Trend: Second Life - Marketing in a Metaverse

Locating real customers in a virtual world.

Trend Description:

Second Life, shortly SL, is a rapidly growing 3D virtual reality, developed by the San Francisco based company “Linden Labs”. Since october the population has increased about 41% and the media hype just began.

Like in Massive Multiplayer Games, thousands of users interact in this virtual surrounding at the same time. Instead solving quests, like it is usual in games, the residents of SL are trading among each other and they build up their own surrounding. Only the land is given by Linden Labs.

Furthermore Second Life as a totally independent economy, with an own currancy, the Linden Dollar, which can be exchanged into real USD and with all rules of trade, which are the same like in reality allows a so far in virtual realities unknown variety and complexity. The most popular businesses at the moment are real estate, selling of smaller objects for the avatars, like clothing and gadgets, as well as entertainment services, like clubs and casinos. 10 million objects have been created until now and the daily turnover is 565.000 $.
SL is getting close to have one and a half million registered users, with an average age of 32 years, and many companies are trying to reach those people with their businesses. 25% of Second Life’s 1.5 million residents are actively trading, while 75% are focussed on consuming. Until now 7000 profitable businesses have been set up. The ten most successful residents have approximately earned 200.000 $ each in 2005.
The hype around Second Life has also reached the higher managements of blue chip companies, universities and governments. So settlements of Adidias, Harvard University, the US government and others have been launched during the last months.
Cases:

Reuters

Reuters news agency now has a correspondent from Second Life. His name is Adam Reuters and will be reporting from the virtual world. His goal is to observe and report on the intersection between real and virtual economies and how Second Life is evolving.
Adam Reuters has a blog to present his articles, and a tiny space on his homepage allows users to convert Linden Dollars to US dollars, Euros Pounds and Yen. On top of this, Adam shares his daily agenda through Google Calendar.

Toyota

By offering an official virtual edition of the Scion xB, Toyota strikes a new path in Marketing. Mainly young customers are the target group of this reletively cheap Mini Van. Unlike to brands like Adidas, which have an own store, Toyota just placed one single Car at Second Life. An increasing number of big brands discover virtual realities as independent market places and as peer to younger customers.

Us government Climate Control

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Earth System Research Laboratory (ESRL) has created an island in Second Life where they demonstrate fluid dynamics. The NOAA is the US governmental agency tasked with researching the oceans, climate and weather.
The NOAA’s sim is called Meteroa, which is derived from the Greek adjective meteoras which means ’suspended in the air’ (Full disclosure, I’m Greek). On this lovely island sim you can find fully interactive educational demonstrations about the ocean and weather. Examples include a sea life submarine ride created by The Magicians, and two different tsnuami demos by Aimee Weber Studios and Electric Sheep Company.

Bild.T-Online in SL (by The Guardian)

Axel Springer, the publisher of Germany’s top-selling Bild newspaper, is poised to launch a weekly paper designed to sate the virtual population’s appetite for news and gossip. The company (and especially Gregor Stemmle, CEO of Bild.T-Online) plans to construct an online editorial office for SL News. A real editor-in-chief will then recruit a team of roving reporters from among the avatar community, which currently numbers more than a million “residents”.

Due to be launched in December, the paper will cost between 10 and 15 Linden dollars. It will likely be sold by subscription - posted into mailboxes across the virtual parallel universe.
The newspaper will tailor its unprecedented venture according to feedback from avatars, but one thing is clear: It will not feature news stories from the real world.

Trend impact:
Being present in a virtual world can offer quite a few benefits from a marketing perspective. Testing and interacting with (potential) consumers becomes possible in an interactive and inexpensive way. The presence in the virtual world is also a must for innovative companies to test the waters in this new digital medium. Besides the marketing aspect, Second Life offers a great potential for social networkers, who are bored by MySpace and other such social networks.

Links:
Reuters Secondlife

NOAA

Bild.T-Online

The Guardian

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