Advertising in Second Life

A fellow named David Berkowitz who is director of strategic planning at 360i writing for something called "Search Insider" by MediaPost Publications has written about Second Life.  Like a lot of SL'ers following the media hype around SL, I've been following my Google newstracker to all these media industry blogs and publications (with which I was previously unfamiliar) and seeing SL through the eyes of these first-timers, some of whom don't even bother to actually come inside SL.

David has got enough things wrong here in a very intriguingly-titled article "Second Life Optimization" that I'm going to take it apart -- though I do appreciate he has made a really good running tackle at the world.

Of course, we're all hoping that advertising capacity will increase in SL, overriding the hatred of billboards that a tiny sectarian group of tekkie-wikinistas espouse, and overriding the received wisdom of everyone from Philip to Cory Edo on down about how companies will be stepping flat-footed if they use billboards.

Of course they should use billboards. And if Philip Linden wasn't saving himself for billboards when he unflappably protected the rights of the odious Bush Guy all last year, then what was it all about (we'll be forced to say he just liked seeing an "Impeach Bush" campaign underway, even if it meant land extortion to buy back the view).

Billboards are fine -- we need some regulations to get them out of our prime waterfront views and back up on the roadsides, and they need to do stuff like deliver movie trailers or Nissan cars or samples of stuff like t-shirts in order to have a new-fangled Second Life.

Where else can you advertise? (Beside on my Picks, hehe).

Well, this media market guru dude takes a hard look at the client in SL and here's what he says:

WHEN YOU WANT A NEW pair of shoes, you might head to your favorite shoe store, mall, or online retailer. Maybe you're not sure which store you'll visit or how to get there, so you'll turn to a search engine. Yet what happens when your avatar needs a new pair of virtual shoes? This probably isn't a problem for you. Yet there is a minority out there, numbering one million users and growing by hundreds of thousands of users each month, that may well care about that virtual fashion crisis. They're members of the virtual world Second Life, and when you consider all the places you need to reach consumers, this is by far one of the strangest.

Amen -- and it's time that all the media hypesters grasp this basic fact of Second Life: there's no mass media inside the world, even if you use the old-fangled old media like the New York Times or Wired magazine to hype the world itself. Some of these new Big Business companies say they are "following their customers" into virtual worlds but since they already have their customers on the Internet, television, radio, magazines, and RL billboards, why do they need to follow them in THERE for?

    

As an example of how this works, let's meet DavidBen Daniel, the avatar I created. He doesn't have too many inherent needs. He has some basic clothing that he can customize as often as he likes, and he's free to wander around most parts of the Second Life universe. He can talk to others and join their networks. He can also engage in some salacious activities, the likes of which we won't get into here, but let's just say you don't need to leave too much to the imagination when visiting a virtual strip club. (DavidBen doesn't frequent those clubs; he's more likely to be found perusing the landscapes created by Intel, Reuters, Sony BMG, American Apparel, Wired, and other real-world brands.)

$25 Plus rating for behaviour on this avatar for his decision to actually make an avatar and go in the world, something not all the media market writers are doing. However, under the old system, we might have to neg him on building or something if all he does is hang around these big companies where there isn't an awful lot of content that avatars can actually use. He'd be better off ditching these real-world brands that haven't gotten their feet wet yet and have hardly any traffic on their lots (more on this to come) and looking at actual high-traffic SL brands.

Last week, DavidBen decided he needed a new pair of sneakers, so I helped him search for the Reebok store. Reebok pays a monthly fee to own real estate. It can recoup some of its costs by selling shoes there. New shoes go for around 50 Linden dollars, which amounts to around $0.20 in real dollars. You can enter a credit card when you sign up for Second Life and replenish your virtual bank account whenever you want so you can buy clothing and real estate, or spend it on slot machines and lap dances. The exchange rate, currently around 275 Linden dollars to the US dollar, can be tracked at the homepage of the Reuters Second Life Bureau.

Well, that was thoughtful of him to hype Reebok -- geez, I didn't know they were there -- but I'll bet they haven't really bothered to do stuff that all of us know how to do who really live there:

o put the store in SEARCH PLACES for $30 a week

o buy a classified ads

o have some avatars put the store in their Picks

o have a SLURL built into a blog or news story

o have landmark givers at yard sales

o have a stall at a mall or boardwalk or other location where people actually congregate

I'd also rather DavidBen track the Linden on the LindEx page just because he'll be able to gather more information about how it's doing. Let him put in a buy order for less than the prevailing rate and even wait 2 hours, or 24 hours, and he might get lucky; let him also realize that buying on Fridays is a bad idea when rates are higher as everybody logs on for the weekend; buying on Tuesdays when many people both try to sell their stipends and cash out before the game is down Wednesdays is a good strategy.
    

What happens when you're looking for shoes or sneakers in Second Life and don't know where you want to buy them? Right now, searching for such terms won't bring up the Reebok store, which is only optimized for its brand term. This is why marketers will need to engage in Second Life Optimization, or, on a broader scale, virtual world optimization.

Erm...did they put it in SEARCH? It can't search itself, you know -- you have to go on the about-land menu where all this is done and click off the right boxes, put in a picture with all permissions opened up to make it go in the land (that means "anyone can copy" etc) and also write a coherent description. Some people favour going right for the maximum sort of search count by cramming in one long line like this in the description box: sexyposesballscuntwhoredickpenisBDSM -- works like a charm. Others favour more coherent sentences that work like this: "Elegant ball flexi-prim gowns for sweeping down the stairs into the arms of the man of your romance dreams," so that ball gown, man, romance, dreams might all get hits, let's say.

Also, putting in classifieds really makes sense too -- it's really working great for sales now and it generally more than pays for itself in a week I find to the point where I almost feel LL is extracting a tax of $50 on my every rental because putting it in SEARCH for $30 is not enough anymore, people use classifieds.

The discipline can mirror search engine optimization in many ways. Here's an incomplete list of Second Life optimization tactics:

Many of these are already available?

Title Tags: The title of the virtual location should include a few important keywords, just like title tags for Web sites. Reebok, for instance, could choose the name "Reebok custom sneakers."

Erm, that's what they do by clicking the box on about-land and making the SEARCH ad for $30 a week -- including key words. They could call their store in the title in the about-land template for this purpose REEBOK and then they could write a description line like jumpsneakerskicksexycoolsports or whatever they need to do.

Descriptions: Adding keywords to the description can help virtual stores come up for relevant searches, similar to how descriptions and meta tags work for Web sites. American Apparel's virtual store, for instance, says, "Clothing for men and women, male and female fashion, socks, underwear, t-shirts, dresses, hoodie, track jacket." Thanks to this description, a search in Second Life for "hoodie" brings up American Apparel.

Yes, we know. Key words have to be done with care. I still tell tenants to make coherent sentences, however, because many people like to browse the classifieds and the ads while sitting on their camp chairs or pose balls and like to read a coherent line of an actual sentence, not a search-cram.
 

Link Optimization: Link development strategies are trickier in Second Life than they are for Web sites, yet I expect this tactic will become more important in the virtual setting. One of the first link building strategies marketers learn for SEO is to have their affiliates and partners link to them. In Second Life, if marketers own multiple properties, they can include billboards for visitors to teleport around to each one. Sony BMG and Reuters both allow easy ways for visitors to teleport within each of their worlds. As marketers expand their presence and enlist partners to join, offering teleportation will help the virtual world visibility.

Here again, I'm puzzled why DavidBen isn't getting that we already have this. It's called "point-to-point teleportation". You press on the SEARCH or CLASSIFIED ad, and on the bottom on the right hand side it says TELEPORT and you go there instantly. If you have multiple stores, you put them all in your Picks on your avatar. This is a social game. It's living people and groups. It's all in the avatars and the groups. It's not in the yellow pages.

Everybody scans the avatars -- people always sniff the avatar pages like a dog when they first meet you. That means profile, picks, classifieds, etc. and these all need to be deployed to good advantage. A lot of these media marketeers are committing one of the worst faux pas you can in SL -- they are leaving their avatar profiles blank! Nothing marks you as a day tripper dilettante and clueless newb that no picture on the profile and nothing anywhere in the profile and picks.

I'm actually not so happy with the Reuters building tbh. It's huge, cavernous, and awkward to fly around. It's a kick-ass realistic RL building built to spec by Barnesworth but it is not really an avian-friendly building. Points for its high ceilings but...it needs to open up all the windows and roos to be walk-in, fly-through and rearrange the levels and furniture. You knock around inside like a fly in a bottle looking for stuff on the levels. You fly around in circles like an idiot and look at giant, pointless pictures of RL newsmakers and only one SL newsmaker (glad to see it was Cocoanut with her Save Our Stipends! sign), but you can't find stuff. The teleporters may work, but they land you at the same white-orange-blue set of couches and pillows that make you feel like you're at a highschool football game cheering for your local Mustangs -- the different levels could be colour-coded.

I have a great set of scripts which are all free which I used in Memory Bazaar and other places which I originally saw used by Anshe and then commissioned variations on that have 1) boards to teleport to any specific location by pulling up the map and showing a bullseye to p2p; 2) boards that have random generated locations to visits by loading up landmarks; 3) a bus-like thingie Lewis Nerd first showed me that shows names of "stations" that generates a landmark you click on. Having the map pull up before the chat even comes off the object is a bit disconcerting but good to peruse to see where other interesting builds are.

Advertising: Search marketing firms recommend that marketers conduct their paid and natural search campaigns together, either with the same company, or by opening up the communication channels among the different parties. Similarly, marketers should consider how advertising can tie into virtual world optimization. An advertising network for Second Life, MetaAdverse, allows property owners to post billboards, and marketers can advertise on them and track the visitors. As with link optimization, this won't help the Second Life search visibility right now, but this will help the marketer's general visibility there.

MetaAdverse AFAIK closed its doors long ago, unable to make it on micropayments and laggy sims, I guess. There isn't anything that replaced it. I urged Static Sprocket, a scripter, to make a networked notecard giver to enable notecard and screenshot delivery across sims to try to break the lame InfoNet barrier. Each one of these kiosks to generate notecards, however, upon touch (spamming is not allowed) has to have land under it. So these big companies will finally figure out that they need to rent space in malls. Right now they imagine it's stupid, micropayments are monopoly money, and they listen to Reuben Steiger who tells them it doesn't matter if there are 4000 or 4,000,000,000 in the world or 39 on a sim or 399 on a sim, what matters is the immediate old-media hit.

But in time, they will come to see that worming their way into the interstices of the SL inworld virtual economy has to be part of the mix. There are all kinds of ways of doing this. It's not going to be pretty seeing them stagger around like clumsy giants when they do get at this. There will be a lot of animosity toward any of them that put up billboards from this tiny but vocal sectarian bunch.

Still, they should persist, buy land, put up boards, have the boards give something interesting, and also do things like sponsor all kinds of events, activities, builds, etc. if they want their logo seen. As I keep saying, just as towns don't mind Coke labels on the boards at their local hockey rink, so Second Lifers will not mind these boards at large venues like clubs and such because they will enable these club-owners to go on surviving and providing micro-entertainment for micro-payments.

Multiple Engines: In Second Life, there is one dominant search engine, accessible for every user from a search box that resides at the bottom of the screen. There are also outside efforts to improve the Second Life search experience. For instance, Second411 allows Second Life store owners to list all their items for sale, and then invites consumers to access its search application. When DavidBen added it, he typed "/411 shoes" to see all the relevant products, rather than just the stores and locations that showed up with the main search tool.

411 is ok, but it is useless for things like rentals and doesn't work for every product, either. You have to rez out a cube and then maintain it and it also chats and bothers people as it updates. You have to fill it with the product itself, risky I'm told in terms of permissions, or at least empty boxes. This gets clunky. It's requiring you to deploy an actual object inworld just to find something, rather than have you send up info using a HUD to simple get words into a list. There has to be a way to get HUDS working to send up words to a site where they are sorted and you search for words and a SLURL link rather than deal with rezzing out objects.

If there is one single thing I'd change about Second Life RIGHT NOW and I consider a MUST CHANGE it's the location, look, and feel of the SEARCH button. Right now the search button is hidden in a blue/white little button at the bottom of what I like to call "your game screen" when trying to steer puzzled newbie tenants. It can easily get mixed up and mistaken for your Windows task bar buttons. It blends into the underpinnings of the clunky interface and you never figure out on your own how to get it. I find many, many people unable to find it or use it. This seems incomprehensible to geeks, but trust me, the thing I must say a million times a week to newbies is "go to the search button...no your other search button...at the bottom of the game screen...no right there in the middle...ok now press on it and find PLACES at the top...no in the middle...see it there? Right..."

All of this sounds pretty strange, with teleporting, customizing avatars' sneakers, virtual lap dances, and all the rest. Yet as with so much of emerging media, I've learned to stop questioning why people use it and to start embracing what can be done with it. It might not make any sense, but it's a new frontier of search. If the critical mass keeps building and it's where your target audience is searching, the universal principle of search engine marketing applies: You want to be there when they're looking for you.

I'm not sure anybody is really looking for these brands; it's true to a certain extent that people want to pursue private social lives and affinity groups and don't want too much brand-invasion.

But frankly, people in SL love to shop even more than they love to have sex. This is a fact. They don't mind malls and even lag and they don't mind brands at all the way the FIC commenting so disdainfully and smugly about this all the time think they do. I would urge all these media marketers to just look past that static coming from the blogerati and actually around and use the capacity of the world.

Philip assures us our eyes never need be soiled by a brand because they'll stay on their own islands. Bullshit. They won't -- and they shouldn't give their agenda. It's unsettling to think about how much they might invade, as I've explained extensively, but possibly they might break open some of this anti-business utopianism you see in SL if they can do it tastefully and do it right.

The way they will get the word out has to be in part by following the very hard-won trail of existing indigenous businesses. They really are worth paying attention to. And this means events, groups, venues. Right now, I see these companies relying totally on their marketing companies like ESC or MOU to do the heavy lifting of opening, keeping, adding to, and filling up groups with content. But already we saw a long complaint from Moopf Murray about trying to get a Nissan out of the dispensor and then having to contact someone who sounded almost like an NPC named Toast Alicious (evidently not Toast Bard lol).

For the world to grow, the companies have to find a way to integrate naturally. Philip, a geeky leftoid utopianist himself, is thinking he will keep them sequestered off on islands somewhere and is promising his beta buddies they need never see a billboard.

This is fucking ridiculous. All those screamers about billboards don't live in the world we actual business owners live in -- billboards all over every road, hill, and roadside on land set to exhorbitant prices. If I see one single Coke or Reebok billboard replace those dumb Mr. Lee's Hong Kong  signs that have blighted the view for years, I'll boycott these products just like the leftist utopians because they will have helped keep alive land extortionists.

But if they deploy well-built tasteful billboards or ads on the sides of buildings or in kiosks or markers along roads and public venues, and pay me and other mall owners for mall and stall space, we could only welcome their contribution to the microeconomy of the world.

Comments

[David Berkowitz]

Wow, this is one thorough dissection. I'll defer to you on the facts, though I still maintain some differences of opinion. For instance, why would big brands follow their customers into the virtual world? These brands are trying to reach customers wherever they are, virtual worlds included. And, for people like me who are relatively new to virtual worlds (or related channels like MMORPGs), brands are like comfort food - the familiar touches of reality that make the new experience easier to digest.

Thanks for reading and offering such a thoughtful critique.

[Prokofy Neva]

Hi, thanks for stopping by. I've read enough pieces like yours, David, that I felt I finally had to sit down and dissect the points -- it wasn't so much to single you out.

I didn't imagine that big brands should follow their customers into virtual worlds; they *themselves* use that very expression and a number have been on the record lately saying they are doing just that. I guess they feel that subscriptions of newspapers are falling off; television viewing is falling off; so they have to follow their customers to where they spend time?

Your comment about the familiarity and comfort food is very interesting. I suppose the first round of users of the virtual world of SL had a completely different set of comfort foods and expectations. For them, MMORPGs with their flying, their wings, their wierd space vehicles, their laser swords, etc. were the comfort talismans they wanted to see in SL.

For someone completely unused to MMORPGs (and I'm in that category as I've never played a single one of them for more than the five minutes it takes to be killed lol), other kinds of comfort things have been involved. I think for those of us coming from the Sims Online and There, it literally *was* food items that you could sit and eat -- these were big parts of TSO intregal to the game and to There for the visuals. So they tended to reproduce those things in SL.

I guess the branded items of sneakers and cars are going to be the familiar icons for the next wave as you say, interesting point.

[Prokofy Neva]

BTW, I did confirm that Reeboks is in the SEARCH PlACES but with no description, maybe they just didn't figure out how to use the land tools yet.

[Aliasi Stonebender]

This is something with which I can agree with you, Prok.

It's not billboards that are bad; it's stupid billboards that aren't deployed intelligently. Companies have slowly been learning this on the web - annoying "Punch the Monkey" adbanners that hijack the computer or play sounds or whatever just get people to turn off Javascript or use an adblocker; ads that display things that might possibly be of use, on the other hand, get through.

Similarly, while "Impeach Bush" or Mr. Lee's Hong Kong are of limited usefulness, one could, say, post a billboard by a well-trafficked clothing store that would mostly show clothing ads, or accessories, or other things a clothes-shopper might care about. MetaAdverse failed at this, as I recall - they were more like the standard banner-ad gristmill, just in SL.

[Robbie Kiama]

Wow,

really great post. Will give it to my colleagues and friends to read. Lots of info was very new to me about how you compare search engine optimization to SL optimization. Great.

Also my question would be- what is wrong with these companies(reuters, reebok and alike ) Somebody who is really experienced in SL are preparing SIM's and all build's for these companies - so why don't they do the whole optimization work???

Maybe you covered it and I simply missed it?

[Prokofy Neva]

Robbie, I'm not sure I understand your question. Perhaps you're saying that if these big corporations hired these experienced local builders, why don't they have "optimalization"?

But all those ideas to change things like how SEARCH works or how the user interface works don't depend on these builders, as connected as they are. They are residents. It's a user-made world.

The game-gods, the Lindens don't make the inner world, they make the software for the shell of the world. That includes the things like user interface and search engines. So only they could be "optimalizing" it. Perhaps if they hear enough screeching from companies who laid out 6-figure ad campaigns, they'll prioritize it better.

[Randal Oulton]

Missing one key point -- search engine in SL sucks. No one would accept such a search engine anywhere else on the web.

[Prokofy Neva]

Well, yeah, I know it's the received wisdom that "the search engine sucks". But it actually doesn't suck in the way people imagine. That is, it sucks if you compare it to Google. It's primitive.

However, it gives most inworld businesses 60-80 percent of their sales by all accounts -- and I'm here to testify that it easily gives me 60 percent of all completed rentals. Why? because it can find the word "rentals" and turn up up a list to browse.

How will that list be arranged? By the most clicked, like on Google? No, but maybe that's a good thing, because Google only tells you what other people clicked -- and that it is clicked on merely because it was clicked (and turns up Wikipedia a lot, which can often be a corrupted and biased source).

What the inworld search does is turn up a list that you can sort by TRAFFIC. And that's something that various outworld developers want to get rid of it. They curiously always seem to be clawing at any successes inworld businesses have and want to remove these advantages. They sneer that it is "gamed". Well, yes, but...the real problem is that it just doesn't show them to be the powerful entities they are in RL, because home-grown businesses have more visitors to their properties than outworld businesses, even with big names. They simply don't have the community, socializing, and content that people want in a virtual world.

So a search, even primitive, that can turn up a word like "rentals" and show the top trafficked rentals offices or properties then turns up a useful thing: properties or offices that actuallly have lots of people on them. That means they already have customers and traffic.

It's fashionable among the elite to sneer at traffic merely because of the camp-chair problem and the top 20.

But when you combine search and traffic together, traffic works to sort search in meaningful ways. That means that a newbies community with 1000 traffic on it can stand out as a successful rentals community, even if it doesn't use camp chairs or gimmicks such as to get 20,000 (which I don't).

Most inworld businesses rely more on search, which costs $30 and just seems to sort better, than classifieds, which costs $50 and just seems to work worse -- precisely because it doesn't have traffic to order it, but only the price tag of the ad itself -- and that is only a marker for how much somebody spent on their ad, not necessarily their worth.

Search combined with traffic make sales work -- search alone or traffic alone may be frustrating for some, but combined, they are highly useful. This is a fact often overlooked.

I'm really leaning toward saying search is not broken, nor is traffic, and Lindens and their dev pals need to keep their paws off it. It works to help businesses succeed inworld. Do not fix it if it is not broken, really. Whatever new thing that might be more like google should still retain the ability to sort *WITH* traffic ratings along side and traffic, even if someone the Lindens grab at it to de-game it, should still sort beyond popular places.

If other businesses outworld aren't getting it to work for them, they should first make sure they have put themselves in SEARCH. Some of them are too clueless to realize that unless they write a description with their name on it and check off the box, they don't go in automatically. It isn't like a website, no.

They could also work at their traffic in genuine ways.

It's fashionable in blogs and news articles to claim "Reebok" isn't in the list. But it is. Traffic: 307. No problem finding it. You do have to check off the box for "mature" to make sure it shows up -- it's in a mature region.
These are meaningless distinctions sometimes, M & PG.

Now, a search requiring that much explanation and toggling, that's clunky, to be sure. But not after five minutes of learning it.

SL isn't the web. In fact, the more it tries to fly around trying to mimic the web the more it looks stupid. It's better as an integral world.

We've had long long debates about search and how to make it work. As we can see, people like Cristiano only make glorified URL suggestion lists, directories, which they clear manually one by one. Some others like the SL 411 people tried making searches inworld connected to Internet webpage databases. All of these suffer from lack of avatar participation -- because you cannot just scrape every list and parcel of land just like that (and I think that's a good thing). People don't want to participate in search-making efforts that are usually run not as real public services but as this or that bid to enhance reputation or make money by scraping data. Instead, people use picks, world of mouth, classifieds of course -- and they check off the $30 box. Works fine.

Yeah, I know that people like Mark Barrett just want to scrape all the data they can get their hands on, but it only benefits a few who grab it and exploit it at this point, and doesn't benefit the public in the ways they imagine.

The question is, what is search FOR? to find things, not to prove technical points about kinship to the web. Are people finding things in SL? Yes and no. Many people do find things and thrive. Others, especially new, can't find things because what they really want is socializing and hand-holding, not finding. That won't happen until the whole newbie/help/orientation industry gets outsourced or bid to third-parties to work on for profit or non-profit.

[Errol]

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[jason rudd]

I am a homeless kid and I want to make my own cartoons. Then i want toi give 25% of the money i make and feed the hungry. then i want to take another 25% to cure disease. then i want to take another 25% of the money i would make and invest it and start my own bisneses such as my own amusment parks. by starting these bisneses i would have to give hungry peapel jobs. once they have a job they can eat what ever they want to buy to eat they can buy houses and cars and clothes for there children. also by starting these bissneses these should infact help me make more money for my first two endevers. and the last 25% well to be perfictly hounest with you I don't want to be ho0meless forever so the last 25% would go to myself and towed my home, with love jason rudd

[BurghMike3V]

This is great stuff! I'm fairly new to SL, but have spent quiet a bit of time in RLC promoting events etc.

I'm totally fascintated by the whole concept of virtual worlds (where else can I dance the night away in a 'nightclub' while actually sitting at home in my pajamas?)and find the thriving economy of SL to be intriguing.

Keep up the good work!

To read about our unique perspective on the Virtual Villages go to www.virtualvillagevoices.com

[SqueezeOne Pow]

I'd be down to see billboards if they were regulated so they worked like RL billboards as far as how they looked and how big they could be.

However, that would also mean more roads. I would love to see that, too.

I would say, however, that RL advertising in SL is silly and annoying. I don't give a shit about Nissan or Reebok when I'm online. I already get innundated with mainstream advertising when I'm ANYWHERE...whether it be in the real world or even on the regular internet. I don't give a shit if the "fit is go" when I'm reading the Onion. Why should I give a shit when I log into SL?

The one good thing about SL is how much of an equalizer it is (or can be). People actually have a chance to have as much footing as corporations when it comes to showing their creativity and passing it along to interested people. This is a paradigm that won't be there for long anyway so I don't see why we should rush to end it.

Let them use PS3's "Home" for mainstream advertising control.

[HEC Hotshot]

Very interesting article. I agree that huge billboards are unpleasant in RL and SL. We've set up an island for Real Life and SL companies to advertise and sell stuff. We have an Exhibition Hall for Real Life companies to get into Second Life cheaply and easily. Their adverts are contained within rented booths so are not bill boarded everywhere.
Getting good traffic too, with lots of hits to RL websites.
www.globalinkjapan.com