First — in-world businesses measure success exclusively by the traffic they draw in-world and the revenue that results. The same is NOT true for real world businesses entering Second Life, where the SL activity is just one component of a larger ROI picture.

Secondly, I think you’re correct that RL businesses have not attained the sophistication of their SL pureplay brethren yet and still have a lot to learn about community building in virtual worlds.

We think it’s important to view SL not as an island but as part of a spectrum of social media that include blogs, social networks liek Myspace and user created content communities like Flickr and Youtube. The goal of campaigns that provide really big ROI is to construct them so that the campaign can leave SL and live in all these other forms of social media.

What we’ve seen in our last 4 or 5 campaigns is the following phenomenon:

1. Launch in Second Life. Our targets over the life of a campaign are pretty modest (5 – 50,000 visitors, depending on scale). What makes this piece interesting is the level of engagement (hours) and who the audience is
2. (When sucessful) the campaign captures people’s imagination and explodes into the blogosphere getting millions of impressions
3. (When successful) the campaign also gets a lot of mainstream media coverage.

I’ve talked about this a lot recently on our blog
http://millionsofus.com/blog/archives/125 and
http://millionsofus.com/blog/archives/128

The net/net is that in order to succeed, all these efforts need to
1. Add value to SL
2. embrace the user-created content of SL
3. Allow for chaos so that nobody really knows where it will go

This last criterion, in our opinion, is the most important one for driving ROI. If users don’t have the ability to change the direction of where one of these efforts goes, they will be uniterested and without that chaotic element, observers will have little to discuss (and therefore the blog coversations and media coverage will be minimal.).

Just my two cents — but I’m really glad to see that the conversation is starting around this topic.

Reuben
–
Reuben Steiger
CEO
Millions of Us
80 Liberty Ship Way, Suite #5
Sausalito, CA 94965
http://www.millionsofus.com
Cell: (415) 425 2482

Now, I don’t really expect an SL auto presence to have more traffic
than an ETD, which serves a much more universal need in SL, but that
point aside, there are many things that corporations can do to expand
their presences in SL, add more value, and better engage residents.
It is starting to happen. It will improve with SL’s growth, because
companies will shift from experimental “dip the toe in” stage to total
engagement… it’s starting to happen.

And on competition, I can’t compare apples to can openers; a tennis shoe is one thing; a stilletto boot is another. I wear these name brands in RL, yet in SL, I choose to wear dingy work boots, unlaced. Reebok can’t compete against that no more than Pacific Sunwear can’t compete with the Men’s Wearhouse.

Also, I think we’re overlooking a cultural thing. Nissan cars in SL are tons of fun but uh, it’s a Nissan. I’ll take a Scion over a Nissan. In fact, if Porsche shows up, I’m dumping that Scion. In the meanwhile, I prefer the things that no car maker in RL can do. You can’t sell RL cars to a cyberpunk no more than you can sell to subcultures of furs or vampires.

Or, just look to the normal video game industry. In Need for Speed: Most Wanted, I challenge you to tell me about the brands like Cingular, Burger King, Autozone and others that are there. It’s a RL company, right? In a fake place (I mean I’m not *really* runnin’ from the cops)

Great conversation, keep it up!