That Girl From Marketing Live Feed
Second Life Optimization From a User, Online Media and Consumer Electronic Purchases, 30% of MySpace Users Create Content? & YAPR about Second Life
Last night I read Yet Another Press Release (YAPR) about a major brand’s launch into Second Life, and thought to myself, “Gosh, what’s the purpose at this point, especially if you aren’t offering anything to the community other than a virtual replication of your big corporate brand.” Then I read Sense.PSFK’s piece: There’s Gold In Them There Virtual Hills?.
This is probably one of the best pieces I’ve read about the corporate Second Life land grab. It includes the author recounting a less than stellar encounter with some “virtual” employees of global ad agency Bartle Bogle Hegarty (who had a We’re in Second Life Press release a short time ago). As well as this choice observation:
“Both media and business need to understand the motivations of individuals within Second Life to glean any useful answers from it. Basically there are two lenses you can examine Second Life through, two viewpoints if you will: as an Immersionist, or as an Augmentationist. So far, mainstream reporting of Second Life has tended to blur the two to great confusion. The Immersionists want Second Life to be a world in itself that should be a complete escape from ‘Real Life’.The Augmentationists view Second Life as just another online interaction tool. Though, that isn’t to say that the two viewpoints can’t co-exist. It’s just that the subtleties of the two viewpoints are not explained to the reader. So is it any wonder some people just don’t GET Second Life?”
If you are interested in the virtual world marketing I recommend reading Iiya Vedrashko’s (80 page Thesis - PDF) Advertising in Computer Games. And if any of you marketers out there are considering seeing what this whole “virtual world” thing is about, you may want to book a virtual tour guide for travel (What will they think of next) (via: ConversationBlog).
The What Have I Been Reading Reading List:
-
Advertising in Second Life: My favorite rules on advertising in second life: 1. Don’t think your cute little dorky guy that you have as a logo or mascot in RL is going to fit in the virtual world just because it’s cute and dorky. 7. Avoid having your employees look like these MOU dudes who look like they’re serving 5-10 upstate. 8. Don’t build a big-ass pretentious build and have a hugely hyped media event with a one-hit-wonder and then leave the build out to moulder on an empty sim for weeks later. 9. Every avatar has a t-shirt — some of them put it on and never take it off because it needs no washing! Make sure it’s your company’s logo!. See also his response to The Second Life Optimization article: Do’s and Don’ts for Big Business Marketers
-
I commented yesterday on ThreadWatch that as online marketers we should take a holistic view of online marketing. If you are in the consumer electronics space - especially for high end goods – new research shows this is all the more important.
From: Affluent Consumers Buy Electronics Online (via: WebProNews)
- 93% of US affluent consumers research upcoming consumer electronics purchases
- 62% used both product Web sites and search engines to do so
- 27.5% used e-mail newsletters as part of their research process.
more than half of US affluent consumers plan to make computer purchases online.From: Online Research Drives Electronic Studies
- 77% of consumer electronics purchases are influenced by internet research
- 45 percent of those who research online and purchase offline use a search engine during the information-gathering process.
- ‘Searchers’ defined as those who use search to research CE goods, represent 47 percent of the offline and online purchasers surveyed…. are likely to advocate brands by word-of-mouth and are 114 percent more likely to consider internet display advertising in their research process.
-
30% of MySpace Users Create Most Content – Research from Kelvin Beecroft, head of Mashable Labs. “MySpace gets lots of criticism for flaunting the 100 million+ registered users they have. While that most likely is an accurate number of accounts, those generating the actual content on MySpace are likely far fewer. I took it to task to find out just how many of those users are truly building MySpace with user-generated content. In applying the ranking formula we eliminated over two-thirds of those user accounts, leaving 362,824 user accounts in which to test for the presence of video links. Thus we narrowed the sample down to 30.19% of the original sample by eliminating inactive and marginally active users. The interesting thing we discovered is that 84.22% of all the video links found in the original, larger sample was in this small group of active users.” Much like the comments in this post, I’m confused too. Guess it will all make sense when they publish the full study. See also: The oldie but goodie, Top 100 Digg Users Control 56% of Digg’s HomePage Content
The I Also Glanced Over Reading List:
-
‘Swarm-Based’ Collaborative Filmmaking - ”The first truly collaborative instance of indie filmmaking and online distribution using the Creative Commons copyright model, thus encouraging free download and fan ‘remixes’.”
“I never ran from adversity, instead I ran to it / Fear ain’t in the heart of me I learned just do it” – The Good Life – T.I.
Posted by: Natasha “That Girl From Marketing” Robinson
