Wired has a devastating profile of Second Life today with a title that leaves no question about the magazine’s conclusions: “
The gist of the piece is that marketers are marching like lemmings off the Second Life cliff, throwing time and money into building virtual communities that no one visits. The reasons range from the technology limitations of Linden Labs’ servers to a kludgy user interface to the excessive time it takes to find and get to anything in Second Life.
One particularly damning statistic: 85% of people who create avatars have abandoned them, the article says.
I was somewhat relieved to read this piece, because I have been feeling disconnected from the whole Second Life phenomenon. While I created a profile and buzzed around the virtual world for a while, I never got much of a sense that I was part of a bigger group. In fact, I can’t think of a single person who’s told me that he or she spends a significant amount of time in Second Life. If Wired is correct, a lot of people have been engaging in self-deception.
A particularly interesting comment is at the top of the third page of this profile. It proposes that one of the reasons for Second Life’s popularity is that it looks so much like the physical world. This gives marketers a sense of comfort that they don’t have when experimenting with the more effective but less familiar tactics that really do work online. In other words, if we can just recreate familiar surroundings, we’ll be okay.
In reality, I can’t think of a successful virtual reality product that isn’t a computer game. People have been experimenting with online analogies to physical experiences since the earliest days of the Internet. One of the first ambitious business-to-business projects I can remember, in fact, was a virtual tradeshow that had visitors wandering around an exhibit hall floor and looking at products and collateral. I don’t remember who put on the show, but I do remember that the experience was notable for its lack of participants. It was never repeated.
Perhaps virtual worlds to have a future, but this article may go a long way toward ensuring that Second Life doesn’t.
I had a similar feeling about Second Life–I really couldn’t see the logic of marketing applications or corporate presence in a virtual world. After attending the Boston Social Media club event on Second Life, I could see a number of practical applications, primarily educational. They showed how different molecules and chemical structures could be built, and as someone who never really “got” chemistry in high school when reading about it in books, the educational value to me was readily apparent. It amounts to low-barrier access to a computer modeling program, something that many schools don’t have the budget for. And, if it engages kids that are otherwise disinterested or unable to absorb the content as it is traditionally taught, great.
I still don’t see any real logic behind marketing attempts in Second Life, and doing just so you can say you’ve done it doesn’t seem to be a solid reason. Perhaps part of the problem is that it is being treated as a mirror of the real world–why on earth would I want a virtual Coke when I can have a real one? And why would I readily subject myself to advertising in a virtual world–what’s in it for me?
At some point, someone will likely stumble on an “ah-ha” application for Second Life, and that’s when the (logical) marketing applications will follow, in my humble opinion!
I have to agree. Second Life seems like a fad waiting for an application that makes sense. As a marketer, I want to help my clients make real money from real customers — not virtual money from virtual customers.
We conducted an interview with Second Life which can be found at http://www.b2bmarketingpodcast.com and then more recently my firm recorded a members only event where Tim Collins of Wells Fargo discussed their virtual world called Stagecoach Island and why they had decided to develop it themselves with their own technology (mainly security and clunkiness). Tim showed some interested application such as using ATMs, training users on fiscal management, etc.
I agree with Jennifer above. There is an ah-ha factor here that perhaps we just cannot yet see. The fact is that most of us spend a lot more time on a keyboard and in front of a computer than we did 10 or 20 years ago and typing comments into blogs while one way of interacting cannot be the only way.
Have a look at the Second house of Sweden on SL
https://secondhouseofsweden.com/
Their experience seems to be pretty positive