Second Life: Opportunities for “Cartoonicizing” Communication
Full disclosure: I wish I’d thought about "opening an agency in Second Life" (SL) before Text 100 did. It’s hip. Because I have been an avid gamer since Pong, someday I hope to be a hardcore SL advocate. But, petty jealousies notwithstanding, I just ain’t there yet.
I have been quiet about the blogosphere’s love affair with SL because I’ve been waiting patiently for disillusionment to set in. I am not suggesting that disillusionment has set-in yet, mind you — it is just on my mind because I’ve found that many clients are not yet ready to commit to Social Media (this week, anyway). A chit-chat about Social Bookmarking is hard enough; anytime I’ve brought up SL-style opportunities to clients, unfortunately the response has been negative. ("Who let that wild-eyed Social Media zealot into the room?")
Specific to SL, I think that for now the chat interface is too confusing and anarchic for most people to stay engaged. As Kami Huyse suggested in the follow-up post about her SL meetup of PR folks, "it is very difficult to follow along if 15-plus avatars are ‘chatting’ all at once." Perhaps live voice apps in SL, such as those offered by Vivox (a former SHIFT client) will help — but as Kami also noted, 15 people talking at once can be just as confusing as 15 people typing.
Here’s my quickie analysis on the short-term opportunities for using Second Life for PR purposes:
- 1:1 interviews between geographically-dispersed people. An "emote" via avatar is far better at conveying tone than email (or even conference calls).
- Machinima product demos. Imagine creating a mini-movie to demonstrate your clients’ products, using SL avatars as the actors. This wouldn’t work for all clients, but if you stretch your mind, it could work more often than you might suppose.
- Virtual collaboration. I don’t think it’s possible yet, but certainly we can expect a day when SL avatars can share and edit RL (that’s RL for "Real Life") documents and files, online and "in front of each other."
- Concept testing. Imagine SL avatars signing non-disclosure agreements in order to access a top-secret "lab" where representatives from consumer brand giants preview their ideas for upcoming products and campaigns, to get the first-time reactions of a highly-educated, tech-savvy audience.
- Word-of-Mouth Marketing. If avatars are talkin’ about it, it must be cool. I wonder if Linden Labs could (or would) monitor avatar chatter and allow marketers to mine it for buzzwords, trends, etc. I wonder if this could take a dark turn, i.e., when will the first avatar be outed as a stealth marketer? Is it okay to burn avatars in effigy?
There are a lot of reasons to be intrigued by the virtual world of Second Life. Now all we need are real-world clients to forge ahead with budgets & balls.
Tags: second+life, linden+labs, vivox, wom, kami+huyse, text+100, social+media, pr+2.0, public+relations, marketing
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Hi – a couple of possibly interesting follow-ups:
- re. stealth marketing, WOM marketing and avatars, have you seen http://ypulse.com/archives/2006/09/your_perfect_mo.php?
(job offer to manage an avatar on behalf of a corporate client). BTW, the whole WOM discussions always remind so much of William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition…
- re. concept tests and similar applications, I’ve been playing around with running market research surveys through the Second Life chat interface (via scripts attached to objects). Although very basic right now, I can see that this could be taken further, since concepts could be built in 3D in SL, and have their feedback mechanism “built in” through a survey that can be taken when the object is touched (or similar). There’s some info on my blog at http://blog.msurveys.com if anyone’s interested.
Strictly FYI, Text 100’s president gave an interesting interview to Sam Whitmore (of Sam Whitmore’s Media Survey) that he aired as an installment of his podcast, “Tech Media This Week.” Worth a listen…
Also, our next meeting of PR Avatars will be held at Text 100’s Island, the second Thursday in October, or so that is the thought at the moment
Thanks for the link, Todd.
I agree that SL just isn’t quite there yet, but it’s definitely growing and becoming more popular.
I wouldn’t call my attitude toward it disillusionment. I think it’s here to stay for a while. But I definitely hate how fanatical many people are getting over it. 750,000 members is just not enough to change the scope of business, marketing, communication, or anything else. Sorry.
It may LEAD to a change, but the program will have to do a lot of changing of its own too.
I agree with Owen, to me this is about the catergory of communication and not SL itself.
One cateegory of use your didn’t mention was concerts and conferneces, one to many.
We sorted out the issues of talking over each other by following some groundrules. For instance, someone typed “?” to get in the cue to ask a question, not too different from the teleconferences I’ve attended. I wrote down each one and called them out in turn to ask their question. It could be seen a little like the Whitehouse press briefing room, but without the rodents (literal rodents).
Todd,
SL is getting lots of buzz – but I don’t believe even those hardcore advocates believe clients are about to rush to Second Life. It may fit a very few ambitious or adventurous clients, but you are right – 2D social networking is hard enough for them to get their minds around, much less getting over the hurdles of a fairly daunting set of new skills.
The buzz around Second Life isn’t fundamentally about SL specifically. It is about the coming of Web-3D and the new possibilities that opens up for business and communications. It is just that Second Life is the most accessible (relatively speaking anyway) synthetic world – anyone can go in and start exploring the possibilities. Most other virtual worlds are less open, have specific goals or rules, or are more limiting in other ways. As others like SL join the fray, Second Life will be just one of a category of such open-ended virtual environments.
And yes, SL communications is immature. Personally I find there are quite a few unique benefits to the chat feature for events – and there are actually a whole array of alternative ways to communicate. A few ground rules set by the moderator using chat helps. One example, asking everyone to use the IM feature for “back channel” conversation and leave the chat for the main presenters works beautifully. Skype is another way to communicate in-world and is being used fairly extensively for in-world events. It has its own drawbacks, but works for some meeting types.
A final comment about monitoring avatar chatter. This is where understanding the culture of SL is vital before even beginning to craft strategies around it. Privacy is an enormous issue in SL and one that residents take far more seriously – and respect above any other – than we do in here in RL. Tread carefully with that thread.
Todd,
Intriguing thoughts, though (per your last point) I wonder if monitoring without disclosing would send a chilling effect and actually percipitate the disillusionment you are patiently waiting to set in.