Second Life Reality Check
Frank Rose, a contributing writer at Wired, has a refreshing article in the August issue. In "Lonely Planet," Rose debunks the corporate invasion of Second Life. He points out that companies setting up a virtual presence there aren't getting much of anything for their money, time, and effort.Toward the end of the article, Rose quotes a couple of informed observers:
"A terror has gripped corporate America," says Joseph Plummer, chief research officer at the Advertising Research Foundation, an industry think tank. ... "The simple model they all grew up with — the 30-second spot, delivered through the mass reach of television — "is no longer working. And there are two types of people out there: a small group that's experimenting thoughtfully, and a large group that's trying the next thing to come through the door." Second Life appeals to the latter — the ones who are afraid of missing out, who don't consider half a million dollars to be a lot of money, and who haven't figured out (or don't want to admit) that Second Life is less than the bold new frontier it appears to be.More generally, taking advantage of Web 2.0 capabilities intelligently requires learning how the people you're trying to reach, whether customers or employees, use applications like blogs and wikis and, in notably limited ways, virtual reality sites like Second Life.
"For people who've grown up in analog, Second Life is not that hard to understand," says Rishad Tobaccowala, CEO of Denuo, a consulting arm of the global ad giant Publicis Groupe. "I have a store in the real world; I have a store in the virtual world." In contrast, the kind of digital marketing that actually works requires a conceptual leap. Successful online marketing is targeted and specific, like direct mail — but it's direct mail in a fun house, where the recipients can easily seize control of what the mail says, where it goes next, and how it gets there. You need to know how to buy up keywords to maximize search returns, how to make the most of recommendation engines, how to use the viral potential of Web video, how to monitor what's being said in blogs and message boards, how not to blow it by trying to be deceptive. Building a corporate pavilion in Second Life doesn't require any of these things. It's simple and it's obvious.
Labels: Web 2.0
posted by Karen Nelson @ 11:00 PM
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