Friday, November 03, 2006

Advertising in Second Life

The MIT Adverblog has been tracking a break out conversation about advertising in Second Life. The discussion was kicked off by David Berkowitz's MediaPost article titled, Second Life Optimization.

From the article:

"What happens when you're looking for shoes or sneakers in Second Life and don't know where you want to buy them? Right now, searching for such terms won't bring up the Reebok store, which is only optimized for its brand term. This is why marketers will need to engage in Second Life Optimization, or, on a broader scale, virtual world optimization."

Prokofy Neva responds:

"Erm...did they put it in SEARCH? It can't search itself, you know -- you have to go on the about-land menu where all this is done and click off the right boxes, put in a picture with all permissions opened up to make it go in the land (that means "anyone can copy" etc) and also write a coherent description."

Prokofy Neva's 20 Tips for Advertising in Second Life:


"
19. Talk to people who spend time living and working as avatars in the virtual world to see what they think and what they want. Don't just believe metaversal marketing companies -- do focus groups."

Peter "Urizenus Sklar" Ludlow's post:

"But this wasn't the future calling: you don't blaze a path to the future by charging into a new space and ignoring what is happening around you, nor by recycling your old rust belt industrial design ideas in a new medium, and more importantly, if the discourse of cyberculture offends your delicate ears, then just keep the fuck away thank you very much."

New World Notes digs into some stats to see how traffic was responding to all the new corporate locations:

"Take the private islands of the "big three" metaverse developers. Early this morning, the aggregate traffic to the HQ of Millions of Us (a sponsor of this blog) was 1451; Avalon, home to Rivers Run Red, was 1164; The Electric Sheep Company's Sheep Island, 486. Traffic for some of their leading corporate clients are comparable, as well: For the Sheep, Reuters Island was at 2578, while Sony/BMG's locale ranks at 970; Rivers' Reebok Island had 519, and Radio 1, the BBC's island, 902. Millions' new listening booth for Warner Brothers hip hop artist Talib Kweli scored 344, while the Wired Magazine office brought in the highest among that sampling, at 6338.

I discovered only one exception to this rule, and that was totally by random browsing, because unless I missed it, this particular corporate-funded island has come into Second Life with little fanfare: for the last three months, a company called Thomson has been providing SL-based instruction for using products from Cisco, Microsoft, and other leading tech companies, on an island of the same name.

Thomson island's Traffic this morning? That would be 23328."

That last piece is amazing. Someone needs to figure out how Thomson is managing those kinds of numbers.

Labels:

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home