The first Instant Messaging tool called ICQ (for “I Seek You”) was created in 1996 by a group of young technologists who were frustrated with the *speed* of email. An instant hit, ICQ became the precursor of many other proprietary instant messaging tools. AOL (who bought ICQ after creating their own IM), Yahoo!, MSN, and corporations like IBM all have their own IM tools. IM typically requires nothing more than a free simple software download and installation and an Internet connection.
Once relegated to teens gabbing 24/7 with their online “buddies” around the world, IM has grown in use and types of users every year. Today, AOL has 140 million registered users of IM. 175 million people use Instant Messaging to send over 1 BILLION messages EVERY DAY.
Not limited to personal use at all, corporations have recognized the value of secure instant messaging and have been steadily ramping up their own use lately. A recent study by Osterman Research identified that 84% of corporations already use secure instant messaging. Research firm IDC projects that the use of secure instant messaging in the workplace will increase from 18.4 million corporate users in 2002 to 229.2 million in 2005, at which point it will surpass e-mail as the primary online communication vehicle.
The use of secure instant messaging in business is growing due to several communication benefits:
- Secure instant messaging is quicker and less formal than email. Email is becoming more of a way to document a paper trail and less of a convenient communication tool.
- Secure instant messaging tools keep expanding their capabilities. Through IM you can hold a multi-person chat conference, view participants via web cams, save phone costs by using voice over IP (VOIP), send files, know the status of a user (“available,” “in a meeting,” “busy,” etc.) to name a few. Consequently, it’s a far more flexible and robust tool than email.
- Corporations can use IM as a customer service tool, improving real-time servicing while decreasing phone expenses.
- Improves Telecommuting – IM is an employee communications tool as well as a monitoring one. If the employee is not at their computer, their instant messaging detects their idleness and displays it.
Marketing Applications For Instant Messaging
As with most modern communication vehicles, once enough people started using instant messaging, advertisers wanted to figure out a way exploit it. How? First, because of the ubiquity of emoticons (smiley faces, etc.) used on all instant messaging products, the emoticons themselves have acquired a certain amount of brand equity in that they’re recognizable. Advertisers have capitalized on this consumer awareness by creating ad campaigns which incorporate emoticons.
A second method of instant messaging advertising actually applies the instant messaging technology. One example is ActiveBuddy, a new company that harnesses the interactivity of instant messaging to create unique branding campaigns. ActiveBuddy’s technology allows advertisers to create programs (“bots”) that interact with a user’s instant messaging just as a regular buddy would. The bots are programmed to respond to natural language queries.
The most prominent bot example is Smarterchild, the showcase buddy agent running on AOL. Smarterchild can be added to your instant messaging buddy list like you would add any other friend, and once you have it, you can use it as a simple problem-solver. Type in, “I’d like to see a movie tonight” and Smarterchild will respond with something like, “Great! Tell me your zip code, and I’ll let you know what’s playing in your area”. ActiveBuddy works with advertisers to deploy their own customized versions of Smarterchild.
Warner Brothers was one of the first major advertisers to partner with ActiveBuddy. They created LindsayBuddy, a buddy agent that played a major role in the promotion of new recording artist, Lindsay Pagano. Within two months of launch, 430,000 people were interacting with LindsayBuddy.
Naturally, such interactivity has some major brand advertisers salivating. The exciting things about this kind of advertising are that it’s permission-based, always available, and offers true one-to-one interactivity between the customer/prospect and the brand. Even better, when the bot is added to a buddy list, it resides there in full view all day, giving the advertiser valuable real estate on the consumer’s desktop.
If you’re not already using an secure instant messaging tool, try it out. You’ll soon find yourself trying to recruit your own friends, family, and maybe even colleagues and clients to join you!
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