Glob – The Indusgeeks Blog

This article appeared in the 4Ps Business and Marketing magazine published by Planmanmedia ( November 21st , 2008 edition) under the title  ‘ Virtually yours … in our 2nd lives ‘.

Virtual worlds like Second Life burst onto the digital marketing scene in early 2006 and since then it’s been a roller coaster ride for marketers. In the early days most marketers correctly realized the potential of this medium to immerse their audiences in to the brand narrative but could not implement or create an effective virtual marketing campaign. As virtual worlds continue to grow and their registered user base touches about 400 million users by some estimates; it’s increasingly important for marketers to understand what works in these worlds. Virtual worlds such as Second Life are a hybrid of web and contact marketing. They combine the advantages of technology and latest web trends like social networking, video sharing with the proximity and immersion of contact marketing. They create engaging user experiences being entertaining, interactive and immersive.

Second Life vs. Other Virtual Worlds…

Although Second Life started it all, it isn’t the only virtual world out there. There are many others like There (used by Coke and MTV), Gaia, etc. The choice of a virtual world or a combination of them that is best suited for a brand depends on the demographics, target audience, customer experience, etc., just as in the case of traditional web marketing. Virtual worlds can also be custom created for a brand and allow embedded brand advertising – Barbie Girls, Lego Universe are popular flash based virtual worlds targeted at teens and youth across the globe.

Branded and interactive virtual worlds can be effectively used to create loyal communities around brands. Long term community interaction, for instance Sunsilk’s ‘Gang of Girls’ – is essential both for community as well as marketing. Interactive virtual worlds can also be integrated with existing online communities such as Facebook (YoVille – Flash based virtual world application on Facebook which has about 1,50,000 daily users). That brings us to another potentially interesting application of virtual worlds – distributed virtual worlds or embeddable virtual worlds.

Using Embedded Virtual Worlds…

So far most of the popular virtual worlds like Second Life, There, Gaia, et al are client-based as opposed to browser-based applications. But with the growing popularity of the medium, a need to embed these virtual worlds into browsers is growing. This is especially relevant for web marketing and network marketing purposes. Just as social networking platforms like ‘Ning’ and Google’s ‘Open-Social’ make it possible to host a social network on your own website/portal as opposed to walled gardens like Facebook; distributed virtual world platforms created using Flash, Java, et al allow virtual worlds to be hosted on a company’s or an individual’s website.

This leads to the usual networking effects witnessed in social networks wherein a friend can be invited to hop onto your virtual space on your website which is in turn connected to a whole grid of such spaces allowing for both public as well as private virtual experiences. Embeddable virtual worlds are in the early stages of development and their growth will have a significant effect in using virtual worlds for digital and interactive marketing.

Myths and problems…

In 2006, when Second Life was on its upward media popularity curve, many companies jumped onto the bandwagon of establishing their ‘presence’ on Second Life. This amounted to little more than just a nice-looking static 3D space, very much resembling an extension of themes and concepts used in the companies’ existing 2D websites. The expectation was ‘if we build it… people will come’, completely ignoring the basic fact that a user needs a compelling reason to visit a virtual location just as he does to visit a company’s website. This saw many major companies like American Apparel, Wells Fargo, Armani, Dell, etc. launch huge campaigns and see them fail.

It led many prominent advertising agencies to believe that virtual worlds like Second Life were not meant for marketing purposes and led to a backlash in the media. The failure, however, was not of the medium as much as of the message. Virtual worlds offer the great chance to engage your target audience in an interactive and immersive brand experience. They allow you as a marketer to create a narrative and ask your customers to participate in it. Such an experience is not possible in any other online digital medium to this extent. Instead of leveraging the huge interaction and narration capabilities of the medium most of the failed campaigns tried instead to create ‘pretty places’ and sell their products blandly using the kind of video and banner based marketing popular on the 2D web and this expectedly backfired.

Brands like coca-cola, L’oreal, Orange, Pontiac and Starwood Hotels succeeded wildly in their Second Life campaigns because they chose to take an event based and community based approach to the medium. They provided an experience or utility which people demanded in virtual worlds while blending it with the brand message. Indeed coca-cola has launched a new campaign in Second Life for its Nestea brand by sponsoring a concert in Second Life.

To conclude, the future of Virtual marketing or V- marketing is bright as long as marketers realize how to use the medium and it’s strengths.

- Siddharth Banerjee

CEO

Indusgeeks

12 days after the Child Rights and You’s (CRY) virtual presence was soft launched by Indusgeeks we have now started to build up a considerable “tail” or trail on the web. We have yet to hold our inworld press conference and do the launch event in-world. We believe that’s part of Phase 2 and not Phase 1 as is usually the practice. As mentioned in the previous post we are still in the First phase of the campaign. Let’s see what the results have been so far :

1 . Hindustan Times – Front page box and then half page inside. (Real life newspaper)

2. Indiainfoline News. -

3. exchange4media.com

4. agencyfaqs.com

5. contentsutra.com

6. ITnewsoline.com

7. SecondLife Today

Blogs :

1. Russian Blog

2. French Blog

3. Your2ndPlace

4. Watblog

5. Indianpad

6. Alootechie

7. India-Forums

This in addition to almost all major aggregator sites like digg and boxxet adding it to their lists. Even one in Korea!! This is not an exhaustive list… by the very nature of web 2.0 it’s difficult to be exhaustive…. this is what a cursory search turns up on Google..

I am not even counting the lead up to this when the articles appeared in DNA and Business Standard and even Hindustan Times before. Also there was a small mention in Economic Times Delhi in the real life paper!

I am not trying for a minute to suggest that… marketing and newspaper hits etc. are the only reason to enter Second Life. Cheap publicity is a terrible motive , but it’s not necessarily terrible! Seriously though, I think publicity about the medium is not only desirable but required in India. Most people have very skewed notions of what Second Life or virtual worlds are all about. So a presence like that of CRY’s makes people sit up and wonder….. if a NGO is here can’t be all that bad… hmm.. maybe I should check it out!

And that’s precisely the kind of reaction required to bring virtual worlds into the mainstream Internet market and educate the masses and corporates about V-Training , Conferencing, Collaboration etc. which is almost never mentioned in the media in India yet…. So keep plugged in for Phase 2

Been too long since we’ve spoken here. Not because we didn’t want to but just couldn’t find the time, what with all the work………. Okay!Okay! so I was lying. We binged and partied and had a huge New Year’s hangover and finally got around to blogging now .

So what is Virtual Training ( V-training) , Virtual Collaboration and Orientation ? I am going to try to explain this over the course of the next month here . To start off here’s an interesting video on Zdnet.com

Indusgeeks is doing a lot of work in the corporate sector in India and abroad on these lines. Virtual is fast, easy and cheap for all manner of orientation, collaboration and training activities within an organisation be it Marketing, Sales , HR or Product Development.

This Indusgeeks video ( although tad boring ) demonstrates some possibilities by simulating a real life presentation on Second Life , using various 3D ( special tools/software developed by Indusgeeks) as well as traditional 2D A/V tools.

We discussed content and community in Second Life in one of our previous posts . In this post I’d like to discuss the questions asked by my Imaginary cousin! What is the one killer application/utility that might transform the way we use Virtual Worlds today and make them a universal phenomenon ?

I am sure, every Metaverse Development Company and other tech majors like IBM are working on that one. In the meantime the following are the limitations of creating utilities in Virtual Worlds :

1. The code is not open sourced ( in the case of Second Life only the client side code is open).

2. Where code is open sourced like in Croquet , there isn’t enough developer incentive and consequently not much mass acceptance or movement.

3. Restricted access to the Web from inside the Virtual Worlds.

4.No Internal Database support.

5.Even in-world scripting has limited capabilities owing to security and spamming concerns.

The above list is not exhaustive. At present any utilities we are creating as programmers on Second Life in India or around the world…are work-arounds , as access to the client side code is absent. Despite these limitations developers have come up with great utilities.

These utilities can be classified into three categories broadly :

1.Help the avatars inside Second Life lead easier and more productive virtual lives ! For instance the SLJobfinder.com application and service created by Indusgeeks helps avatars find jobs inside Second Life.

2.Attempt to connect the Web and other applications to Second Life to make them more universally usable.

3. Derive relevant data for Real Life organizations to justify and capitalize on their virtual world investments.

Ultimately, as codes become more open and interoperability between virtual worlds rises ( will touch on this in detail later), people will start looking to “do” more things on them. Even today we see an increasing restlessness amongst users about what else to do in VWs besides build, chat, shop and party… This need to be more productive on the 3D Net will lead , we believe, to a burst in developmental activity around utility creation ( aka raising the Utility Quotient).

We at Indusgeeks are actively working towards this end. Already, we rarely sell static or marketing oriented “virtual presences” to our clients. Sure beautiful buildings and lots of newspaper acreage helps… but what will win the war in the end , we think, is Utility. The Geeks wanna be around when Utility becomes the King in Second Life!

- Sid