Corporations leaving...good thing or bad?

From where i sit, the RL corporations come here to take, not to give, which is a fundamental mistake in SL. They are not offering anything the second life community wants. Therefore the second life community will hardly notice them. They are missing the point, that people come here to enjoy what SL offers them.

Some of us are here to enjoy the feeling of satisfaction of owning stuff in the virtual world that we cant own real life. I love my rented plot of beachfront land and my high private spacious skybox, which i can fill with gorgeous furniture and ponce around in my gorgeous clothes.

Some of us are in SL to create and feel the buzz of offering something to the SL community, and for those creative people, SL offers us a platform to be wanted and appreciated for our work and our creative ability, no matter how small, in my case, very small, but in my case i get a tremendous buzz when someone spend their precious L$ on something i made with my own small skills.

Some of us are here to interact with people around the world on many levels from casual to intimate.

If the Corporations could find a way to incorporate all three aspects, and the many more reasons people come to SL, they might get noticed by me, and many others like me.

Sitting on a pretty sim with an empty building marked with a big Logo just doesnt do it.

The corporations have to get their mindset onto a different level to understand the online/virtual world. Its not fundamentally about profit and loss, which is what they primarily understand.

Imogen

Yes and in addition, there are so many things to do to make the land buying and owning process more valuable and enjoyable. If that had happened, I might have not tiered down to 0. If LL ever decides to deal with landbots and spam ad farmers, and gives me a server I feel confident won't lose my inventory items or bork my transaction, I might start spending money again.

Excellent analogy and dead on target as well.

I think the corporate thing would be great if they could just do a little more than build a sim, have a one-off event and walk away. Take the "Sky News" build, a pro build that is an exact replica of the real studio, one event, the Hay Festival, and bang nothing !!

What a waste.

The coporate suits see the idea, like the concept and push the button in a blaze of glory then the talent run's out as do the idea's.

I repeat, what a waste !!

Dominus Shadow > Mustang
any day

If Adidas made flight-assist shoes like Hermes' winged sandals, they might have a sellable product. If Everlast made boxing gloves that occasionally dropped a horse shoe, they might have a sellable product.

When you change the medium and market, you have to change the paradigm and product.

I'm panicking. Every day there are fewer and fewer opportunities to interact with a brand!

As others have said, it mostly boils down to the corporate sims not having anything much that the average SLifer is interested in. No one is going to go out of their way to see a sim-wide advertising board.

RL products are inherently inferior to anything in SL, simply because SL doesn't have to pay much attention to real physics. If the corps made fantasy (no, not that fantasy) versions of their products for use in SL, and marked them low but (subtly) branded, people might use them more and wear them on their avatars.

The other approach is to build a place where people would naturally want to congregate. the best xamples of this I've seen are the L Word and BigPond.

I've had a brief look at some of teh sims owned by the news agencies in SL (reuters et alii), and to be honest, there's nothing there that would make me want to go back. But that's fine. News works best in a text medium, at least on the net. With SL running, bandwidth isn't generous to allow for a decent high quality audio stream too - not compared to what you could get on one of those new fangled wireless radios anyway.

Point here is LLABs Promises to help deal with understanding how things work. Any PR of a service or product must have some kind of CS to help to get started and or get thur the hard parts. ( but like you said its rarely the case ) BUT never the less it must have been a selling point to get them with in SL to start with.. Otherwise they would not bothers

No matter how passionate or eager to make things work, if ther is no support or the lacking of support. Why should they wait their time and resources? As that referance writing to this topic explained, at times failure is spelled in the form of NOT knowning the envir, and or its users within. Not just vending cars inside a machine. Its far more complex in stats measuring usage, and what the needs are. Then just letting people buy in a vending machine then car drive and then expect then to remeber this when they need to buy such RL objects.

I've seen a lot of evidence on these forums and in-world of people that "get" SL and could actually provide RL companies with the assistance they need to get a foothold on the grid. Someone could put together a marketing consulting company that provides the unique builds, amenities and events that would draw people and the staffing to keep their sims alive and interesting. Not just empty, static builds and ad farm spam. Maybe this has happened already? Maybe the content creators best suited to this just don't want to support a corporate influx? I don't know. I'd buy RL things through SL but right now the web is just so superior for that there's no comparison.

If anything, SL as it is now is probably more suitable for information/education contact with users. Non-profits, charities, etc. would be a better match. Probably already are. Is The Nature Conservancy here yet?

Anyway, back on topic, Imogen summed it up pretty well:

I remember last year sometime reading an article in one of the SL newspapers that said American Apparel was planning on opening a store. It didn't mention the location because it wasn't open yet.

Never heard about it again until this article today. I had totally forgotten about it.


I went and was frankly just as unimpressed as I am in RL with them, maybe more. Sorry, but the prospect of buying another solid colored tank, t-shirt, pant or skirt just bores me to tears. Could be that the stuff they design just doesn't compellingly grab you in SL.

man it's dark in here

scalling back? tiering down? what will we do without them??

I have mixed feelings about it. I have several friends who have jobs with development companies who build corporate sims and I always thought it was pretty cool that they were able to make a living doing that.

As a resident however, I feel very "meh" about it. I liked the ivillage meetings and that was about it.

I think two points raised are really pretty huge when it comes to people who see SL as an Advertizing opportunity.

The correctly mentioned fact that there are no where NEAR the ammount of users as is hyped.

The fact that it is difficult to be more noticed in world than everyone else.


I imagine this is pretty similar to how the internet was when there were a limited number of people using it.

Companies didnt see an advantage to being there.

You know , in the first couple years after Al Gore invented it.

Adidas (or perhaps the SL designers they hired) even tried to adapt their products to SL. They sold bouncing shoes which acted like a pogostick, based on one of their real products (). The goal was product placement of course, not L$ revenue.

I liked the idea, but such an advertising stunt only lasts for a month in SL. In a shortlived world where new gimmicks pop up at every corner, they'd need to push out at least one new and inventive product per month, in order to keep the SL community interested. Quite an effort for luring perhaps 2,000 or less visitors to their virtual store. An oldfashioned TV spot reaches a much larger crowd.

I totally agree. The first company to have their product banner on the WoW login screen or perhaps even ingame will reach millions of people (Blizzard and NCSoft are really thinking about product placement in MMORPGs). But SL is so full of advertisements and dramatic visual effects that a single business presence somewhere on some island goes unnoticed.

I wonder why no RL company uses the established internet advertising recipe, i.e. ad banners on every website with sufficient traffic. Pay the successful SL bars and clubs to display their ads or logos. They could establish a business presence in addition and have their ads hand out landmarks.

Thats very true... anyone else recall a Mr B Gates stating that the internet was a 'passing phase, that wouldn't amount to anything'? Didn't Microsoft use SL as part of it's advertising campaign for the Vista release?
SL is still the unknown, a lot of corporates are now way more confident than they were back in the 90's regarding the internet. Anyone can see the big picture here, the VR platform will not die, it will become the Internet. My only hope is that IBM or similar, will take this baby called SL, adopt it and give it a good upbringing.

Corporations need to get off their backsides and utilise the place. Exclusive product promos via quicktime video clips would be a start. They could also help make roadside plots useful by buying advertising space and making it less obscene and if they want to rent some of my land to do it they can contact me

FYI--I just read a pretty cool 4-page spread in (get this) Acura Style on Second Life. The magazine isn't just about Acura...there are a lot of fascinating design concepts in its content.

This is just one example of round-about advertising (PR). Not only are there a lot of these magazines doing pieces on SL...but there are a lot of people (like me) who find these SL articles.

Second Life is still going through a huge population boom. And as long as a competitor doesn't come out, the sky is the limit!

And where there are people (with a working economy) there will always be advertising and big-business.

/me raises his hand.

RL corporations have no place in SL...hence the different letters in the terms. RL corporations are only going to lose money in SL until LL breaks down and makes banner ad space all over the viewer like AOL or some RL company figures out a way to integrate their RL products/services with SL in a useful way.

So far only these guys called "calendarhub.com" have been able to do it...
http://www.slexchange.com/modules.php?name=Marketplace&file=item&ItemID=230652

SL still isn't ready for primetime anyway. You have to really want (or in some cases NEED) to be in SL in order to enjoy it. It's definitely not a casual use product.

It's something I've thought about tryin' to get into, actually - or at least have been pondering.

Mari

Suggestion to RL companies: If you want to make money long-term in SL, try throwing events that are fun and cool and that people actually WANT to go to. Keep the corporate logo and branding and propaganda on the down-low.

Then, you may see people actually wanting to look at your stuff. Throw concerts sponsored by Sears...with a very small mention of Sears. SEARS IS THROWING THIS CONCERT will only turn off most SL'ers.

/suggestion off

I don't think this has been the case with all of them. For example, Showtime made a fairly respectable effort to teach new users basic building skills and offer discussion groups at the "L Word" sims, along with promoting the show itself. A number of RL companies (albeit only a few) have done the same.

As for the rest, if their goal wasn't to use SL soley as a test program for virtual world experiential marketing and didn't learn anything from it for future virtual marketing strategies... well, feh. Those corporations probably had marketing people in charge of the SL program who didn't bother to know about or take the time to research and understand the successes and failures of the early days of marketing on the web.

As a result, as now and as back then, they deserve exactly what they got -- failure.

Here's a very basic starter idea -- Hook up "Business X" with new residents who want to make a few lindens that might otherwise be attracted to camping. Give them a t-shirt with the company's logo tied to a scripted attachment that pays them when they wear it in-world. Maybe the pay rate could go up in the proximity of other avatars and when the wearer chats. It could work sort of like those buzz marketers who paid people to go to bars and order their booze and talk it up to strangers.

Can I have their stuff?

coco

Maybe the bosses of the corporations awoke to the fact that there are things out there called 'websites' where you can post things called 'images' and 'animations' to show off your products and services. Maybe when they told their minions about these newfangled website thingies, the minions replied 'but we've had one of those for years, didn't you know?' and the bosses of the corporations said 'oh!'.

More seriously, I think perhaps RL corporations have discovered that a lot of us SLers resent the intrusion of RL. Plus, I know that if my RL agent was interested in finding out about Toyotas, they'd go to a Toyota website rather than send me to Scion City.

I think when virtual worlds become more sophisticated and the graphics become as good as Gran Torismo, there will be renewed corporate interest. But we're not at that stage yet.