I don't think that Linden Lab meant to create quite such a blogstorm with its announcement of the inSL logo programme, but there's no doubt that this is exactly what it's done. With some bloggers talking about three day strikes, and many others echoing the message that Linden Lab has overstepped the mark, it's pretty clear that this is a mess - and one which the Lab will have to deal with.
As I've pointed out, the reality of the situation is actually pretty uncontroversial. The licensing programme itself is just about ensuring that companies can advertise their presence in SL without having to use Linden Lab's trademarks, which is the kind of thing that gives the average business lawyer hives.
However, the way it's been expressed has lead many people to believe that they will have to adopt onerous conditions whenever they even mention Second Life. Again, as I've pointed out, this is largely not true: unless your business name or web site name uses one of the Linden trademarks in it, you'll probably have to do precisely nothing different. Publications with "Second Life" in the title will probably need to adopt appropriate disclaimers. No one will be able to attempt to use Linden trademarks to suggest they're associated with the Lab. As Ciaran Laval has pointed out, this is exactly the same rules as any other trademark.
Clearly, Linden Lab communicated this badly. But that's not enough to explain how bad this is looking for them. Why are so many people willing to believe that Linden Lab actually wants to kick the hundreds of bloggers, writers, and content creators who contribute to Second Life's success in the teeth?
The answer lies in the complete dearth of proper community relations management and an utter failure to have any kind of real blogger engagement programme. This is something that's been building for months - and to anyone who's been following the progress of the Lab, it's no surprise.
For a company based on building communities, Linden Lab is surprisingly opaque. Partly, this is down to a failure to develop its sense of what its community is since the days when Philip Rosedale could hold "town halls" with the reasonable expectation that everyone in-world could attend without the servers falling over. The original way that Linden Lab communicated with its customers was in-world - but that only works for a few people at a time, and utterly fails with an active community in the hundreds of thousands.
(As an aside, I suspect that this is why Linden Lab spends such a lot of its time working with small groups in-world, such as the Second Life Architecture Working Group. Small groups work in-world. The problem is, of course, that it's all too easy to see such groups as "feted inner cores" and assume the Lab doesn't care about anyone else.)
Nothing has replaced in-world meetings as the core part of Linden Lab's communications programme. While the company has a blog, it is mostly formulaic corporate comms with a dash of hints and tips. It has grown well beyond the point where a single blog is enough - every senior executive should have a blog, and communicate things which impact their area directly. With the Linden blog, you never feel like you're talking to a person - which is the point of blogging.
Worse still is the apparent lack of a real community/blogger engagement programme. For a company like Linden Lab, blogger engagement is probably the most important kind of PR. And while individual Lindens often appear happy to talk about their specific area, no one appears to be doing this job for Linden Lab as a whole. This is shown by the fact that, 48 hours after this issue started brewing, there is no clarification or response from Linden Lab over the issue.
Good blogger relations - heck, just good old fashioned PR work - could have nipped this one in bud. That hasn't happened, and it's now getting to the point when a minor clarification may no longer be enough to stop the damage.
So where does Linden Lab go next? The first thing it needs to sort out is this mess, which it can do by officially clarifying things. If its lawyers can't agree on a form of words which express the simple fact that you don't need to follow every instance of "Second Life" on your blog with "TM" then it should fire its lawyers. Other companies' legal teams manage this daily.
Second, it needs to start a serious blogger outreach programme, to ensure that it gets feedback from some of the most vocal members of its community - people who's work influences thousands of opinions. And blogger engagement means listening as much as talking - something that should never be forgotten.
Finally, it needs to start being a more marketing-focussed company. So far in its short life, it has mostly been a technology development team: marketing was really a "pig in lipstick" role. The techies delivered the product: the marketers worked out how to market it. Now, it needs to learn the real lesson of marketing - put customers first, including in your development process. And that means learning a lot more about the community, who are, after all, its customers.
