A lot of companies tried conventional and less conventional marketing tactics on Second Life, and failed (e.g. ING and ABN AMRO in the financial services). Other companies continue their efforts (e.g. L’Oréal and Peugeot) and develop new initiatives. Charlene Li of research company Forrester is outspoken about marketing and virtual worlds, as I read on the blog of the Electric Sheep Company:
She was asked about big 3D virtual worlds like Second Life in the Q&A, and responded that they were not useful for marketing but that they could be useful for internal collaboration and learning.
The author of this blogpost, Giff, agrees:
Second Life has been a wonderful platform for innovation and experimentation, but for most marketing campaigns I think that lighter, more purpose-built multi-user social & game environments on the Web make more sense.
Of course, virtual worlds such as Second Life are part of the much wider family of participatory media such as blogs and wikis, Flickr and Twitter or Bazaarvoice. Good old forums are still interesting tools as well, so Li explained. Speaking about participatory media, Li’s slideshow can be found on SlideShare.
A lot of the thinking of how companies should behave in a connected world, a world where participatory media become more important every day, can be found in the rightly famous Cluetrain Manifesto. For me, that Manifesto boils down to the idea that markets are conversations, that companies and especially the real people working in those companies have to engage in an ongoing conversation with real people outside the company – maybe customers or potential customers.
That conversation should be authentic, also people working in businesses should speak with normal voices, advocating the merits of their products and projects, but in a normal conversation, not in the form of the empty, hysterical commercial broadcast messages nobody in his or her right mind believes in.
While the original messages of the Manifesto are almost violent in their critique on traditional advertising and communication policies, Forrester tries to develop a constructive-revolutionary stance in the book Groundswell. Groundswell is defined as
A social trend in which people use technologies to get the things they need from each other, rather than from traditional institutions like corporations.
So it should be no surprise that I read on the Forrester blog:
You need to be a part of the conversation. You might start a blog, you might start a Facebook group, you might start a community, or begin twittering, but until you start connecting as a corporate employee, you won’t understand what’s going on out there. And it can and will bite you.
There are some guidelines here, which are important for corporations, and one of them is that there should be measurable goals:
You could be trying to increase awareness, generate word of mouth, surface leads, save on support costs, on tap into innovation. But regardless, no corporate activity should go forward with a measurable goal, and this is no different.
Now, participatory media cannot be “controlled”, at least not in the way a company controls press releases or traditional commercials. But that is nothing very special: companies don’t control the way in which their communication ends up in the traditional press either.
Still, the lack of control has some specific aspects in modern participatory media. The fact that forums or blogs can be used by anyone, means one hears often a very unfiltered, “raw” voice commenting on the company or the institution. Or company messages can be subverted in a sometimes very funny way, but not always in a very flattering way for the company. This can be very upsetting for managers who are not always used to listening to the unpolished reactions of members of the public or to forms of rather caustic humor. Forrester tries to anticipate on negative reactions by those in the companies who are not very convinced by participatory media strategies, by emphasizing that one needs not only a budget for those strategies, but foremost cover:
Companies may be made of people, but those people are not free agents. Your boss needs to know what you’re doing, and, we argue in the book, your top management should, too, since they’re going to inevitably get some surprises from these efforts. You’ll need budget (maybe not a lot), and you need cover.
Back to Virtual Worlds
This blog tends to focus on virtual worlds, so why discuss these marketing issues? Because I believe that environments such as Second Life are a subset of the family of the participatory media, and the recommendations for communication and marketing for participatory media also apply for marketing and communication in virtual environments. There are supplementary things to watch for in virtual worlds, but the issues discussed in this post are “necessary but non-sufficient” conditions for business communication to succeed in virtual worlds.
Which also means that I do think that there is a place for marketing (or business communication) in virtual worlds, even though experts such as Li Charlene seem to doubt it. The reason I think so is because participatory media are interconnected. I just assisted at a Metanomics meeting in Second Life. The Metanomics group is of course situated in Second Life, but has also a feed on Twitter and on Facebook. Furthermore, there is SLCN.tv, which is a site, where the video of the show can be watched. There are all the blogs, where the discussions of the Metanomics group are discussed and commented.
This means that an event in Second Life is not only communication with a few tens of people participating “inworld”, but probably the biggest impact will come from sites, blogs, electronic social networks etc. Or maybe the other way round, that a YouTube about a product (for or against) will be discussed and embedded in blogposts, but maybe it will also be watched in virtual worlds communities. So I think it is rather artificial to focus too much on different formats in participatory media. They do by their very nature interconnect, and this means virtual worlds are a part of the issues discussed here, and I think the importance of these worlds will only grow.
Roland Legrand
