It is a coincidence that Akela should have posted what he did about the differences between real-life marketing products and SL products, as I have just had a lively exchange of email with a friend who is a RL advertising agency businessman in the UK, who assumed he must have a client with a youth product to be interested in SL. I supplied him with a link to this page, which is a couple of years old, but shows that the demographic for online gaming in general is not what it is assumed to be. Just because the high profile campaigns in SL have been youth brands and aimed at a youth market, doesn't mean that's what we have in SL.
My experience of having many friends and acquaintances in SL is that the minority of them are under 30. Maybe that's because I like long intellectual conversations, or because I have a horror of text-speak -- except for my well-known addiction to lol -- and like people who speak in whole sentences and use punctuation. However, I work as a mentor and the incoming avatars must be a fairly random bunch, and I have met a substantial proportion of my friends that way. They aren't all 19. By a long chalk.
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So ... my first piece of advice to anyone wanting to market in SL is, know who you are talking to, check out the demographics of online gaming and don't assume that because everyone looks young and gorgeous that they are young.
When I first came into SL over two years ago, when there were under 10,000 avatars signed up, there was an interesting list of events, which were announced at the top of the hour by a Linden, there were classes, introductory events, parties, contests. At nearly every event, there would be a free-to-copy item -- it was de rigeur to provide something for your guests, and the equivalent maybe of a drink in RL, at parties. Sometimes people endured extreme embarrassment to pick up a good freebie. I have often talked of arriving at my first party with many Lindens and Mentors in attendance, with a vagina box stuck to my head, just so that I could pick up the beautiful stone jars and lids which contained marvellous free items, at Misty Rhodes' birthday party in 2004.
Nowadays, the events list is full of trash -- events which aren't events, yard sales where people are selling other people's freebies or pirated things, sex clubs, gambling promotions, store openings -- and it is hard to find any good events among the dross - so hard that many people give up the attempt and stay at home on their parcel of land. The same old freebies circulate around SL, and what is more, commercial companies arriving in world to promote their products want to charge for their products, instead of using them as viral marketing by allowing them to be free to copy.
If we are going to see SL as an extension of the web, then I would see good freebies as the equivalent of the free downloads that many companies offer. I can see that RL companies are in a bit of a bind over whether to charge for their goods or not. If they don't charge at least $1 linden, they don't get any idea of how many of their items have been taken and circulated, not without additional programming, that is. If they make something fantastically detailed -- a shoe for example -- then there might well be complaints about unfair competition from the in-world creators.
The thing is, that I think the Advertising agencies and PR companies have their eyes fixed in the wrong direction. They are looking to their clients, instead of to the in-world market. And making some pretty substantial mistakes thereby, because this is a new world, one where the rules are changing all the time. You have to keep up. You have to remember there are businessmen and women, people with things to sell, people with products that they want to promote. They're all disguised as residents, may be blundering around looking for a person to help them with a global marketing campaign or they may be long-time residents astute enough to know which companies know what they are doing and which do not.
Companies who have money to spend in SL need to look at what they are offering to the in-world audience, even if their intention is to sell their services to companies who are not in world yet. They need to understand the way that things work, in order to be able to maximize that for their clients' benefit. If one PR company would invest in a web page which removes the dross from the events list and provide a good, in-depth guide to the worthwhile events in SL, how much traffic would they get? If in addition, they thought about SL and the web in a joined-up way, couldn't they provide a win-win-win for them, their clients AND the people in SL? An easily-read events list, links to web pages, slurls to places in world ... it could be four dimensional.
If they offered events like networking parties -- a chance for scripters to get together and exchange ideas, a chance for builders to swap tips and hints, and maybe sell a few prefabs, a chance for people offering specialist services in SL to set up a five-prim exhibition on free land -- how much positive publicity in-world would that generate? If they took over and properly organized the in-world version of the SLCC which was a complete non-event this year but could have been fantastic ....
It seems to me that offering a free gift to people in SL could also be seen as the SL equivalent of a direct mail letter, with the advantage that in SL people opt in to the specific product. It would be easy to have a free and wearable version of, say, a shoe, as a publicity item, including landmarks and information about the company's in-world and web presence, and then have a charged-for item with extra functionality. People need to think inside SL, not inside their profit margin.
I don't think that it will ever be possible for cheap sweat shops or expensive ad-agency-sponsored items to drive the resident-created brands out of business, for the same reason that neither market stalls nor designer shops have put Marks and Spencer out of business. People know what they like and want, and they won't just buy things because they are cheap or branded. Some people will, all people won't. Brands in SL mean a different thing, anyway. People know which brands they like, and keep checking back with them to see if new things have come in. Diversity is good for business in both worlds.
Where I think there is a huge gaping hole at present, is in sponsorship and provision of actual, much-needed services. These, if offered to residents, would be a boon and provide much much more positive benefit to marketing companies than a replica office in SL. If four companies planning to open SL sims were to club together to sponsor an island in SL, then (for the cost of four islands and the builds they would have paid for) they would be able to pay a reasonable salary to three people to man it most of the time, offering guidance and advice to people coming into SL who feel disorientated and unsure about their next step, who don't like to bother a mentor. No-one is going to mind branded posters and links to websites when the companies concerned have shown an interest in supporting the communities in SL. They could have links and landmarks which are kept up-to-date, one of the biggest difficulties in SL. If not help and support, an in-world guide to specialist areas? Or an information centre for educational builds and events? There are a lot of opportunities to show that you know the world and want to support it.
Greed is often publicized as a reason to get into SL, but it isn't my experience generally that the people I know and love there are greedy. Mostly they are generous with time, creations and experience. Yes ... that seems to be a foreign language to a lot of commercial companies. Many of them are learning in real life that having a good environmental and giving policy pays dividends in positive customer feedback ... the same is true in SL. And, compared with TV campaigns and print advertising, it's cheap and affordable.
It isn't a mistake that I have described a freebie as the SL equivalent of a RL drink, the equivalent of a free download on a web page, the equivalent of a direct mailing letter, and the equivalent of, well, a freebie like a pen or a calendar. Treated right it can be all of those things and a lot, lot, more. And yet I see very few companies offering anything worthwhile. Most seem to think that a few clickable web page links is good enough. They last for a few minutes. A freebie may last for a long, long time. I still see the free candle and candlestick I provided as my first freebie in 2004 all over SL, sometimes in quantity. If that was your company's item, it would be selling you far longer than a virtual conference room. (And if you are going to build a virtual conference room, make it one for a particular group in SL, provided free of charge in return for your name on the wall, not one which sits empty until your staff wander in to show a client.)
I think that SL is very like RL, but it isn't the same. People who have spent a lot of time in world know that it is different, but are hard put to say why and how. I would say that marketing, branding, and selling companies need to be in world enough to understand that indefinable difference, or find someone who does. Even some who have been in world a long time, still make basic mistakes which have an impact on their effectiveness for their clients. I believe that only when they start to work in SL in a way which results in the win-win from which we can all benefit, will they begin to tap into the potential of the world. If they don't know the world and don't understand how things work there, how on earth can they do that for their clients
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