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Or would you not advertise at all, or maybe hold off on advertising it until some specific thing came to pass? Because, you know, I’m curious as to what you’d do in that position. 41 Responses to “Your thoughts: How and where would you advertise Second Life?”Leave a ReplyCommenters are to be civil, courteous and respectful to others, insofar as it is possible to do so. Beyond that, you're not required to agree with the opinions expressed by me or by others. Think for yourselves! First time commenters will wind-up in the moderation queue and your comment won't appear right away. Ditto for anything that gets flagged by the anti-spam rules. Got a news tip or a press-release? Send it to news@taterunino.net. | Support us...or use Flattr  | |||||||
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absolutely nowhere…. in the shape SL is in right now. Jira long as your worst nightmare, CS appaling, Leadership gone to the [insert faul word here]
SL is and have been for a very long time a complete mess and with the gamifying that is going on right now there is noway even I, with a very active imagination, could even dream up what SL is about at the moment
Sad but true
First rule of Internet web site marketing. If you advertise on the Internet your doing it wrong. I recommend radio ads during rush hour traffic and billboards. Also, a postcard in a bulk mail campaign might do a better job in reaching more people for the same money than a banner ad campaign and with a coupon code can be used to track effectiveness per area.
Well I think I’ve mentioned to you before that I’d try to show off a fuller scope of what Second Life can do using something like the old Burning Life videos & Resident-created official trailers that Linden Lab used to run contests for.
What one *could* do is run targeted advertising- so you run the silly “be a vampire” type ads in places where the twihards hang out, run the Burning Life 2004 type ads in art galleries/places frequented by art/multimedia students.
The problem I would foresee with targeted advertising is that you would have to simultaneously run quite a diverse array of advertising for multiple niches/demographics, otherwise you end up with the current situation where people would dismiss Second Life as “that vampire game”.
If it were a single-medium campaign, I’d say YouTube-type lead-in adverts for an online campaign rather than banner ads, since I don’t believe you can adequately portray how diverse and capable the environment is in a banner ad.
Anything poster-based would likely be out for the same limited utility of a banner ad, ditto for newspaper/magazine ads.
Although the same material as used in YouTube-type video ads could be used for TV spots, the limited breadth of content available would make finding an appropriate slot to purchase a difficult task.
What sorts of SL users does LL make the most money from? people who chat and collect marketplace accessories, or people who experiment and build on private regions? Those who role-play in the deep end or those who casual mingle and blog what they find?
Would it be possible or even worth coming up with an ad campaign that could pitch all of this to a possible future resident?
I think i would try and show SL as incomplete as it is. I would want to show that its not a complete and finished game, it evolves and those who get stuck in help it grow. I’d use the current buzzword CROWD SOURCED VIRTUAL WORLD. I’d show inworld footage as you would see it and not as a staged machinima presentation.
I think any advertising of SL should show what you get when you first log on, not what you could achieve after a couple months to a year of using SL. Perhaps ad campaigns that show a sort of levelling up in experience. First arriving, to changing appearance, to finding people with common interests to then customising with weapons from marketplace to getting your own home. But have several different types of people who take different paths.
maybe make the campaign a game or story in itself where you get to choose an SL residents story to find out what they decided to do with SL.
Examples, real true to how people would experience SL from the moment they first log in to where they might eventually end up if they stick around and get involved…..
This is all just off the top of my head by the way. To do SL’s marketing would be one of the toughest jobs ever.
I still want SL gift cards. I want my family and friends to be able to buy me SL gift cards for christmas instead of Vue Cinema gift cards.
Well, I think there are two main components to the SL experience, those being the creative and the social….
There’ve been a few adverts I recall showing off the social side of SL – avatars interacting in various nice-looking environments – but I don’t seem to recall so much of the creative side coming across. (Which is a pity, because it’s more the thing that keeps me coming back to SL!) Now, if we could see those stunning environments getting made – start with a bare patch of empty land, show someone terraforming it, putting up a building, textures going on, furniture appearing, lighting settings changing, and finally a new venue filling up with people – now, that might be a reasonably easy sequence to make, and it would showcase that creativity.
Make it a vampire’s castle and call it “crowdsourced virtual world” if you must… but show off the creativity, that is for certain.
I would do no external advertising and instead setup a generous L$ referral bonus program. Users would need to invite a new user and have that new user active for a defined period of time, during which that user would have to pass anti-bot checks.
Word of mouth is how SL has grown in the past and this would just accelerate it. By imposing an activity limit this would encourage users to actively cater the experience of their new user friend to make sure they continued to enjoy SL
Sure, some people would spam out the affiliate links everywhere, but without the curious clickers sticking around those people would not benefit. Sure, some people would sign up a bunch of bots, but if LL can’t detect that then they have bigger problems that advertising can’t solve.
As long as retention rates are miniscule and the learning curve is astronomical, why bother?
Better to focus resources on tutorials, making it easier to find good content (search), and finding others to interact with.
And also to keep the ones you’ve got instead of frustrating them into conniption fits.
-ls/cm
perhaps a look into how those of us who stuck around were first introduced to SL might clean some inspiration. How many of us was actually introduced to SL by direct marketing?
I found SL on the Apple website when apple had a downloads section. There was a sort of showcase article on it. I signed up to SL and i was given L$1000 for getting others to sign on. I got at least 6 friends to join, none of them continued to be interested in SL past the first day.
Playboy and Hustler.
i’d spam Little Text People with ‘SL Rocks’ messages! =D
but seriously, if i was LL i’d advertise on blogs just like yours (rather than sending Take Downs to people like Jokay)
when i was enamored with SL, i would have been thrilled to put up a legit ad (i did used to put that referral link up and that was good for $10-20 per month!). imagine if they simply paid $20 a month for a 250 square ad or just give you free premium monthly membership? i think people would respond to that
Apps. They should develop some “simple” apps that lead people into SL, one for builders to experiment with modding a cube (or torus or sphere, etc.) on their iPhone or Droid and texturing it, etc and building something that could be imported into SL. Another for fashionistas to dress their avatars with a closet full of clothes, skins, hairs, makeups, etc. Another good app would be Tringo/Slingo competing against other SL players.
If you make a great product/service your customers will do the marketing for you; i wouldn’t focus on doing the marketing myself, i would focus on fixing and improving things, but most of all i would focus on making my existing customers happy.
I’d focus on keywords/concepts like “Create”, “Friend”, “Fashion” and make each one the focus of a contest for LL residents that paid off in real dollars (not the pathetic amounts of ld they’ve offered in the past).
The contests would be to produce a 3 min video highlighting their own interpretation of that concept.
Take the best videos and develop a lead-in website for them.
Then point some targeted net advertising at that website.
Also i’d have the marketing team do their job in the classic sense – writing ‘angle’ articles and distributing them to traditional print media. The recent ‘SL back into top ten games after 9 years’ article is a good example. Print media, especially local newspapers, love interesting/quirky articles they can insert anytime as space fillers.
I would also refrain from advertising at this time.
LL needs to address several key issues with their product before advertising will do them any good.
1. Presentation – SecondLife is widely, and not without cause, regarded as ugly. Not only visually. The interface, the lack of multichannel sound, the poor use of sound by in-world builders, poorly made starter avatars, poorly made Linden owned environments such as starter zones and Welcome Areas. All of this needs to be improved. If Linden Lab hopes to market SL professionally, they must present it professionally.
The usual rebuttal to this is that SL cannot look good with user created content being the focus. That is not entirely correct. The starter avatars and Linden maintained areas must be of professional quality, yes, but even user created content could look so much better if Linden Lab provided proper tools.
2. New User Experience – The new user experience is currently abhorrent. It teaches new users very little, it fails to engage them on any level and it does not grow with the user. Someone should be able to return to the new user experience much later and learn new things. Their first time should at least teach them the basics, including how to find content that may interest them.
3. The Interface – Related to both of the above and more, the interface is one of the most important aspects of SL, and it is woefully underdeveloped. The appearance editor is unintuitive and broken in many respects, important features are buried under endless menus. The entire UI is set up more like a file editing programme, like a word editor, than a piece of creative/entertainment software.
And finally;
4. Interactivity Tools for content Creators – LL must provide tools which allow content creators to fill SL with engaging, interactive experiences. SL is many things to many people, but it seems to excel at few. Interactivity is not simply for games, it would allow the creation of better tutorials, provide background life to more casual/social environments and engage all users on a level not currently possible. NPCs, animated environment set pieces, more complex UI elements (like allowing a user to chat with an NPC by focusing their camera on the NPC’s face and bringing a dialog menu up in the center of their screen). Being able to have an avatar picked up by an NPC or a set piece, being able to control a visitor’s camera for scripted events, all of these are vital in creating a more engaging SL experience.
Once LL has made significant progress in these areas then, and only then, would I even consider advertising. Until then it is spending money to foster a bad reputation.
The most effective way to get attention now seems to be through social media. Create a Twitter account and tweet to Second Lifers with the #secondlife tag. Create a Facebook account and fanpage. Register a domain and write a weekly blog. Create interesting videos and take photos and post them to those places.
The key is that your social media messages can’t be overtly commercial, but instead post things that are interesting or informative to Second Lifers in general, but tag each one with your brand using a branded account profile. That builds brand recognition.
When you get sufficient followers/friends, try promos and giveaways.
I agree with Crap Mariner. Without improving retention, advertising is rather pointless.
It’s not a “do this first”, but it has to be fixed. Part of that fix is for the advertising to match what is possible for a new user. And part of that is to get across the basics to new users.
They could try forming strategic alliances with some of the companies who make content creation tools, Blender, Adobe, Daz 3D, Gimp etc.
They temporarily ran a Google adsense campaign.
They could point Second Life users in the direction of their own affiliate advertising options that already exist.
They could advertise their own twitter, Facebook, Plurk and Flickr pages, they probably should get on Google +.
They should most definitely be making better use of their own blog, they seem to be afraid of self promotion.
I would do traditional advertising (as WOW does atm) but also a lot of PR – I would try to work journalists to write about Second Life, TV and radio if lucky. Find some good stories from in world and get them published in media. You cant stop advertising even if the product is less than 100% you have to do it on a regular basis. No virtual world is perfect, so just go for it. Some of them will stay =)
I would start off with a small advertising campaign. Target certain aspects of the current Second Life user base, Education, Libraries, Music, socializing, dancing, building, art and roleplaying. Maybe one ad touching on all of those areas, and then a targeted ad for each specific area.
Would not do TV ads yet, but would do Internet Radio, and banner ads on web sites and maybe a little ad time before a YouTube type video. I would want the ads to show for people that might have an interest in Second Life and that target group.
The ad would be informative and have appropriate background music for that targeted audience. For visual ads it would also display the best of Second Life.
I would not advertise the Sex areas of Second Life as those tend to sell themselves by word of mouth advertising and may be seen as a negative to the above mentioned targeted audience.