Chat has always been a great way for individuals to talk to other people all over the world. Now, increasingly, chat is becoming a viable -- and desirable -- option for business, offering opportunities to increase profits and promote business growth. If you are looking to expand your promotion options and want a low-cost means of expanding your Internet profitability, consider the benefits of online chat. Chat can help you achieve your goals by allowing you to:

Discuss your industry with other professionals: You can establish a chat community on your Web site and invite other professionals to join you in chatting about your industry or profession, or you can locate like-minded individuals in established chat communities.
 

Chat provides an excellent way for you to let your customers give you feedback and to allow your technical support people to help customers while cutting telephone costs. 

·        Locate target markets for new products: Chat rooms on the Internet have numerous target markets ready for you to mine, or you can recruit potential participants from your Web site. 

·        Complete product testing more quickly: Using chat, you can gather participants from various parts of the globe and let them discuss your product through a few chat sessions. 

·        Conduct market research with less expense: Through chat, you can establish a market research group and post questions to the group while letting the participants interact with you and each other. 

·        Search for, screen, and hire employees more effectively: By joining a chat group and getting to know the people who frequent it, you can locate reliable, competent people to fill a need within your company without the expense of advertising. 

·        Conduct classes and training for new employees, contacts, or customers: Chat is ideal for training or classroom instruction, especially if the participants are located in various areas of the country. It’s much cheaper to gather them in chat for their instruction than to fly them to the home office and provide lodging and meals while they're there. 

·        Find experts online to advise you about your business, industry, or product: Professionals from all walks of life abound on the Internet and chat offers the best means of getting help from those professionals on any subject you need. 

·        Hold meetings with employees or contacts around the globe: Coordinating the members of a scattered sales force and disseminating information to them is a classic business challenge; however, with chat it no longer need be. Chat lets you set up a schedule of times and dates for your sales reps to meet you online, save all of you countless hours out of the field, get your message to everyone at the same time, and spend much less than holding the meeting at the home office.

With so much to gain, businesses large and small are incorporating chat into their Web strategies. But for many Web site owners, chat constitutes a new technology barrier that can appear prohibitive. On the contrary, chat is relatively simple to implement and cost-effective to maintain. Dave Murphy with the International Association of Information Technology Trainers group says, "Chat frees introverted business people to maintain open lines of communication without requiring aural communication -- a fear-laden process for almost a third of the general population."

Using IRC for Your Business

The least expensive means of implementing chat is to use the Internet Relay Chat (IRC) resources available as part of the overall Internet connection. On IRC there are thousands of free chat communities already established with regular participants and visitors, and there is room for many more. Like email, newsgroups, and the World Wide Web, IRC is a separate service of the Internet; to access IRC, you need special software -- and as with Web browsers and email programs, much of this software is also free and readily available for download.

IRC channels (also call "chat rooms" by some portal sites, including AOL, Compuserve, and Prodigy) gather participants from the world around. The types of chat channels available are as varied as the people who use them. Some are set up for specific age groups like #40plus, #30plus, etc, while others are organized around specific hobbies or interests like #homeschoolers, #bridge, #autoracing, etc. Yet others like #Michigan, #Arkansas, and #Texas, are geographically based. Professions abound as well: #insurance, #artists, and #firefighters are just a few examples.

An existing, well-populated channel with set demographics might be just what you need to strengthen your marketing focus or improve your understanding of what your target customer wants.

IRC is ideal in circumstances where you want to connect by:

·        Topic: You can reach a group of people interested in a particular subject.  

·        Demographic:  You can reach a specific demographic by age group of people or by income or other criteria. 

·        Company: You can connect with the remote employees you need to keep in touch with. 

·        Need: You can ask for and receive expert help quickly. 

Like everything else, however, IRC does have its weaknesses. IRC is not ideal:

·        If you don’t have the time to get to know the people in chat channels. 

·        If you’re not careful about which channels you choose to join. 

·        If you are technology-shy or have technically-challenged participants. 

·        If you have overly specific chat needs that are too specific for a general chat area.

Ultimately, to discover whether IRC is the right chat solution for you, you need to participate in, or at least observe a number of different chat channels.

IRC First Steps:

·        Download software: You’ll need to download and install a chat program -- IRC is accessed through a separate service on the Internet and requires chat software to reach the service. The software allows you to access the chat nets, or networks, and chat via text messages to other chat users.  

·        Join a net:  There are dozens of nets for chat and you’ll need to choose one to start your chat experience. The two largest are EfNet and the Undernet, with upwards of 30,000 users each.  

·        Search IRC's channels list: This function lists all the channels on a particular net, plus how many users are tuned to each channel.  

·        Search IRC's channels list: This function lists all the channels on a particular net, plus how many users are tuned to each channel.  

·        Join a channel:  When you find one that interests you, start chatting.

For IRC all you’ll need is a reliable chat program. There are several available and most are shareware programs. One of the best and easiest to master is mIRC. You can find it and others at the Tucows.com or at Download.com. Many of the chat programs offered are shareware programs and the costs are minimal, usually around $20. Some are even freeware.

Once you select a particular chat channel, you will type a command that brings you into the channel. The command is /join #. Without the angle brackets you type the name of the channel you wish to join. A separate window pops up on your screen, letting you see all the text messages the chat users are typing to each other. To join in the conversation you simply type your message at the command line at the bottom of the window and press the enter key.

Chats are easy to log for future analysis and reports. You simply right click in the upper left-hand corner of the chat window. A drop-down window appears with several options to choose from. You simply click on the option for logging. These logs are an ideal way for a business to document how well the product is received, how well it performs, and what bugs or problems might afflict it.

Once you locate a group of people for your research or test market group, you can set up your own channel by simply typing /join # and then inviting your group to join you in the new channel. The chat can be directed by a monitor from your business, or simply allowed to flow with the monitor merely logging the conversations.

A monitor is someone from your company who can direct your target group in the discussion of your product. This monitor should be someone who is familiar with your product and who is familiar with market research for your company. Ideally you don’t want to hold chat sessions for these groups for more than an hour at a time. This allows time to run a controlled session (where the monitor asks specific questions and allows the group to answer those questions) without boring the group and without taking the monitor away from his or her duties any longer than necessary. The number of sessions you need with your target group will be dependent upon how much is accomplished in each session.

Using Web Chat for Your Business

Where IRC couldn’t provide you with a sufficiently controlled environment, or where you want to build community around your existing (or developing) Web site, Web chat is the preferred alternative.

See an example of a good use of Web chat at Reston Real Estate. The company, based in Reston, Va., maintains a Web site that offers a multitude of services to local residents: classified ads, a calendar of local activities, and directories of area professionals. It also offers message boards, chat groups, and subscription email lists to help residents get acquainted with each other.

Examples abound of merchants who are learning the benefits of offering chat through their Web sites. Mountain Bike Review offers the latest news about mountain biking, products for sale, and a chat area where visitors can discuss biking trails and experiences. GreatOutdoors.com offers a chat area and also schedules celebrity chats. Borland, a distributor of software, uses chat to provide technical support. The Virtual Garden offers gardening news, tips, products, and several chat forums for its visitors. WRAL-TV5 out of Raleigh, N.C., uses chat to let visitors talk to its reporters.

Web chat is ideal in circumstances where:

·        You want to build a community within your Web site. 

·        You want to create an interactive community for your loyal customers.

·        You want to provide interactive technical or customer support to your customers.

·        Slow speed: The high traffic of the Web can make chatting difficult, slow, and sometimes impossible. 

·        Slow development: It may take months to establish a target group for your market research. 

·        Longer learning curve: Web chat is more technology intense than IRC and, therefore, will require more time to master.

To discover if Web chat is right for you and your business, talk to other businesses who have used Web chat in their sites. Find out from them what the pros and cons are. Also give it a test run to determine if it’s an option for your business Web site.

Web Chat First Steps:

·        Download software: You’ll need to download or purchase and install a Web chat program.

·        Make room: Determine where within you site you want to offer the service, and set up a Web chat option.

·        Promote: Announce your Web chat service to your customers, contacts, and employees -- either via email or regular postal mail.

·        Schedule: Initiate chat sessions with your contacts, customers, or employees -- set up a specific time and invite participants to meet you there.

·        Integrate: Optimize your chat area’s usefulness by integrating chat opportunities with other content and products or services throughout your site.

You can use Web chat in many of the same ways you'd use IRC chat. However, without the ready-made user groups, it will take a bit more work to establish target markets or test groups. You’ll have to set up an area on your site to invite visitors to participate in these activities. Then you’ll have to screen those volunteers to find the right subjects for your test product or market survey.

If you prefer to offer chat as part of your Web site, you have many options. A number of Java based chat programs let your user download a Java plug-in and are relatively easy to implement. A number of vendors offer hosted chat services, or  you can purchase special Web chat software. Costs can vary from a monthly fee to more than $10,000, depending on your needed capacity.

The Future of Chat

Using chat for your business helps you build a rapport with your customers. It can cut the operating costs associated with critical marketing activities. It can replace face-to-face meetings with virtual ones, attaining your coordination goals and keeping a record of your activities. It's a tool that makes good business sense. But both IRC and Web chat implementations are fairly new in business applications.

Many businesses haven’t come to realize how much chat can help them build their business, maintain relations with their contacts and employees, and save them both time and money. However, many of the braver businesses are already experimenting with chat and discovering its many attractive features. If you’re still not sure whether you’re ready to use chat to help build your online business, don’t be surprised if your competitors are.