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Are Marketers Abandoning Second Life?
Posted by
kdawson
on Sat Jul 14, 2007 02:37 PM
from the peaked-too-soon dept.
from the peaked-too-soon dept.
Vary writes "The LA Times is running a story today saying that marketers are pulling out of Second Life, primarily because — surprise, surprise — the 'more than 8 million residents' figure on the game's Web site is grossly inflated. Also, as it turns out, the virtual world's regular visitors — at most 40,000 of them online at any time — are not only disinterested in in-world marketing, but actively hostile to it, staging attacks on corporate presences such as the Reebok and American Apparel stores. The companies aren't giving up on virtual worlds altogether, though, but moving on to games like There, Gaia Online and Entropia Universe. The article also contains some commentary from a marketing executive who conducted an informal survey of the game and discovered that 'One of the most frequently purchased items in Second Life is genitalia.' What company wouldn't want to be in on that action?"
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Are Marketers Abandoning Second Life?
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One of the most frequently purchased items... (Score:5, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Tuesday June 19, @07:48AM)
I am pretty sure if they weren't supplied for free, that would also be the case in real life.
Re:One of the most frequently purchased items... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:One of the most frequently purchased items... (Score:5, Funny)
(Last Journal: Tuesday June 19, @07:48AM)
Umm, remind me not to go shopping with you.
Re:One of the most frequently purchased items... (Score:5, Funny)
(http://www.emacswiki...iki/ChristopherSmith | Last Journal: Wednesday November 07, @07:35AM)
Now, is politics the second oldest profession, or merely a variation on the first?
Re:One of the most frequently purchased items... (Score:5, Funny)
(http://www.artefaqs.com/)
Re:One of the most frequently purchased items... (Score:5, Insightful)
Sounds like politics to me.
Re:One of the most frequently purchased items... (Score:5, Funny)
(Last Journal: Thursday May 13 2004, @02:58PM)
At least with prostitution up-front you know you're getting fucked. With politicians, its more like date rape.
The most frequently purchased items: (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://www.scarydevil.com/~peter/ | Last Journal: Monday September 26 2005, @06:53PM)
In First Life: clothes, food, shelter, cosmetics, drugs, jewelry, weapons, transportation, and entertainment (including stories and movies about people who can change their skins, hair, clothes, gender, species, etc...)
In Star Trek: clothes, food, shelter, cosmetics, drugs, jewelry, weapons, sensors, shields, teleporters, and holodeck privileges (where they can pretend to change their skins, hair, clothes, gender, species, etc...)
They are moving to FirstLive (Score:5, Funny)
Total Residents: 6,553,628,382
Born Today: 364,936
Died Today: 152,029
Pants Purchased: 27,021
TV Hours Watched: 82,124,102,305
Re:They are moving to FirstLive (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://babelfish.alt...%2F%2Fslashdot.jp%2F)
And that's after spending years doing training in the random (usually boring) place you started the game in and being stuck with a load of boorish cretins. Supposedly this is to teach you how the game works, but after you complete it, you realise it's not that useful at all.
The one bit of good news is that you don't have to buy your own genitalia- the bad news is that it's hard, if not impossible, to upgrade...
Re:They are moving to FirstLive (Score:5, Funny)
(http://www.seizurerobots.com/)
Re:They are moving to FirstLive (Score:5, Interesting)
Defacing virtual commercial presenses? (Score:3, Insightful)
(http://www.demaagd.com/ | Last Journal: Sunday October 27 2002, @06:53PM)
Re:Defacing virtual commercial presenses? (Score:4, Insightful)
(http://localhost/)
When commerce is about relative equals using their own skills and resources to meet each others' needs, it is not in conflict with many utopian ideals. When it is about large institutions existing at an entirely different scale than those of its market, it's another story.
The small-scale, individual entrepreneurial providers of services are not what are getting attacked in SL. It is the influx of commercial institutions.
Re:Defacing virtual commercial presenses? (Score:5, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Wednesday July 11, @08:27PM)
What exactly is SL, There, et al? (Score:4, Insightful)
Maybe I'm just not nerd enough anymore..
Re:What exactly is SL, There, et al? (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://www.secondseeker.com/)
For me it is sculpture. A friend of mine used to race sailboats. He was bed ridden with a neurological disorder, but in Second Life few knew this. He is dead now, from the disease, but for his last few years he was able bodied as you and I.
PleaseWakeMeUp Idler in Second Life
Surprise surprise! (Score:5, Insightful)
And that maybe marketing sportsware or fashionware to geeks playing Second Life all day, instead of going outside and doing some sports or going to real life parties, may just not be the most cost-effective idea?
One of the prime reasons people are playing second life is because they are so damn fed up with First Life! And advertisers are a big thing that you can be fed up in the first place. Guess what, if you import to Second Life things that were what you hate in First Life already, people are going to be hostile to them?
Go back marketing soap to soccer moms, marketers. Do a favor to yourself and the rest of society.
heh. (Score:3, Funny)
Also, (Score:1)
Oh look, marketing realizes what we knew years ago (Score:4, Interesting)
(Last Journal: Saturday November 18 2006, @07:24PM)
Yes, it makes a lot more sense to do such a survey now, rather than before you wasted a bunch of money putting your company presence on this POS "game."
I swear, if the average corporate marketing division was a person, he'd have an IQ roughly between that of a flying penis and that of the jizz on a furry's suit, both of which are common themes in Second Life.
Rob
Spelling notes from a disinterested party... (Score:1)
You mean **uninterested**.
"disinterested |dis?int??restid; -tristid| adjective 1 not influenced by considerations of personal advantage : a banker is under an obligation to give disinterested advice. 2 having or feeling no interest in something : her father was so disinterested in her progress that he only visited the school once."
"USAGE A common source of confusion is the difference between disinterested and uninterested. Disinterested means 'not having a personal interest, impartial':: a juror must be disinterested in the case being tried. Uninterested means 'not interested, indifferent': | on the other hand, a juror must not be uninterested."
More Importantly.. (Score:5, Funny)
I wonder what their return policy is?
Re:More Importantly.. (Score:5, Funny)
Kinda Like the Klondike Gold Rush.... (Score:3, Insightful)
(http://rewinn.com/)
Near the end of the article: "Consulting firms that were set up to bring brands into Second Life are busy helping clients explore other worlds."
The best way to profit from a gold rush is to sell tools to the miners ... as Seattle discovered in 1897 [nps.gov]
Second Life? (Score:2, Informative)
Stay away from SL Sex (Score:1, Informative)
It took that long... (Score:1, Insightful)
And... what was the point originally, anyway? (Score:5, Informative)
(http://hydrogencode.freehostia.com/)
Being underage, I loaded up the teen edition, logged in, and got started.
Or not.
For one thing, the load times are terrible. Because pretty much all the content is user-created, it must be loaded when you enter the area. Rather than have users wait for six hours at the load screen, the world loads and renders around you. This effect looks terrible. First the mesh of an object comes in - slowly and jerkily - and then remains gray until its texture loads.
After the area has rendered around me, I try to make my way around, stuttering with lag. It turns out the best way to get around in second life is to fly. So I try it, fly high up, only to see - surprise! - more buildings slowly coming into view.
I tried to give it a chance - I really did - but after about five minutes of graphical glitches and lag, I left the game and uninstalled it. I think I'm just fine with my first life, thanks.
Re:And... what was the point originally, anyway? (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://www.andymo.org/)
The first thing I did in world was stutter around at aprx. 4FPS. Even though the world was lagging like crazy, and everyone I saw was wearing the uniform purple/blue shirt, I was intrigued by the possibilities. I finished the tutorial and started messing around with LSL.
After a few minutes, I had a hello world program up and working. A few hours later, I made 10 bucks by writing a blackjack program for my first in-world friend, the owner of a small casino. I hung out with him for awhile, and invented a few new gambling devices, and then I decided to become a premium member.
At this point I was earning enough money to pay for the subscription cost, and I also purchased my first plot of land.. a 512. I built a small house on my land and started modding it... for instance I could change the alpha value of the windows, lock doors and such.
I became a scripting teacher at TUI, a school for the basics/advanced parts of Second Life.
I still have many friends in Second Life that I would never have met otherwise, and came out of Second Life much better at writing finished scripts and the confidence of having run a small scripting business.
Once you get past the sometimes ugly graphics of Second Life (not as ugly once your upgrade your graphics card), you can understand why 40,000 people spend hours and hours a day in their Second Lives. It is a welcome escape from the monotonous first life. Where else can you decide to be a bunny one moment, and a 10 foot robot the next?
Hype (Score:3, Funny)
(http://www.tjerkstra.org/)
Or are they? (Score:1)
(http://urban-pirate.com/)
PK'd? (Score:1)
Just because you get PK'd, doesn't mean they don't like you. It's one of the new challenges on the internet. It comes as a direct result of resurrection.
DON'T GIVE UP ON second LIFE (Score:4, Interesting)
(Last Journal: Thursday May 03 2007, @11:34AM)
So to me the question to ask is why does the model not work, and why do people attack the brands. Perhaps because second life is supposed to free to develop it own 'economy', and people do not want established brands interfering with their enterprise. Perhaps this is yet another artifact of a world in which the conventional rules and consequences do not exist, and if a major brand wants to exist, it must truly compete, and not depend on the vagaries of regulation to make it succesful.
This is surprising? (Score:2, Insightful)
LA Times Confirms It: Second Life isn't Popular (Score:2, Interesting)
The fact that its few members have nothing better to do than to flood the Slashdot story queue about it, grasping for some small, twisted glimpse of relevance, indicates just that: Second Life is popular with a small group of 40,000 people who have nothing better to do with their time than to flood the Slashdot story queue.
Seriously. Small websites have more visitors a day than that.
In fact, if you want to post stories that accurately reflect its accomplishments, try headlines like: "Second Life: Publisher Creates Sexually Explicit Virtual Meeting Place for Furries and Other Fetishists."
LAT repeats 4 out of 5 common myths about SL (Score:5, Informative)
http://gigaom.com/2007/07/12/debunking-5-business
- [S]ome reporters glance at the front page's "Online Now" stat- currently around 40-48,000 at peak times- and assume that's a more accurate tally of total active users... A better reference is posted monthly by the company's demographer on their blog, and includes an industry standard of unique monthly active users. As of June, that number was closer to 500,000.
- While it's true that "homegrown" content generates far more enthusiasm, traffic to the top real world promotional sites [in SL] are actually competitive with other forms of Internet advertising. During June, about 400,000 Residents logged in each week. In a typical seven day span that month, according to my Second Life blog's demographer, the five most popular locales generated anywhere from roughly 1200 to 10,000 visits. (The top ten earned over total 40,000 visits.) Therefore, each of the top five sites garnered a
- Much as a conflict between idealists and exploitative capitalists in the metaverse would be an exciting story, that hasn't observably happened to mass effect since 2004, when the world was vastly smaller.
- In terms of land mass, Linden Lab reports that just 18% of the world has been designated to have "Mature" content; explicit sexual activity is relegated to a subset of that percentage.
Full links and background at the GigaOM article [gigaom.com]
.Even more embarrassing... (Score:2)
(Last Journal: Monday February 13 2006, @07:11PM)
If there's any hyped game lately based on media buzz due to clueless journalists thinking a MMO where you build your stuff is "new and cool", then this is it.
Second Life? (Score:2)
oh guys (Score:2)
(http://www.fiveeightforums.com/)
Not really suprising. Any of it. (Score:3, Insightful)
Second life is real life with anonymity. Don't you think that breeds a culture that is more interested in sexual exploits and penal attacks (I mean the flying penises, not a second sexual action) than wholesome family fun where people can buy items.
The biggest problem is Second life tries to build an economy based off of real world money. It just doesn't work, people don't want to pay money to get virtual money. On the other hand World of Warcraft has an economy based off of fake money earned from doing spending time in the game. This way advertising in WoW could work (it shouldn't be done but could be there).
So someone please explain how advertisers would even start to invest in this idea with out looking before they leaped. It's an obvious bait and switch deal (high amounts of users, low amounts of ACTIVE users).
Sony's trying to get into the Second life front with Playstation Home, then expecting people to buy all sorts of virtual wares? I can't imagine that's going to turn out good for them too. That doesn't mean the virtual world idea is horrible. The problem is the cost of the virtual world has to be floated somewhere, and consumers are NOT the place to get it in a Second Life style enviroment. SL had a good idea at one point of charging people for land, and that could work, but nickle and diming them for everything or expecting people to spend huge amounts of time designing objects doesn't make a online experience for any company.
Instead give a monthly stipend so people can do stuff with it, have a couple LARGE add ons (more room/s) and charge the advertisers pay for the servers. There needs to be a reason for people to log on other than random hookups and spending there money. That's what the mall is for, though I still can't find the random hook up store.
Which? Disinterested or Hostile? (Score:1)
Dangers and marketing: SL vs RL... (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.scarydevil.com/~peter/ | Last Journal: Monday September 26 2005, @06:53PM)
What actually happened?
What does it mean?
When you buy an "island" (a server) from Linden Labs, what you get is configured to only allow *you* to create objects on it. In addition, unless you deliberately set out to make it happen, nothing in Second Life can be damaged, destroyed, defaced, or in any way modified except by the owner. Even if you do allow people to create objects, you get to set a time limit beyond which they vanish. THe only think you can effect are objects marked as being as being subject to normal physics, which has to be done deliberately, and pretty much the only "physical" objects in most places in SL are the avatars themselves.
If the people who built the Kerry site mistakenly turned on building for other people without setting a time limit, and didn't keep someone there to monitor it, then they did the equivalent of renting space in a mall, putting up posters, setting out leaflets, and walking away with the doors unlocked... and they were a lot safer doing that than they'd have been in RL.
There's no feces to smear on things. You can create a picture of them and post them on top, like a second layer of posters. There's no way to remove anything anyone put there, or break it.
So... someone came along and put up new posters, with *pictures* of feces on them. Which (if they had any sense) the Kerry people would have removed, permanently, as soon as they returned. After making sure they had some pictures to show everyone what jerks Bush supporters were.
If they'd done the same thing in RL they'd have been lucky if they didn't get everything movable stolen as well. And canned from the campaign. No, there's much less chance of anything seriously unpleasant happening to your marketing campaign in SL than in RL.
The biggest problem I've seen with people marketing in SL is simply not understanding what they're doing.
For example, objects in SL are infinitely and freely replicable by the creator. If you set up a website online, advertising your product, you typically let people download screen savers and branded games and things for free. If you're a car company, you don't charge people money for the driving game and desktop wallpaper and AOL icons... you want people to walk out with them and keep them around. At car shows you give people freebies, you don't charge money for the toy cars and tee-shirts with your logo on them.
So I went to this auto maker's island. They wanted you to pay the equivalent of a dollar to buy a "car" in SL. That's a bunch of painted boxes configured to use the "driving" code built into SL. A car, mind you, that costs them no more than the wallpaper and mini driving game you could download at their website... and cost less to create than the model cars in that driving game. No thanks, I'll save that buck for an iTunes download. So their thousands of dollars for renting that island in SL is all thrown away because they tried to recover the costs by charging the people they're advertising to for what they'd be giving away as a freebie online or at the auto show.
You see this again and again. One electronics store wanted you to buy "computers" and "iPods" from them... all of which are just boxes with photos pasted on the sides. Another company was charging money for a logo T-shirt. What this kind of product is, is basically an uploaded copy of their logo, positioned so that when you "wore" it it showed up on your chest... they didn't even bother creating a "cloth" texture, stitches, folds, or any of the baked-in lighting effects that hobbyists making levels and skins for video games are used to doing. The T-shirts they give away at trade shows cost approximately infinity times as much to reproduce.
Meanwhile, the average person selling clothes in-game with a monthly budget that *might* pay for the typical
Apologies to the Wizard of Oz... (Score:2)
(http://geexology.org/ | Last Journal: Tuesday October 11 2005, @07:25PM)
I would toil away the hours, and mingle with the others, if I only had a groin.
Those who are tired of life... (Score:2)
(http://www.mclean-campbell.com/ | Last Journal: Tuesday July 31, @07:57AM)
attacks on corporate presences (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://vital.org.nz/)
Quelle surprise. Marketers in the real world always and everywhere have to pay for the ability to get their message out because at bottom people are reluctant to host it and reluctant to see it. People do not like advertising.
This is exactly what you would expect if there are no consequences to acting on that dislike, unless you are a marketer whose self-esteem depends on fooling yourself that people like what you do for a living.
Bill Hicks:
By the way if anyone here is in advertising or marketing... kill yourself.
No, no, no it's just a little thought. I'm just trying to plant seeds. Maybe one day, they'll take root - I don't know. You try, you do what you can. Kill yourself.
Seriously though, if you are, do.
Aaah, no really, there's no rationalisation for what you do and you are Satan's little helpers. Okay - kill yourself - seriously. You are the ruiner of all things good, seriously. No this is not a joke, you're going, "there's going to be a joke coming," there's no fucking joke coming. You are Satan's spawn filling the world with bile and garbage. You are fucked and you are fucking us. Kill yourself. It's the only way to save your fucking soul, kill yourself.
Planting seeds. I know all the marketing people are going, "he's doing a joke..." there's no joke here whatsoever. Suck a tail-pipe, fucking hang yourself, borrow a gun from a Yank friend - I don't care how you do it. Rid the world of your evil fucking makinations. Machi... Whatever, you know what I mean.
I know what all the marketing people are thinking right now too, "Oh, you know what Bill's doing, he's going for that anti-marketing dollar. That's a good market, he's very smart."
Oh man, I am not doing that. You fucking evil scumbags!
Good riddance... (Score:3)
(http://zorin.org/)
Meanwhile, content generated by residents tends to be interesting, innovative, and lots of fun to experience. Drop by Luskwood sometime and you can see the raw creativity in some of the avatars there. Check out Svarga and admire the amazing natural looking landscape, produced entirely by one resident.
Real life big business just can't compete with individual expression in Second Life. I won't be the only one happy to see them gone. Perhaps Linden Labs will start to cater to us, the residents again, and implement some basic necessities like user validation to keep out the net.riffraff.
-Z (Zorin Frobozz on SL)
Are Marketers Abandoning Second Life? (Score:1)
(Last Journal: Friday April 22 2005, @06:54PM)
Been there done that (Score:1)
The real reason for abandoning Second Life (Score:2, Insightful)
(http://insidesecondlife.blogspot.com/)
Yes, it's true, the Resident Numbers shown on the Website are over-inflated, by about 7.5 million I would say, and even then I would consider it suspicious. Linden Lab began allowing FREE ACCT's over a year ago, and many of the regular Residents of course decided they wanted a FREE Alternate Acct to mess with. Since there is not active way to track these FREE ACCT's, (LL doesn't track based on IP and MAC Address) there is no real way to tell how many of these FREE ACCTs are for already established Residents and how many are for New Residents coming into the world.
Yes, it's also true, there's a large part of the Resident Community that get their kicks out of Virtual Sex. This is true with just about any Online World though, so there's no real big news here.
Yes, it's also true as well, that there is a SMALL contingent of Residents that vehemently oppose the commercialization of the Second Life world. These groups actively seek out Commercial establishments and hold regular protests. The LA TIMES is incorrect those in assuming that MOST of the Community is against these Commercial establishments. The thing is, with the Commercial establishments, they usuall BUY their OWN ISLAND, therefore, if you don't want to go there, you don't have to. Most of the Resident Community might visit these Commercial Islands once or twice, but after that they figure, "So what else is new?" It's not that they don't like the Commercialization, its just simple that there's nothing new about them. Just another store to visit, big deal, we've been to stores before, and quite frankly, a Car Dealership showing new models in SL doesn't really do it for many people. Now if say someone like Netflix or Blockbuster came to SL, and rented movies, then you would see people flocking to them. It's a matter of the right product for the Community, not that the Community doesn't want them there. On a side note to this example, there are DVD stores in Second Life that are renting DVD's. This has been brought to the attention of Linden Lab, but they feel until the MPAA actually tells them to remove the offending material, then they don't really have to do anything about the illegality of this.
Which brings us to the REAL REASON the Commercial avenues are disappearing in Second Life. It's got little to do with the "assumptions" given in the LA TIMES, it has everything to do with a very unstable World and the amount of BUGS that continue to plague the world. A day doesn't go by that I don't hear from someone that has spent a considerable amount of Linden Dollars (in-world currency) and when they went to put the product out on their property, it simply disappeared and never returned. Linden Lab of course, says they can do nothing about reimbursing the people for this major issue, yet provide no fix to this issue that has now lasted over three months. Not only that, but it was recently divulged in-world by the BUG TEAM members that BUG REPORTS that don't have REPRODUCABLE steps are ignored because, as they put it, they just don't have time to try and figure those out. Yet, the bug list still has bugs listed over 4 years ago on it. The BUG TEAM also has decided it would be a good idea to let the Community VOTE on which bugs will be fixed first. I would say if you like BUG tracking and coding, a great place to work would be at Linden Lab, since they are still waiting to be told by the Resident Community what BUGS to fix first. Of course, Linden Lab has failed to provide some venue in which to "vote" on these issues, so I guess the BUG people are just taking the summer off. Also, Linden Lab continues to add more and more enhancements to Second Life, which continues to increase the stress on the GRID. A month or so ago, Linden Lab introduced a new enhancement called WINDLIGHT to the world. It's purpose was to make the worlds SKY more realistic and "prettier". Once the enhancement was added, peopl
the problem (Score:1)
There are marketers, and there are marketers.... (Score:1)
We are talking about the feelings Second Life residents feel towards different types of marketing campains, that are being used by different marketing companies in Second Life. One campain stategy, that has been discussed in the posts here thoroughly, is the big companies. These large corporations are responsable for the disinterest, because of their un-inspired presentations, and some protests by extreemests, just like in real life. The final marketing campain type, that has been greeted with so much hostility, is the low level mass marketers. These marketers do the real world equavelent of buying your neighbors house, and all of the houses at major street corners, and put up massive ugly ads for sex, and gambling, and all sorts of horrible MLM schemes. These marketing companies destroy the once wonderful views that the local land owners have worked so hard to create. In real life most municipalities have passed laws against this sort of behavior, so it does not happen. But in Second Life, the residents have no such protections. So, some have banded together to purchase the land around these horrible ad farms, and surround them with trees, or a building, to return their view, and land value!!
Whew...
Hope this helps
something wrong here. (Score:2, Insightful)
(http://www.gamerslastwill.com/)
even that is a exaggeration. I've preached this since its inception, Second Life is dumb.
It truly is an animated AOL chatroom. It's full of boring people who don't get to have sex.
As they are boring people, why is everyone paying so much attention to them?
It has no plot, no purpose, no rules, no point.
The end of spinning ad farms? (Score:2)
(http://www.on-fire.org/ | Last Journal: Monday October 15, @01:29AM)
Does this mean the end of spinning ad farms, and those Avs wandering the infohubs with giant attached signs, getting paid for every person who clicks?
Oooh, I hope so.
Translation: (Score:1)
Quite Contrary infact (Score:2)
(http://www.artichost.net/)
Movies like 300 and Transformers were advertised there, with quite a big fan fare, and it has been excellent for those movies, and more is coming along. The guys who made these builds, V3 Group, is telling that especially with movie 300 there was a huge viral marketing success via freebies, same happened with Transformers.
I personally know few of these who have been working on making those events and advertising happen.
This article that marketers would be leaving SL is quite a total bullshit. Hell, i even know who does marketing on SL, and they PROFIT, not via the impressions, but DIRECT profit with the marketing material they have! That case is a music producer/publisher, with online music store.
Now, what's up with Adidas and American Apparel store? Regular griefing attacks, nothing special there, or new. It might be
disappopinting, but when i visited Adidas in-world location, it was made like they would be INVITING GRIEFERS! Of course they
are going to have them in that case. Apart from that, Adidas shoes in SL are simply the BEST BUILT shoes of ANY there, they are
simply an awesome piece of work. They ask a nominal 40L$ for the shoes, but personally, i would have been ready to pay many many
times more for them. Needless to say, i used them for quite a while, and they got some viral marketing effect from it, many were
simply stunned about those shoes.
The problem with these "failures" is, that they simply don't know "the rules", or how it works. With Adidas this was VERY apparent.
As for the resident numbers, yes they are inflated, and mostly there is only peaks of over 40,000 online at any given time,
however, these figures are constantly on the rise, and there is hudnreds and hundreds of thousands of active 'residents'. And
money moves.
And YES, i do run quite sizeable business within Second Life, am personally on every single day, and conducting business there every single day. I do also run an advertising network within Second Life, as a side-kick kind of thing. That isn't my main business there. And yes, i am helping people to succeed with their second life business journeys.
Marketers Just Don't Understand Marketing (Score:2)
(http://whatisthemessage.blogspot.com/)
With a generation of people who have grown up in a massively interconnected world, traditional marketing principles are turned on their head. A presence in SL just ain't going to cut it. Marketers are going to need to figure out how the contemporary world functions in all its interconnected complexity, and change their ways accordingly.
Well, duh (Score:2)
Why do you buy brand stuff in the first place? I mean here, in real life. Well, there are generally 3 reasons:
1. Quality
2. Comfort
3. Looks and bragging rights
1 and 2 are simply out in 2nd life. Whether it's comfortable doesn't matter (hey, you don't have to feel it against your skin, for all you care it could be made of sandpaper instead of silk), and it lasts forever anyway, so who cares about quality?
What's left is looks. Now, since you don't have to build up sweatshops in east asia to get your designs going, anyone with a decent modeling skill can start his own business. And I'm pretty sure there are designs out there that look better than Reebok and Adidas.
So what's left is "brand awareness". The "look, I can afford it" effect. And, well, I've seen a documentary recently about some chinese girl who made a killing with her designs. I can well imagine that her stuff is the "I'm rich and I wanna show it" outfit already.
In other words: Sorry, Adidas, you're too late.
Re:Iran Might Claim Second Life Too! (Score:1)
Re:hmm... (Score:2)
Please don't paint all the players of EU (myself being one, as well as a SL resident) with the same brush of MA's brainwashing. I for one don't fall for it.