SL International Business

Introduction
Marketing and Advertising in SL is quite different, while still quite the same than in RL. The most obvious, or first path of action necessarily isn’t the best route to go. Even Fortune 500 companies, or should i say, especially them, do make the common mistakes when they enter SecondLife.

In this short article i intend to clear few of the mistakes, and outline why some doesn’t work, and what would be a good path for an university looking to make itself more known, via SecondLife.

My Second Life name is Tyrian Camilo, and i’ve been here since December 2006, running an advertising network and well known businesses since February 2007. I entered SecondLife with strong understanding and experience of ‘The Web Life’. Almost half of my life-time i’ve been heavy user of Internet, and almost as long have i been running different kind of websites and services profit in my mind on the web. SecondLife was like dream come true for me, a excellent venue to conduct business in a way i’ve always dreamt about. So read with confidence, as these words comes from a deep understanding of the on-goings of SecondLife marketing and business.

Common Mistakes
Some of the common mistakes people do when they enter SecondLife with the mindset of greating hugely profitable business or making an advertising campaign, is that they loose common sense the minute they login. This world isn’t that different in the end, don’t forget common sense and laws of marketing.

Many Fortune 500 companies have created an island with some magnificent content, and then they proceed to curse that it has almost zero effectiveness, just after they’ve done building. Wait a minute … After they’ve done building? Yes, that is correct, that’s almost everything they did. They forgot that their marketing vehicle needs marketing. It infact isn’t that much of marketing vehicle in itself, as it’s a place. If you build a store in real world, would you NOT market & advertise it? That is exactly what these companies have done, they have NOT properly advertised & marketed their efforts. These guys wouldn’t make really good entrepeneurs …

Another mistake is that the mindset is that SecondLife is this hugely crowded place, with the 8million or so registered users. This is incorrect too, SecondLife isn’t crowded, infact, it’s mostly very quiet and like an ghost town. We do not need to sleep or eat, or any that necessary stuff for us who are carbon-based lifeforms. We still do that in the real world, and as such, requires us to sieze activity within SecondLife.

Not knowing the culture and technical restrictions is a huge one, which has lead some very stupid mistakes. For example, Adidas made sneakers into SecondLife, they are cheap and they ROCK. Sounds like a success? Think again. They missed something very important: Prims! It’s the hidden economy of SecondLife, and each additional prim causes slightly higher loading time AND used CPU & GPU cycles, RAM etc. in order to display. These sneakers are over 200 prims each, yes, over 400 in total! As a comparison, you would need a 2048sqm parcel just to have enough to rez a pair of these! They are awesome build indeed, but waaayy wastefull on the prims. Who built them is an excellent SecondLife builder indeed, but you have to make them USABLE. Another thing is that their place was like calling for griefers, with all options enabled, and the surroundings were empty. The place itself was also awesome build. They charged 50L$ for each pair. Now, they could have made them free: Viral marketing. Or charge WAY MORE, they afterall are very high quality and i would have happily paid 200L$ or even more for them. If they would have done the latter, it would have involved a bit more work, but they could have started to conduct business also in SecondLife, and bring their design skills in broader range into SecondLife, form lots of new content, and likely, eventually, monopolize SecondLife sneakers market. Of course, this latter would have been suitable for them, would have required more effort, but could have potentially lead to many good things, even good profits.

Viral Marketing
This is golden, and VERY highly effective on SecondLife. SecondLife is like an huge socializing website (ie. Myspace), and about cool stuff word will spread like wildfire. Especially Movies has been having a huge success with this type of marketing within SecondLife.

How is this attained?
Most commonly through objects, ie. with the Movie 300, spears, shields etc., Transformers: Avatars in the shape of the Autobots.

Effectiveness?
VERY high like you would expect from viral campaign. However, my feeling is that the target audience is rather limited.

Islands
Now, i’ve made it sound like a stupid effort. That’s not the whole truth, done correctly it is very effective, and infact, with some effort, it can be also used to make profits, a advertising campaign type i personally love!

What needs to be done then?
- Marketing and Advertising for the island
- Some benefit to visit there, other than curiosity (product or service perhaps)

Benefits to visit? Offer something of value, which makes them stay there.
Perhaps a sandbox, and space to educators to keep classes there.
Information of topics of interests, readable only there (ie. billboards).
Popularity creates popularity, so you might also want to consider camping chairs/dance pads, wonder chairs (which actually does do wonders to traffic), and other non-relative freebie/free cash offerings.

The profit portion then?
Rentals and perhaps even sell portion of the land and collect tier fees and land selling. With luck this would get out of hands, and you might create a marketing effort worth A LOT! Which in fact could even make profits!
How about that?
It’s almost funny how human brain might work when you put a big price tag on something …

Of course you can also go for mainland, which doesn’t offer the flexibility of private islands, but has lower running costs, and place chosen well, might be vital for success if you get a good placing, next to a good and relevant high traffic location.

Regular type mass-media advertising
Billboarbs, billboards and banners!
SecondLife hasn’t forgotten these neither

There is 2 viable options currently: SL Marketing and Mainostaulu. SL Marketing offers web banners targeted for SecondLife users only, while Mainostaulu is an in-world billboard advertising network, which unlike the other competing networks, does not have such negative brand impact due to various factors, infact, due to these factors, some people even prefer to keep these adverts next to their businesses, and some businesses has tried to copy this …. Needless to say, they have failed miserable, missing the true essense of Mainostaulu.

SL Marketing has two billing options: CPC and by impressions, while Mainostaulu has bidded time-units.

These both are well worth to look into.

Other venues
There is lots of other options too, but these all are very well known in RL businesses also, word of mouth, press releases etc.
Use your imagination, and don’t restrict your mind!