A Gallery of Marketing and PR in Second Life

Authored by Rohit Bhargava on August 23, 2006 - 8:44am.

Amendment: Many Second Life residents commented that this gallery/list, which was originally positioned as "firsts" was inaccurate and left out much of the hard work of residents over the past three years before SL realized it's current media status. To amend, I have changed the title of this post to reflect the fact that this is a collection of examples - but not necessarily "firsts." Hopefully this gallery is still a useful resource for marketers interested in learning about some engaging efforts that have taken place in SL recently, however this should not be considered a true list of firsts.

I2m_secondlifelogo The virtual world has been getting a lot of coverage in the real world these days. Second Life is becoming the new poster child for the rising popularity of avatars and virtual personalities that real people are taking on, and every day it seems there is a new development that causes those in marketing and media circles to issue another latest news bulletin, write a blog post, or move on the rise as del.icio.us tag candy. As some have noted, Second Life and the concept of virtual worlds is not new. This was an idea first explored in the dotcom days, but never really took off due perhaps to the limitations of PCs, and the lack of abilities for promotion. Those barriers are gone as personal media allows word to travel farther and faster, and word has certainly spread about Second Life.

Adding even more credibility has been the ability for Linden Labs to continually partner and create new "firsts" for their virtual world. A big win for credibility was the BusinessWeek cover story several months ago (not to mention the Second Lives documentary airing on television) - but beyond that, there have been a steady stream of efforts that has made it fun to watch, but tough to keep up with. As a marketer, the news I tend to pay attention to are all the examples of the new ideas that are coming from Second Life. From my time observing over the last several months, here is a list of notable marketing and PR efforts from Second Life that may serve useful for others trying to keep up (or catch up) with the rapid evolution of Second Life:

Virtual Hotel: Starwood's Aloft

Virtual Concert: Suzanne Vega's Queen and the Soldier

Virtual Retailer: American Apparel

Virtual Sports Event: Baseball's All Star Game

Virtual Ad Network: MetaAdverse

Virtual Movie Filmed on Location: Bells and Spurs

Virtual Newspaper: The Metaverse Messenger

Virtual NonProfit Campaign: Global Kids GK Island

UPDATE (08/23/06): Virtual Automaker: Scion (Via Reuben Steiger)

I am sure there are lots more efforts that I haven't included here, but it's a start. Perhaps what Second Life really needs is a list where all of these could be kept and edited by the group. Sort of a Guiness Book of World Records for Second Lifers. I'd certainly subscribe to the RSS feed for something like that ...

Photo Credits: Most photos were taken from screens available online and link back to the source. The Global Kids photo was taken from the Flickr collection from GlobalKids.org. Other sources for information and stories included Adverlab, Micropersuasion, Second Life Insider, and New World Notes.

Note: This piece originally appeared on my blog, Influential Interactive Marketing. My bio can be viewed here.

Email this page

add to:

del.icio.us |

digg | Yahoo! MyWeb | Slashdot

Comments

No, Not the First

Submitted by anonymous on August 23, 2006 - 8:28pm.

Actually, I think what you mean to say would be, "First big-name real-life brands to be the first". Because there were many indigenous Second Life brands made inside the world long before the big guys showed up.

In every single one of these categories, there were "firsts" by the early and later successive generations of pioneers, as you can read about in the SL History Wiki http://history.secondserver.net/index.php/Firsts

The very designer of the Scion, Francis Chung, for example, made his own brand of vehicles for the virtual world some years ago; the very first vehicle was a boat by Philip Linden and the first resident vehicle was a magic carpet by bUTTONpUSHER Jones.

The first newspaper was the Second Life Herald (www.secondlifeherald.com); but the first inworld notecard paper was Second Life Times and first flippable magazine was Graphica.

The first live music concerts were likely held by the native SL'ers Astrin Few, Frogg Marlowe and Jaycott Nino.

First hotel? Hmmm...well I'd like to think my Flamingo Court/Motel of Last Resort might be *among* the first if not THE first!

First virtual retailers? My God, there's a gadzillion number of those -- shopping is the world's major activity -- Preen, Simone, PixelDolls to name but a few.

Long before the American Cancer Society, the indigenous GOM (independent banking and currency exchange) used to raise money for real-world charities before it was forced to close when Linden Lab opened its own currency exchange.

I'm sure other long-time residents could add much more -- I'm a relative newcomer. The fact is, people do live in this world with even rich and complex lives and they make their own brands -- in between the times they might visit the stage sets of the ad campaigns represented by these big marketing "firsts".

Prokofy Neva http://secondthoughts.typepad.com

I caught this post yesterday

Submitted by anonymous on August 24, 2006 - 5:07am.

I caught this post yesterday and wondered if someone would post some corrections. Right on cue...

Agreed.

Submitted by anonymous on August 24, 2006 - 6:07am.

Famous names = good blog traffic! Come on, who really cares about the little guys anyway! There's no money in the long tail! It's boring! <-- (that's me being seriously torqued and sarcastic.) You gonna risk trampling over the little guys, the indies, the people who've toiled far longer. What, cuz they ain't pop culture, they don't exist? I agree with Prok above. I had posted on this yesterday anyway, so the timing is amusing: http://www.ericrice.com/blog/?p=103 Eric Rice/Spin Martin

First Virtual Concert

Submitted by anonymous on August 24, 2006 - 8:06am.

Specific case in point. Suzanne Vega did not perform the first virtual concert, even if you don't count resident musicians. Halou performed on August 22nd for an audience of about 400 residents. Halou, with at least 5 albums published, has been making music longer than Linden Lab has been making virtual worlds. Jade Lily

what is this batch of nonsense?

Submitted by anonymous (not verified) on August 24, 2006 - 9:00am.

This "article" is so uninformed and insulting. Another case of "big name" dropping and copy and paste insights. Thanks for the corrections Prokofy.

A clarification

Submitted by Rohit Bhargava (not verified) on August 24, 2006 - 12:18pm.

All - thanks for commenting, and especially to Prokofy for pointing out an important correction/response to my original post about "firsts" ... that they only represent corporate efforts and do not recognize the many prior efforts of Second Life residents. Apologies if this caused offense to any current residents, however as I noted in an update to my original blog post - my intention with this post was to provide a useful marketing resource for media planners and advertisers considering finding ways of working with Second Life and wanting to know what other real world brands have done. In cases where I have missed something (like the Scion launch), I have gladly made an update to the original post. Hopefully it sparks some interest and causes people (including myself) to learn more about your virtual world and how to participate in it.

Correction to your post

Submitted by anu (not verified) on October 29, 2006 - 7:50pm.

Given that you've acknowledged that you've not really posted about real firsts on SL, merely the first time that a 'corporate' has done something - one wonders if the responsible thing to do would be to update your post and explicitly make the clarification visible.

Bound to get people annoyed

Submitted by epredator potato (not verified) on August 25, 2006 - 6:21am.

Well I guess proclaiming firsts in this context is alwyas going to be an unusual set of things that have been found, but maybe not experienced. With the SL community growing, increasingly people will find things for the first time, but they may not be the very first. Like the 'first web page to sell xyz'. I guess it should be a gallery of note. I could harp on about the Wimbledon Proof of concept http://eightbar.co.uk/2006/06/27/wimbledon-in-second-life/ which whilst no public was data from a real sporting event. I have only been in for the past 7 months, but I still keep finding 'new' things. There is a wiki with firsts in it, though they do not have the dramatic picture appeal http://history.secondserver.net/index.php/Firsts even those amy be up for argument. I still reckon our guys had the first virtual laptop that tilted based on real laptop acceloremeter readings in a pub sub environment. Not quite as catchy as "first hotel" :-)

virtual worlds

Submitted by anonymous (not verified) on August 25, 2006 - 1:34pm.

there is a long history of these things being attempted, too. you can look back to early video games, some of which were very visual even though text-based, or early more visual attempts like The Musicosm (http://www.spottworks.com) that were TOO early, or today's Neopets.com or Trollzopolis (http://www.trollz.com) for kidz. Second Life rocks but it's still pretty early to declare it the winner in this space.

Completely inaccurate.

Submitted by Ron Blechner (not verified) on October 26, 2006 - 6:15am.

Every single part of this article is inaccurate, as Prokofy has pointed out. Please retract or correct this article, and next time consider doing some research.

This is all incorrect

Submitted by anonymous (not verified) on October 28, 2006 - 11:17am.

Simply change the title to 'A Gallery of Corporate Virtual Firsts (...)" and it would be fine. As titled, it's complete and utter lies. All of these things were already done well before you people got on the grid. Please get serious about this topic if you're going to report on it.

get a real life or maybe third life

Submitted by ReAL LiFe (not verified) on November 2, 2006 - 4:53pm.

Whats up with all these people, if they are real people, being insulted and offended by a post like this. At least some one is reporting on it. To them, please stay in Second Life and don't bring down anyone in real life, with these pathetic negative attitudes, the world has enough problems. As for firsts, does anyone know who started the first blog? live long and prosper

Dear "ReAL LiFE",

Submitted by Troy McLuhan (not verified) on November 6, 2006 - 6:34am.

Dear "ReAL LiFE". . . . . . . . . . You take the name "Second Life" too literally. Linden Lab could have named it "Metaversia". What would you have written then? As for Second Life not being real... it is as real as a telephone conversation or a webpage. Maybe it's because Second Life, as a simulation, is *more* realistic, and that scares you (because you were just getting used to the Web, and now SL threatens to make you learn something new)? As for the firt "blog", Wikipedia's article on "Blog" is a good place to start (but don't stop there). Sincerely, Troy McLuhan