Last week, under the nose of the whole social and tech communities, Facebook turned back the clock and reentered the world of anonymous chat rooms. Without much press or fanfare, Facebook Creative Labs launched a new app called Rooms, a new twist on the popular social congregating spaces of the late 90's and early 2000's.
Unlike the early chat rooms that employed a technology called IRC (Internet Relay Chat), Rooms acts more as a forum with the feel of anonymous chat. It's an interesting concept, which topic focused socializers might flock to, ultimately bringing brand engagement and advertising opportunities.
How It Works
Users of Rooms do not need a Facebook account, or even an email address to use the platform. Anyone can come in and create a new Room, essentially a forum on the topic of their choice. Once inside it works very similar to a rich content forum or newsfeed, enabling additions of text, images or video onto the page.
Rooms are based on interest topics, ranging from music to GIF's and even places to practice Parkour. This system allows rooms to stay focused and truly build a community around a topic of interest without the clutter of irrelevant noise and spam.
One of the interesting features, although also a bit cumbersome and confusing, is how one goes about joining a new Room. The invitation system employs QR codes, scanable through the in-app functionality. Room creators are able to generate the QR code and disseminate it as they please, through social channels, direct email or even paper printing. There is a little scavenger hunt element to finding the QR codes online in order to join rooms.
Privacy
The privacy component of Rooms directly hits on the trend of hypersensitivity around giving too much personal information online. As stated before, Rooms does not require any login information, meaning if you choose, no one can track activity back to your Facebook account. When entering in this stealth manner, the app is not able to pull any interests and demographics about the user. In addition, users are able to create new and anonymous screen names for each room they enter - this is true anonymous socialization.
Potential for Brands
The simple concept behind Rooms opens the doors (no pun intended) to major opportunities for brands. While the app is not set up in this manner yet, it is only a matter of time until they look at monetization options. Here are 3 ways brands could theoretically utilize Rooms.
1. General Engagement - With the way brands have moved in the past decade to humanize themselves and come out from the proverbial computer screen, it would be a no-brainer to simply jump into conversations pertaining to the overarching business. While they would need to be highly careful not to turn the room into an advertising billboard, trying to sell services, it would be a fantastic opportunity to lend expertise, get insights into consumer minds and even pinpoint potential content creation ideas.
2. Private Communities - With the room system being one of invitation-only, brands can create rooms around specific topics and invite their closest advocates, social influencers or just build a community around a topic aligning to the overarching business or campaign.
3. Influencer Discovery and Engagement - Influencers come in all shapes and sizes, so what better way to discover a topic specific influencer than going into a space dedicated to that interest? Brands can engage in Rooms looking for topic experts and social influencers who can be potentially used in other avenues, such as brand content creation and eventually building offline relationships.
Is Rooms a sure fire hit? Who knows. But it's a very interesting take on an old technology, which might ultimately bring the users, the brands and the money.