After the hype comes the storm. That's the golden rule of any kind of technology trend, and there's no doubt that Second Life is currently moving into the storm phase.
First came the child pornography scandal. Then there was the backlash from long-time residents, fed up with what they saw as a change in strategy from Linden Lab which reduced their freedom. And now no less an authority than Forbes magazine has described the virtual world as "a weird, chancy place for real-life brands". Even IBM, that doyen of virtual universes, seems to be getting cold feet, with one executive saying "do I think anonymous avatars dressed in funny clothes are the future of business? No, that doesn’t interest me."
Does that sound like a media backlash? You bet it does. And some might say that it's completely deserved, given the amazing amount of hype that the game garnered earlier this year, post the infamous Anshe Cheung "virtual millionaire" cover.
For those of an "I told you so" bent, this probably seems like hubris getting its deserved reward. But actually, what's happening is the classic case of a failure to make a conceptual leap between one medium and the next. In exactly the same way that it's taken most print publishers ten years to begin to make web sites which exploit the medium, so companies used to working on the web aren't quite getting Second Life - yet.
Take Forbes' example of American Apparel, which was one of the first real world clothing companies to set up in Second Life. The company made a big splash, with a nice build complete with virtual clothing by Aimee Weber which look as nice as those in the real world.
According to Forbes, AA's web director Rasmus Schiönning is "disappointed" by the resulting sales. They just haven't done as well as expected - bringing the currency of their brand into the virtual world just hasn't worked.
But that's no surprise: in a world where you can dress like a biker, a pixie, a 50m tall mecha robot or a leather-clad dominatrix, who'd dress in American Apparel? That's no criticism of the designs they brought with them, but it demonstrates a failure to understand that in a world where design is limited not by the real world of physics and the facts of body shape and visual conservatism, people will not simply want to mirror themselves in real life. My own avatar veers between a slightly-less-dumpy-than-real-life human, a spheroid floating robot, and a tiny ferret in a bow tie. But no matter what my avatar, my standard real world uniform of large geek t shirt and jeans tends to be much less appealing.
The second failure is a lack of understanding that being "in" Second Life doesn't mean building something static and hoping people will come. It's not like the web, where you can game search engines and do advertising and attract traffic to your site, some of which (you hope) will stick. Instead, you need to give people a reason to come to your island - and also ensure that they can find your island at all. Otherwise, you're going end up being one of the many "ghost islands", with beautiful builds and almost no visitors.
What should you do? First of all, consider not building anything at all. Instead, think about getting involved with projects which are already in existence, run by residents. Be partners to existing metaversal businesses, and learn about this new medium from them.
Again, there's a parallel here with the early days of the web. Many print publishers saw existing web-only titles in 1997 and thought "we can do better than that. We know content, and we have a brand. This is going to be easy!"
And promptly wasted millions of dollars, eventually giving up and buying the web-native companies they were competing with for millions more dollars.
Taking American Apparel, again, rather than building a flashy store and creating some nice but too real-world clothes, the company would have been better off sponsoring clothing design competitions, organising seminars on how clothing works in the real world (and what SL designers can learn from this) and giving away full-permissions textures of textiles. Not only would it have spread its brand and brand message far more effectively, it would have made a massive pool of contacts in-world which could be important for it in the future.
Finally, don't be afraid to make a simple decision: that the time is not right for you to invest in the metaverse. If there's no business case, just say no. Keep an open mind about the future, but "no" can be the right option.
But if you decide to say "yes"... do it properly. With help from the people on the ground.
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