Nonprofit Expressions

Chat rooms seem designed for teenagers and stay-at-home moms. For today’s website owner live chat technology can make a huge difference, but not through a chat room…

When someone even says the word “chat” images of AOL and Yahoo go through many people’s minds. But these free-for-all chat venues are a disappearing thing. Internet predators, virtual worlds and spammers have made sure of that. Today’s chatters go online to places like second life or onto the xbox live for live voice chat. Historically, adding a chat room to most websites is simply a loosing proposition because a chat room requires people to constantly be in the online “room.”

Chat can still be a vital component for your website. First, we must re-consider what we should expect from chat, and what it can offer us.

We must think of chat as another mechanism for communication with website visitors, and as a method of creating personalized interaction with the website. We are currently running live chat on three websites. Two of our own, and one of our clients.

The first consideration is commitment. Yes - you must be committed to being available online for chat on a regular basis. This doesn’t have to be as tough as one might think. You should erase images of being barraged with chat requests every 3 seconds, it’s just not going to happen. On occasion however you will have the opportunity to chat with one of your website visitors in real time, one-on-one.

This personal interaction is priceless. To date, I have only chatted with a few of our website visitors. After only the first time I knew this was a feature I should keep on my website forever.

In the process of having live chat (good live chat anyways) you will also have the opportunity to see who is coming onto your website, when, and from where. This is not just analytics mind you. This is real time data you receive every time a page with a “live chat” button is viewed.

When a visitor enters my website - if I am online - I can see their city of origin, what page they are looking at, and even send them a live invitation to join me for a conversation.

Another crucial element to live chat is the trust factor. When people visit a website and they see an active “chat with the website owner” button they are gaining yet another piece of trust for the website and its contents. It is the same principle as posting an 800 number and an email address all over a website to gain the visitor’s trust.

I have become such a live chat junkie that I added a link to my email signature. Now anyone with an email from me has an opportunity to chat with me!

If you do not have live chat on your website yet, you should consider it.

Click on this link and you can chat live with me right now, and if I am not online you can leave me a message. I will call you back ASAP!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 30th, 2008 at 8:06 am and is filed under Best Practices, General, Improving your website, Marketing, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.