Get a (Second) Life…
Posted by PRGirlz Alumni on August 30th, 2006
Text100 has opened a PR agency in Second Life.
I don’t really know what to say about that. When I read about Second Life I get an image of a big game of Sims gone awry, and I find it lends credence to the stereotype (or is it?) of online geeky folks living their lives via a mouse and desktop in the basement. Measuring out their lives with pixels instead of coffee spoons, I suppose.
Apparently the legion of “virtual” people is growing – BusinessWeek reported that 170,000 such devotees were online back in May, so I imagine there must be gazillions now. (Update: There are 595,000 “residents” now.) All spending real money (real money!) to buy fake money to buy fake things, like fake land. Or fake PR services, I guess. (As an aside, that’s one of the sadder things about SL – it’s a brand new world, no physical limits and endless resources. And what do people do? Shop.)
I can see why marketers have glommed on – obviously you have a large group of uh… motivated people with disposable income all in one place (kind of). It lets the digital marketing department have some fun, ‘cuz there’s a ceiling on the fun to be had buying real estate for web ads and subverting MySpace. And, well, it will garner you some ink in meatspace – see MTV, BBC Radio 1, Twentieth Century Fox, Warner Brothers Records, American Apparel and Major League Baseball.
I can see SL as having the potential to add new dimensions to distance learning, at least in parts of the world where broadband is becoming a utility. (For the rest of the world - I guess you could call them the un-online – they are probably poor people in a poor place so we can’t sell them anything anyway. Pity. Oh well…)
I can even, maybe, see why regular people might choose to spend their valuable, limited time pretending to be animated. We live in a taxing era - lots of people have limited, stressful or difficult lives (maybe even all of the above) so the fantasy that they can recreate themselves and live a totally different, unlimited life (albeit one which requires them to sit in a chair and stare at a monitor, natch) could have appeal. Some people, god love ‘em, are simply cashing in. In the real world, I mean – trading those Linden Dollars for currency. (Now that I can understand.) Linden Lab, of course, has created something that defies any easy label – let’s just call it clever – and I imagine they will monetize it in even more elaborate and creative ways. Understood.
But what will Text100 do there? They’ve explained they will make their best trainers available there for internal usage and offer up their “space” for client press conferences. Press conferences? I bear in mind that Text100 is a tech PR outfit so their target journos are likely to be much more tech savvy than your average daily beat reporter, but I’m interested to hear how (and if) that works. Anyone know?
August 30th, 2006 » 8:28 pm
Thanks for basically summing up how I feel about SL!
August 30th, 2006 » 10:43 pm
No prob, Chris – here to serve.
September 1st, 2006 » 4:25 am
This post really made me laugh, because as much as I hear and learb about Second Life, I just can’t rise to the level of excitement about it. I have a hard enough time keeping up with my first life to complicate it with a second one, professional or otherwise.
I did get an avatar, a word I can’t even pronounce, and it is still lost somewhere on the entry island, where I abandoned it a month ago. I wonder if most of those 595,000 residents are just zombies that have been abandoned by the real people who created them. It’s just sad, I better go back and clean up my trash I guess.
September 5th, 2006 » 6:06 pm
Mary Ellen,
Sorry that it took me a while to respond. I was out of the office moving house. Let me just try to clarify why Text 100 joined Second Life (SL).
First off, we don’t think that SL is a game, because its content is completely generated by its users, without the limitations of a game script. SL residents relate to each other by their own interest not by any pre-set rules. We prefer to call SL a virtual world. As such, it attracts the typical criticism all new media got since we made the move from an oral to a written culture: the media virtualises relationships, distracts from real life, and seduces us into a fake world. That has been said about letters and books, it has been said about phones, radio and TV, and it has been said about internet platforms like e-mail, blogs or SL. While there is some truth to this view in few exceptional cases, in general none of the media replaced or threatened the real life, they all just added a new layer to it and enriched it. Just consider how virtual it is to write an e-mail or your blog, how far from real life this will look to your grandparents. On a blog, you can experiment with your thoughts and have an exchange with people who are interested in the same thing, even if they live far away. The same is true for SL, there you can just do it in 3-D. From this perspective, it is even more tangible than an exchange with words only. I wouldn’t denounce you as an escapist simply because you have a blog or spend most of your day writing e-mails rather than meeting people face to face, and I would claim the same for the residents of SL. You can do a lot of things there that are not meant to replace your real life but to enrich it. E.g. I find it fascinating that designers of a house can co-create new designs with their customers and offer them a 3-D experience before they are built in real life. I would have loved to use this kind of thing before I moved house! As a result, we view SL as the next stage in the evolution of peer-to-peer media like blogs, wikis, social networks and other online forums. It is a rapidly emerging new public we need to understand first hand and based on this experience advise our clients how/if it can support their business. It is still early days, but we are sure it presents a couple of interesting opportunities to our clients and ourselves. I hope this makes more sense?
Best regards,
Georg Kolb
September 5th, 2006 » 7:23 pm
Thanks, Georg – seems like SL is the topic du jour so I’m going to post a link to your response.
September 5th, 2006 » 10:34 pm
Hi, Kami – I bet you’re right, probably most of those residents were born during a short burst of curiousity and promptly abandoned due to sheer boredom.