Marketing will and should be driven by the "Friends" functionality in SecondLife.

I realised after making my poll that the point of it was probably lost on most people because of a certain lack of context, so I felt I should post this thread as well:

Marketing will and should be driven by the "Friends" functionality in SecondLife.

Basically, as you recommend items for purchase, people on your 'friends' (and potentially, their friends) list will have access to your recommendations.

You will, of course, become quickly 'friend'less if you try to spam your friends with pointless recommendations.

I believe this is the future of advertising and SecondLife has an opportunity to truly lead the way, and will lead the way with this type of functionality.

I'm pretty sure it's in the pipeline right now or very soon will be - so get ready for it. Because notions such as branding and advertising are outdated anachronisms and are a result of a lack of appropriate technology that we have today and which will fortunately soon turn everything on its head.

I love the idea. We need a way to verify a seller is selling good products, not junk that has a touched up picture on the vendor.

My hope is we will have a rating system much like that of Ebay, so we can rate sellers and buyers on thransactions we have with them. The idea is you can only rate with this system if you actually bought from or sold to that person. And allow space to comment on the transaction.

The problem with being able to rate merchants is that LL doesn't monitor our transactions for that type of information. Basically, all they see is that 'X' bought' Y' for 'N' L$. I would guess that this type of system would be so easy to game, all you'd have to do is get some friends to buy some products over and over and rate them favorably.

I am dreading the future of advertising spam in SL. I have been receiving unsolicited material from mall owners I've never met regarding renting space in their malls, and I'm getting tired of this. I assume it's considered against the TOS since it's technically spam, but I'm not sure.

Yes, on ebay I'm sure some poeople sell trinkets to friends to up the rating. But all in all I have been pleases with transactions I made with people with high ratings. I think it keeps people honest, because they don't want any negs. I know when I sell on ebay, the urge I get to make my item seems a bit better than it really is I control, because I don't want a single neg.

If I check a persons ratings on ebay and see many from the same person I ignore them all except one. Ebay lists how many positives, but also by how many different people. If I rate you 100 times, the rating only counts for 1 positive.

I guess I just have always found security in the ebay system and have yet to be ripped off by anyone with a high rating, so that's why I love that system. But I'm open to anything that would work. I'm sick of buying junk and carrying it around or tossing it.

There's nothing new and innovative about this, blaze, it's ancient history, it's medieval. It just returns the economy to something like a medieval village (my oft-made point) where guilds trade to other guilds, craftsmen trade f2f with other trusted craftsmen and some serfs are also pressed into service as customer fodder. People aren't going to want to spam, and while they might access a friends' recommendation list, they aren't going to be bound by it.

We have something already like this in the game -- PICKS. I often look at PICKS to find out what a person recommends, and you can learn a lot about them and where they've been and where to find them that way : ) You can also find stores you've never heard of on them and that's interesting.

FIND PLACES searches beats everything hands down for sales -- many people say they buy from there and I know people renting often say they typed RENT into the search engine.

A googlable FIND PLACES and a categories and classifieds in-game will be the best thing to happen.

Nobody needs a card and a spam-up to operate on the friends system anyway, they just do it. That's how it is done. That's why people want to grab the newbie stream and position themselves to friend up and apprentice up newbies and get them in harness to buy within a certain "stream" Some will fortunately resist this pressure and this blatant favor-bank machine.

You're wrong that branding is somehow "dead". Yes, a lot of people waste a lot of time on marketing campaigns and branding, but branding is actually a very modern and convenient thing unlike your medieval village. Branding is an accessible impersonal icon. It loads up -- you upload into your meaning and your associations. We don't have to be friends. I access it and download my meaning and associations -- sometimes on purpose, sometimes accidently. We trade our access and riffing off this brand-icon without having to get in each others' faces. That's the different between the modern marketplace and its accessibility now, even completely faceless and imperson on the Internet, unlike old cultures where people sit in the bazaars all day and drink tea to make a deal.

With friendster type crap, you introduce horrid fascistic little FIC currents where I only get the best product if I "know the right people". With modern branding, I don't have to be a friend, I just have to pay.

I think you'll find that in a 'friendster' type environment, the power of the FIC will rapidly vanish.

They (and, unfortunately LL) may think that they're somehow superior but in reality they are not and a full friendster graph environment would rapidly reveal the midget wizard behind the booming voice.

The FIC are generally pretty incestous. In a situation where we subscribe to people we respect and admire, the FIC will quickly realize that they do not have a lot of friends beyond their clique and will have very meagre influence on SecondLife as a whole.