True Confessions Of A Marketing Intern

Lost In Second Life. "Can I Get Some Help? Please?"

During the course of my academic career I have had the opportunity to explore Second Life and the marketing opportunities it may present.  While I do not pretend to be and expert in either, I believe that virtual worlds are the future of the internet and therefore the future of marketing.  However, I do not feel that Second Life will be the platform of the future.

According to Business Week (http://tinyurl.com/6atsjk), 2 years ago they were promoting the advantages of marketing in Second Life (SL).  Flash forward to May of 2008 and the are still promoting the same idea.  They claim that while many credible sources, including Wired Magazine (http://tinyurl.com/dg8cqu), are talking about the trouble with SL, other marketing companies, This Second Marketing for example, have been very successful in SL.  They claim that one of the benefits in SL is the ability to foster a community, and they give The L Word (a Showtime series) as an example of a successful brand reaching their audience through SL.  They suggest that businesses should leverage the brands of businesses that are currently successful in SL, and that companies need to think outside the box when they create their islands.  They believe that companies need to “leverage the fantastic”.

While I do agree that companies need to create islands unlike anything they may consider in Real Life branding, I do not believe that SL is the medium of the future.  This is confirmed by the opening sentence of the article where Business Week has stated that they had a cover story almost 2 years ago touting the same marketing efforts.  If you consider that Facebook only took 2 years to reach a market audience of 50 million (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cL9Wu2kWwSY) that is a long time for SL to still be attempting market penetration.

The article that I found most useful in discussing what marketers are doing wrong in SL is a blog (http://talkingsl.com/) discussing White Feather Technologies, a successful marketing company with efforts directed in SL.  They equate mistakes companies are making now in SL with the same mistakes they made in the early stages of the internet.  They list 4 specific errors companies are making; they are duplicating their real business in SL; they are assuming that if the island is built then visitors will come without any effort on the company’s part; they are failing to staff their businesses; and they are making broad assumptions about the SL community.  While I do agree with most of these statements, which I’ll discuss later, I do have a small disagreement with the final conclusion.

While I do agree that marketers are making broad generalizations in SL, I think that making broad generalizations is what makes marketing so successful.  Whenever someone is creating a marketing campaign they must first decide on a target market and then make generalizations about that market.  For example, if the target is women between the ages of 35 and 40 buying a Fruit Roll Up, a marketer would likely assume that the woman had children.  It is in making broad generalizations that marketers are able to focus their efforts because if you try to target everyone you’ll get no one.

The other three statements I completely agree with.  I think that in attempting to recreate their real life image online brands are making the same mistakes that were made in Web 1.0 when companies created websites which were basically just a copy of their flyer.  The mistake that shocked me the most (until I investigated SL myself) was that major corporations would spend millions creating an island and then not bother to staff the island.  While I do understand that this is a virtual world I do not understand how companies can think that they do not need to provide service.  What people like about Virtual Worlds is their resemblance to Real World interaction.  While people may not expect a representative online when they visit a website, they look for that human help in SL.  Also, as SL can be awkward to navigate they may actually need the help to make a purchase.

If you consider that Facebook reached a market of 50 million in 2 years or the extreme popularity of World of Warcraft it is evident that SL is well behind the ball as far as market penetration and return users.  I attribute this to a poor user interface in SL which is not particularly intuitive, extremely high graphic demands that are not supported by many personal computers and difficulty located other users while inworld (although this is part of the interface).  I do think that it is important for organizations to experiment in SL so that when a market leader does emerge in the Virtual World environment the organization will have cutting edge marketing efforts.  So don’t be afraid to market in Second Life, just be cautious and don’t be surprised if in the recent future you need to adapt to a new Virtual World.

Tags: Virtual Worlds

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 7th, 2009 at 11:04 pm and is filed under Second Life, Virtual Worlds. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.