Thanks for introducing us to your blog. Looks like a great resource for anyone marketing on SL. (Love some of those post titles, by the way!)

David,

Absolutely. I just wonder if SL will be the eventual format for virtual worlds. Clearly, there’s a huge market for virtual worlds, and it’s got to be far broader than any of us can imagine right now. It makes me think of Jeff Bezos’s TED presentation from 2003 (for those who haven’t seen it, it’s well worth the 17 minutes).

Remember Pong? Pacman? (The first early video games). The games just got much, much better. Now 30 years later think what PacMan has led to.

Now consider Second Life is an early stage virtual community. Imagine 20 or 30 years from now. We can’t even grasp the possibilityies. For example, imagine a mashup of a Webinar tool like WebEx with a virtual world like Second Life.

SL is just the start. Marketers will need to follow the new worlds as they develop.

David

Each of the platforms has issues to sort out – they’re certainly far from perfect.

On the marketing/brand issues, I’ve written a small series of pieces over time: http://www.secondlifeinsider.com/tag/PracticalMarketing

You make a great point. Still, its economy is unproven since it’s so young and, from what I’ve read, it seems to be trending down, not up. Of course, that doesn’t mean the medium is broken; perhaps it’s self-correcting from an influx of companies with no Second Life business model, as it were. Like David said, it’s essentially a billboard for such companies.

It really is an amazing social experiment, but it’s unclear as to how long it will last. But… worse has been said of the US and its economy before.

I agree in every respect, Robert, except one. Second Life already has a real economy. For all that it is artificial and relies on the motion of virtual tokens, you could say that of any established economy.

You nailed it. Being there for its own sake seems to mean very little without a strategy for engaging customers. Second Life has a lot of potential, but nothing turns off a niche or destroys a sense of community faster than commercialism that seems out of place. Perhaps instead of “build it and they will come,” the social media monetization mantra should be “provide value and they just might come, although they may not, but if they do, you’ll be a hit.”

Doesn’t have the same ring to it, I know.

As marketers, we should be where our potential customers are. If customers are on Facebook, we should be too. If they are in Second Life, we should be too. The problem is when marketers take an advertising approach to these media. Banner ads in Facebook and unpopulated vanity islands in SL are just like billboards on the side of the road, they make you feel good but are they effective?.

But what Randstad is doing is pretty cool — they are extending their offline business (2,500 staffing offices around the world) to fulfill a need of their clients to staff their SL operations.

Take care,

David