

Another thing is that readers will now have to choose between either dropping a comment in the comment section or participating in the chat. Depending on the popularity of your blog, that brings a few remarks with it. Not everybody will do both and if you don’t score more than 500 readers a day, you should be very lucky to be able to participate in a decent chat conversation because not everybody has the time to talk or feels like talking at the same time. Lets say 1% of your readers is simultaneously social enough and has time enough to talk, that means that out of 500 readers, 5 will feel like talking. Following this idea, that would create the need of those 5 readers to read the same post at the same time to be able to discuss the matter you, as a blogger, posted about. That would mean that you should write about a topic that interests your 5 readers hard enough so they would like to discuss this with each other.

I don’t think it’s so simple to integrate this tool successfully.

Another remark I’d like to add is that the conversations on your blog are also being mirrored on the 3Bubbles main site (most active conversations). That takes away the possibility to add the chat interface to internal company sites for let’s say a brainstorming session about marketing ideas or campaign strategies. The thing is: the value of some conversation lies in the fact that they can be ‘closed’ conversations and kept within the company walls.

3Bubbles would be a great tool, if it could be a standalone application, but as it seems to be with all the 2.0 tools out there, you have to sacrifice the content you generate to be able to use the tool. You have to provide data in order to use the service that allows the data to be created in the first place. Sharing is the biggest 2.0 keyword, but sometimes when you just don’t want to share, I think you should be able to buy the technology and enjoy it privately. None of the 2.0 apps has this function, there’s always ‘remote’ interference. Picture communities like BubbleShare or Flickr have your pictures on their servers and share them with all their users. Video communicties have your movies and do the same. Feed readers get your content, networking sites like LinkedIn have all your private data. You sacrifice that in order to use the service.

Some sites allow you to block your information from people who’re not in your contact list, which is great to have a more closed community. I think a lot of 2.0 tools should also consider private use or licensing so that the wonderful ideas could be used without the ’share-this-with-the-rest-of-the-world’ feature, or the ‘your-data-on-our-homepage’ feature. It would make those tools accessible to business users, and it would generated a needed income for the developers.

Check out 3Bubbles.com