Some Q&A from San Francisco
By Jeff Hilimire on Wednesday, April 25th, 2007I always love going to San Francisco and I always love getting back home to my family…its just that in between time of waiting at the airport for the red-eye flight and then actually taking the red-eye that is less than appealing. So here I am 3 hours into my wait at the airport in San Fran with a few hours to go and I figured I’d shed a little light on some of the questions I got after my presentation on virtual worlds on Tuesday.
First, let me say I was shocked by the lack of knowledge about Second Life from the otherwise pretty savvy group of interactive people that were at this conference. I found that almost none had tried the medium and very few had heard much about it. That being said, here were a few of the questions (and my answers) from the group:
What is the cost of a project in Second Life?
You can make a pretty fair comparison between building an island in Second Life and creating a website, both in terms of cost and work required. If you want a pretty standard island with few bells and whistles, that should be around the same cost as your standard brochure-ware website.
Are any of the virtual worlds converging with each other or with MMOG’s?
Not really. However, I do expect that there will have to be some form of convergence between virtual worlds so that people are able to take their avatars (personas) with them from one world to the next. People take a lot of pride in their virtual selves and expecting them to invest in multiple worlds will be a stretch. Some Googlish company will come and put a few together and own the virtual space.
Should we expect to have 24/7 support and resources keeping our Second Life presence going?
Although you don’t need to have someone present at all times on your island, you should consider having someone there at peak times and certainly during any events. One of the biggest problems that marketers make is creating a presence in Second Life and then stepping back and seeing what happens. Build it and they will come might have been a good strategy for Kevin Costner, but it won’t work for you in Second Life. Be ready to have some resources continue the experience.
What about Second Life’s inability to have more than 50 or so people in any given area (the servers can’t handle it currently)?
When asked this question I point out that Second Life is closer to real life than our typical web experience. If I’m on Amazon.com and trying to buy a toaster, the fact that there are a thousand people shopping for that same toaster does not effect me at all. However, if I’m in a Best Buy trying to buy a toaster and a thousand people are trying to buy it too, well that would just plain suck. Second Life is about communicating with other people in a realistic environment (ok, as realistic as 3D can be). If I’m in a room in Second Life and there are 500 people in that room, I couldn’t even have a conversation with someone because we’d all be on top of each other. So my point is, even though Linden Lab is working on improving the situation, I actually think its a great constraint because if that “problem” gets fixed, we’ll have a completely different problem on our hands.
If you’ve got more questions, by all means let me know.
Interesting questions from the group, Jeff. They might be new to virtual worlds - but, they are asking the right questions. Because they are a savvy group of interactive folks it wasn’t a stretch for them to see the potential of the space as it relates to branding and marketing; so their questions seem to have been more focused on functionality of the space. I’ll be interested to see what kind of questions this same group will be asking in 6 months to a year.
Branching a bit from the convergence question, while there isn’t yet convergence between the various 3d virtual worlds and mmogs, there is convergence occuring between these virtual worlds and the web. World of Warcraft has datalogging services such as Thottbot, and Second Life is a great platform for experimenting with integrating social web apps in general.
When advising people on starting up a project in second life, I notice that most people still consider it seperate from the web. Given the integration possibilities, I’m of the mode of thought that the best projects in second life are the ones that create a seamless experience between the second life space and the community web space. Creating that two-way bridge is the best way to take advantage of the social marketing opportunities in second life.
Have there been any strategies identified to try to target marketing efforts to segmented groups of Second Lifers? Seems like it could be a challenge to do so.
Also, other than the SL real estate millionaire, I haven’t heard of many documented marketing successes in the virtual world. Do they exist? Are real world companies able to market inside of SL with any success?
TS - great question and that was another one I got at the conference. The answer is that there aren’t really many public results from the current marketing efforts within Second Life. I think this is for many reasons, including there just hasn’t been enough time for such results to be posted as well as the results were far from exciting (due to the still low number of people actually using the medium).
Many marketers are getting into Second Life for the PR benefits and to test it out, without setting real metrics or KPI’s beforehand to measure its effectiveness. And measuring results in Second Life is difficult to do at this point as it is, and that was one of the biggest discussion points at the recent Virtual World conference held a month or so ago. Many companies, including us, are working on how to effectively measure success in a virtual world.
I have heard that the American Cancer Society has raised upwards of $50,000 in their Relay for Life within Second Life.
Jeff - thanks for the reply. How about the ability to target to specific segments in SL? Have you seen or heard about anyone doing that? On the surface, it seems much more random than the real world - plus, you have the added difficulty of not knowing if the person using SL is anything like their avatar (most probably aren’t that similar). Does Linden make any demographics available at all? I would be surprised, but maybe there is something available…
Here is the info I have seen recently:
59% male; 41% female
Ages
13 – 17: 1%
18-24: 28%
25-34: 39%
35-44: 21%
45+: 12%
31% in U.S
But as you say, hard to tell what is real and what is reported by the user inaccurately. However, I will say that in many ways targeting a demo is very similar to real life. If I set up a coffee shop somewhere, I can look at the surrounding area and assume there is a certain type of customer I could expect, but at the end of the day it could be any random person that walks in. On the web obviously we can target by choosing sites (ESPN would have sports enthusiasts), but its much harder to do that in real and Second life.