stedavies.com - communications consultant

Creating marketing opportunities with virtual worlds – an introduction to the corporations, branding & marketing in Second Life.

Introduction: “Hello everyone, I’m a software engineer at Second Life.” [Explains what a virtual world is and what you can do in virtual worlds and the differences of Second Life.]

“The business model is different with SL. SL is free to use and you only pay if you want to have virtual land or if you want to use the other services Linden Labs provides. Most importantly, SL is not a game it’s a virtual world although people can build games inside SL. [Shows example of the golf and tennis games in SL.]

“The most interesting game that’s been developed in SL is Tringo (cross between Tetris and bingo). This is proved to be wildly successful in SL. People also do a lot of experimentation in SL. Recently people have been doing live performances in SL.” [Explains live performances that have happened previously and how the music has been streamed from live radio.]

“Bands can play a gig in SL and you can have an audience that’s global. And another thing that is happening in SL is movie making. You can build your sets; get your friends to be actors and you can buy clothes and film it inside SL.”

“Lots of people are doing interesting stuff with conferences in SL. What we’re seeing is people creating mixed reality conferences. People attending a conference both in the real world and in SL.” [Shows example].

“Education is becoming a big thing in SL now. Harvard now has a presence and there’s a big culture of learning. People are teaching each other how to build stuff in SL. This is amazing because people are spending an enormous amount of time to teach other people how to use it. It’s amazing! The culture has blossomed into a real world of learning: art, business studies, etc.”

“Charity is also a big thing in SL. [Shows his avatar with red nose for Comic Relief]. Charities are doing sponsored walks in SL and raising lots of money”

Stats

* 41% are female
* Median age is 33
* 68% international (as opposed to being US only)
* 10% of residents are from the UK
* 54% active residents are European
* SL is 6.5 times the size of Manhattan
* Approaching 5m members
* 116 residents earn >$5000 a month
* $5m a month exchanged
* 12m user hours per month

“We’re currently in a rapid growth phase and we are receiving a lot of media attention [Shows Business Week cover]. We also had corporate interest; in 2004, UK company Rivers Run Red was the first corporate organisation to buy land in SL. They did Radio 1’s Big Weekend which was streamed into SL which, in the real world, the event lasted a couple of hours; in SL it went on for 24 hours.”

Examples:

300 (movie) – You can buy the costumes of the characters in the film

AOL Pointe – They’ve built a bunch of cool stuff and branded it with AOL

Sears – Built by IBM and they’re looking at the potential of v-commerce websites.

The L Word – Most popular real world brand space in SL. Reasons being is they keep running events and have meetings. They have a number of shops to buy haircuts etc.

Big Brother – They created a virtual world of BB. Avatars stayed in a virtual house for so many hours of the day.

“Why would you want to stream video into a virtual world? Because you can watch it collaboratively which is more of an experience of watching a movie at the cinema.

“Why are businesses investing in SL? It’s certainly not for the money… Not just yet. [Shows example of American Apparel and how you can buy t-shirts in the real world and get the same one for free in SL].

“Virtual worlds are not going away. They’ve been growing for the last 10 years and will continue to do so for the next 10. SL if going to become far more of a platform; in the future corporations will be able host part of the SL grid. We’ll see more corporations in SL.