Travelocity buzzing after success of Roaming Gnome on Chatroulette

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Some consider Chatroulette as either The World’s Newest Freakshow or a marketing opportunity too good to miss – Travelocity says it belongs in the latter camp.

Company mascot, The Roaming Gnome, began springing up on the controversial video-based website – a service which pairs random users together via their webcams – in early April 2010, following enormous hype around the new site.

Since then, according to a Travelocity official, Mr Gnome has generated around 350,000 chat impressions and had 400 conversations with the great unfiltered of Chatoulette.

So what about the time and resources needed to handle such activity for the bearded fellow?

Travelocity claims “a few technical elements” were needed and a staffer to facilitate the so-called conversation between the Gnome and random users.

But perhaps the biggest coup for Travelocity hasn’t been the level of bookings or queries inspired from the appearance of its mascot of something as utterly unpredictable as Chatroulette.

“The buzz that the initiative has generated on the social web has entirely made the experiment worthwhile,” says an official, claiming the value of PR impressions is in the region of 17 million.