The Progress Bar read by people interested in emerging Internet marketing, technology, social media, reputation, virtual environments, blogs, the Boston Internet scene and much more. If you like what you see you should subscribe to my RSS feed or via email in the sidebar. Thanks for visiting!
I found this link to the MIT Advertising Lab blog which talks about first world marketers invading SL. Not that I agree 100% but telling none the less.
It looks like a fairly heated and a long overdue discussion on virtual world marketing is unfolding across SL-related blogs, so here’s a a quick follow-up to yesterday’s post with more links. (Brace for more SL news on Adverlab since the dedicated Brands in Games blog is undergoing some reconstruction. )
Business Week did a story last week filled with some hard numbers on what it costs to bring a company to (Second) Life. Quite a spread: $5,000 to $1M, and we are not talking Linden dollars here. As Prokofy Neva commented in SL Herald, “What a faint, distant memory that cover on BW in April featuring Anshe and her paltry $250,000 in Second Life, eh?”
Peter “Urizenus Sklar” Ludlow, founder and editor of the SL Herald, unleashes his wrath at the real-world marketers on the pages of Strumpette PR blog: “You don’t blaze a path to the future by charging into a new space and ignoring what is happening around you, nor by recycling your old rust belt industrial design ideas in a new medium, and more importantly, if the discourse of cyberculture offends your delicate ears, then just keep the f$%k away thank you very much.” (Find more of his thoughts in SL Herald).
It amazes me that SL is getting so popular thanks to nothing more than media interest in the SL economy. Did you know that companies are spending up to a million dollars for their SL presence already. Unless you’re Amazon, which is making great strides in merging their web services with SL.
Do you know old school Second Lifers call marketers in SL? F#$ktards. Rude, yes but somewhat on point given the recent spate of “ground breaking, first-ever claims coming from agencies and their clients. So much hot air from so many clueless people. Not much can be done about it.
We’ll see what sort of interaction consumers have with these brands a year from now. I have a feeling there will be a rush, lots of spending, a lull, and then another rush into virtual space. And then we’ll have to figure out how to open source SL and connect it to other environments, but I’m getting ahead of myself.
Some development shops are close to rolling out customized SL clients. That is going to be cool. Special branding, user interface tweaks and hopefully increased speeds and special features.
It’s early days for setting up shop in SL. Lots of companies coming into SL with no clue about how to be good citizens.
We’re still at the point where creating a Myspace page for an iPod is more effective than spending a million bucks in SL.
As with early web developers, the $200,000 projects are there for the taking for a select few companies. That’s where Electric Sheep Company, Rivers Run Red, Millions of Us and other SL build/brand agencies come in.
Me? I set up a marketing shop in Worlds Inc in 1996, but that never took off enough to be lucrative. We ended up working with IBM and SGI, who wanted to port their brands into virtual space via VRML builds of their websites. And sell the hardware and software that would run these worlds and the objects in them. We were way to ahead of the curve, but that was exciting. Moving into SL now doesn’t get me as excited as I thought it would, which is kind of disappointing actually. I still visit every day but often the SL window is buried beneath Firefox, mail and my blog reader.
I think I need a new black MacBookPro running Parallels, just for SL.
