And the pull out begins....

Um, since all the corporations are leaving can I have all their stuff?

HtB

Not if it's the same crap they sell us in RL

I think its probably marked as no-transfer

Those sl dev people just move on to the next unknowing client welling to spend the monies they have lieing around. Facts are The PR dev has always over done the possible high gains of return in capital funds. That in itself a reason future possible companies will think twice about getting involved on sl. Playboy is a good example.

BTW i loved the Ben and Jerry Ice Cream Island

Har posted about the Dresden Gallery sim in another thread.



That sort of build is completely understandable to the mass media.
It also enhances SL tremendously.

If a corporation sponsored that sort of build
1. They would get brownie points
2. They would be highlighting the fact that sex/gambling/scamming is not the be all and end all of SL


If there is a LL corporate sales section, then THIS is the opportunity they should be selling.

This is perhaps the direction that the major SL developers should be taking in promoting their services to big business.

Glad to see this, in a way. Hopefully LL will be forced to realize who their REAL customers are: We, who invest and stay in SL in order to have fun, socialize, slap pixels or run a small SL-only business.
It's important to keep us happy, and that can only be done with a stable grid, not by following through with a megalomaniac plan that forces features on us that we never asked for and ruins the reliability of this platform.

I know someone who is actually in the process of doing exactly this. I didn't attempt to dissuade her in the least as it would have been utterly futile.

1. Make a nice build. Really. Anyone in marketing knows sales are 90% appearance.
For goodness sake, make it original and interesting. Set aside an area that may have a discrete logo, but has NOTHING to do with your product. A park perhaps, or something that people will WANT to spend time in. Isn't that why you people keep buying stadiums?

2. Make something that may or may not have anything to do with your product, make it well, and GIVE IT AWAY. Yes, free. Any company with any sort of RL sales is NOT going to need $L. Name recognition is the best part.

3. Build mainlaind. What? No private islands? That's right. If I have to go halfway accross town to get to Brand X Store, guess what? I'm going around the corner to Brand Y. Ignore the teleport factor. Teleports are for people who know where they're going. How many RL stores get walk-in traffic? Think it over. Most of what I buy in SL is because I went wandering and found something nice.

4. Be a presence. Have employees get paid a few hours to be in-world. The best products in the world don't sell without the people behind them. Hand your reps a few thousand $L and let them go shopping. I'm more likely to be aware of a business if the employees have interacted with me. Sponsor a few events or concerts.

Finding the same story in multiple sources doesnt necessarily mean anything- If it hits the news wire they can pull it down.

Or someone can use the wire story as their "source"

I think it should be against the SL TOS for a Corporate entity, or a real world government body, to begin to operate inside SL in any form.


We already KNOW what the "real world" is like. Do we really want all that crap in SL?

:igh:: Again??

Angel.

Pretty much sums it up for me too. It's all about getting your name out there for the public to see. If you make it a pleasant sight and fun experience you are likely to get your target audience to remember you in a positive way. The money gained is not going to come from SL......but from real life when you remember the SL site you visited the other day.

I still don't see how IBM is expecting to profit with their presence though. That's sort of like the commercials I occassionaly see on TV about Boeing Aircraft........hahahahhaha, I doubt many viewers can afford 300 million to purchase one of their aircraft. But, at least I remember them.

From the 3rd article link posted by OP....

"Second Life doesn’t rely on corporations for revenue and the decline of corporations on Second Life doesn’t really matter all that much to Linden Lab. Once the last corporation leaves Second Life, the user-generated metavserse will continue, and in some ways may even end up being better off."

Sounds good to me.

I love the first paragraph of dis...

"It seems Playboy has gone the traditional corporate route in Second Life, which goes something like this: announce a presence in a "cutting-edge virtual world," host a few events, leave behind a ghost-town. This pattern works well in the sense that most people only remember the "announce a presence" part. It even seems to be good enough just to say you'll be doing something exciting with Second Life, without actually following through. Duran Duran, I'm looking at you (and Coke, I haven't forgotten about your long-overdue Virtual Thirst campaign results, either)."

Corporations who do nothing to be a part of this world are going to fail in SL. Sure, they'll get their big splash and such, which is what matters to them really - but n one will stay with a dead region.

Some of these places would be well served to consider hiring a "maintenance" staff that will keep things fresh and innovative. :-/

Mari
(Who had a great event last night, for which a ton of people showed up an had fun, an at which no corporations were involved)

Really Playboy was not done well. I don`t know what their ideas was selling things ( oh brother ) or sexy people................It was dissappointing. Content was very very badly handled. Don`t know why they do a better job other there. But reguadless it was just badly from the start go.

I took a look at the Playboy sim this morning. I saw a store, a beach, a yacht and some mild nudity. Then, something occurred to me. It seems that the sim was trying to push the "Playboy" lifestyle. The problem with that approach is that the "Playboy" lifestyle had taken hold in SL ages ago. Trying to sell that sort of lifestyle in SL is like trying to sell fresh air in the wilderness. To add insult to injury, there have been Playboy branded knockoffs in SL as long as I've been playing. In the end, they fail because their presentation was just more of the same. Genuine Playboy branded stuff, but nothing special.

They sure missed the message they were trying to commucate on the playboy island. If they wanted to make people feel the air of wildness and upper class style they missed the boat as they say. The products being sold was another thing. Why in the world are they thinking? Again they missed the market target i assume was upper class etc........


My feeling is the presentation was not impressive let alone "WILD". The only thing they did get right was make the island in the shape of a playboy symbol. Atleast they did not screw that up. There are two mind processes of thought about design. "Good design" and "Better design". Playboy island was "GOOD" design but not "BETTER" Maybe they should think before just trying to sell a symbol, on that content creator next project. A little creative though process is a better then putting a sticker of a Playboy bunny on it they they seem to have done.

Usagi

Whether it's Second Life, or any other investment opportunity, one can't expect to just blindly throw in money and expect some sort of return. If the corporate pinhead who is making decisions about the corporate "presence" on Second Life isn't actually a regular resident of Second Life, how could the corporation rationally expect the "presence" to succeed? This really isn't some sort of principle unique to Second Life. This is the most basic business sense.

To most of those corporations, expectations probably weren't that high anyway. Some low-level corporate pinhead made a good sales pitch to get some seed money for the Second Life "presence." A bigger corporation makes lots of small initial investments in various projects like this, expecting nine out of ten won't fly, but maybe one out of ten will yield something that requires some more serious corporate attention.

There's nothing Linden Labs can really do to help these corporate projects survive if the corporate pinheads in charge are only making half-assed attempts anyway. Ironically, of all of the problems with Second Life that Linden Labs hasn't or won't fix, that could very well torpedo an otherwise brilliant corporate "presence" projects, it seems to me that none of these Linden Labs problems are causing the corporate "pull out." These corporate projects seem to lack direction from the outset. None of these corporate projects are even giving Linden Labs a chance at sinking them.

The funny thing is the spin that the Second Life residents are somehow to blame. It does seem to me that the average Second Life resident has disappointing low consumer skills. But that isn't going to sink corporate projects- to the contrary, it makes Second Life one big pot of money for the taking by the person who actually puts some thought in how to take it.

A lot of the Second Life economy does revolve around sex (moreso that gambling is out of the picture). But I'm going to venture a guess that many Second Life residents spend their time in virtual sex for the same reason that teenagers from my generation had a lot of thoughtless promiscuity- having sex as a filler for boredom when there's nothing better to do (after school, you can either (a) hang out at the mall, (b) go home and watch tv all night, or (c) find someone with access to a car who can take you somewhere for sex). I doubt that Second Life residents are ignoring great and wonderful opportunities on Second Life so that they can hop on a poseball set with someone else. Maybe they are having lots of sex because it's not easy to find something better to do. If any of these corporate projects brought something of value to Second Life residents, I doubt it would be that hard to pull Second Life residents from their sex poseballs to come check it out.

The corporate pinheads who want their Second Life presence need to stop bemoaning how the Second Life residents would all rather buy sex-related productss, instead figure out why the Second Life residents are buying the sex-related products, and/or what the sellers of sex-related products are doing right.

The only direction is Money.......And at times the lack of creative design.

I've seen some rather impressive corporate builds, but that's all they were -- impressive builds. Go there once, explore, say "oo, nice build" and move on without any reason whatsoever to go back.

No events. No amusing gadgets for sale. Apparently, they see this as an extension of the web -- slap up a site and that's good enough, when they should be thinking of it more like a virtual "bricks and mortar" location.

lol yanno for what 2 and a half years almost 3 you have be3en here posting about how unhappy you are but yet you stay? i don't get it

it's not about being a rah rah SL has a lot of problems, it'
s about laughing at yet one more "expert" telling me again that SL will be all dried up and dead in a year, or some hazy time line,
if you truly believe ok you can, experince has taught me that you are wrong if yer right I will be sad that something with such promise has died,
what people like the OP do not understand is that for a large number of people, SL is not about just getting what they can out of it, it is about trying to put something no matter how small back into it and as frustrated as i get, spending a few hours exploreing show me that that spirit still lives in SL, it's just hard to find sometimes

This is why I don't want corporations here.

They are, in the first place, not charged rates as sponsors, as they should be, but are treated just like individual residents, even though they have hundreds of thousands of dollars in their advertising budgets to spend on their sims.

Second, we know how they could be a success, but please, stop telling them!

Because the end point of all that could essentially be that the real world corporations end up giving away all the content that we sell. Because - it is just a part of their advertising budget, and they can hire whoever they want to to make it.

They could also wind up providing all the entertainment everyone ever needs.

Pretty soon, we would have "Advertising World" - a series of land parcels and islands owned by real-world interests, with their deep pocketbooks - and the rest of us as tourists merely stopping by to gawk and play for a few hours. Our little microeconomy would be toast.

Then the SL motto will be, "Corporate World, Your Eyeballs."

So stop telling them how to do it right! Or we'll be having to find some other world for our own creative endeavors, and our own second lives.

coco

How do you feel about the Corporations that actually put funds into the economy by hiring existing SL builders/landscapers rather than having their own employees do it, hence putting money into the economy?

Zora Spoonhammer, for example, just finished a rather lovely build for Avnet (technology whole seller). (Shameless plug for a neighbor's build).

some people just have to say some thing regardedless

Infact what are you trying to say from your little mouth? I still dont understand. I made my points clear unlike some here

Face it you don`t have the slightest Idea what your refering too

What exactly are "consumer skills?" I am a consumer; I pick and buy what I like and what I see as valuable to my experience in SL. Does the fact that I don't go for the big brand names make me less "skilled" as a consumer? I consider myself quite skilled in spending money on stuff that I like. Coca-Cola and Playboy don't float my boat, sorry. Am I less of a consumer because of it?