Alone

Yesterday I went to different islands from a few comapnies to see what’s going on. As most of the time in Second Life I was alone, only in the sandbox area from IBM I met a few avatars playing around.

Like many times before I asked myself what are the attributes of a succesful campaign in Second Life – or other virtual worlds. Setting up an island with funny buildings can’t be the solution! Who’ll notice? Who’ll visit the place and why? What is the real benefit for the people? I can’t see any. Find your information you are looking for on a simple webpage makes more sence than reading boring notecards or posters inworld.

But should a company be active in a virtual world? These worlds work different than the rest of the internet. They are far more like the real world than a text based website where a customer can search the offered information by him- or herself (and hopefully finds what he or she is looking for). So what’s the answer? I think the copmany needs to be present with staff. Get together with customers and organize events to build up and keep a community around your inworld services. And that’s a lot more work than running a website and doing a bit of search engine marketing (SEM and SEO) for promotion.