Open Letter to Your Boss (By Amanda Linden)
Amanda Linden has posted an ‘Open Letter to Your Boss’ on the official blog, designed to dispel common myths and bring more businesses into Second Life.
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You can read that letter by clicking here.
This is yet another sign that there is a real concentration on bringing in businesses and more of them. And of course, it would help if Linden Lab could recruit already loyal business and social users alike to persuade their management at their place of work. Good marketing sense. And you know, the letter does what it should do to an extent. It tackles the common myths.
However, Amanda Linden’s discussion of how Second Life™ can benefit companies as a “collaboration, learning, recruiting, and marketing tool,” might need revising. I agree that as a collaboration and learning tool, the platform is amazing. There’s one problem with the ‘recruiting’ and ‘marketing’ part though. If an organisation is going to allocate funds to marketing online, would they allocate funds to Second Life? No. I don’t think it is necessarily the most sensible thing to do. Take a look at Facebook, as an example. Facebook has thousands of businesses advertising there and those businesses can target literally MILLIONS of people. Second Life on the other hand, as much as I love it, crumbles into a mess when 85000 are online.
“Oh noooo,” scream the servers in unison, “85000…. quick, fall to the ground and play dead. They might not notice us here.”
And even if improvements can be made, what will those improvements be within, let’s say, 12 months? Will we be able to get 100000 online by the end of the year? 200000 by the end of next year? After all, membership to virtual worlds is growing all the time. But the fact is that even if you could get half a million online at a time, that’s still a drop in the ocean by comparison of other means of marketing online. Marketing in Second Life just isn’t as viable for companies for that reason. The same applies with recruitment, largely. Though I have noticed that certain real life recruitment agencies in North America are successfully recruiting candidates for real jobs and this seems to be an ‘industry’ within Second Life that is experiencing growth. I will be watching this with interest.
I’m with Amanda Linden on the collaboration element. For teleconferencing with international colleagues, Second Life (particularly with increased reliability) is pretty fantastic for that. Though, personally, I would probably be concerned about the possibility of employees teleporting in with their Xcite! attached outside their pixel business suits.
EMPLOYEE: Sorry I’m late, boss. I had to….
BOSS:Have sex with escort on company time?
EMPLOYEE: No, no. I had, erm… to, you know. I erm, I was donating to a charity box and couldn’t teleport out of the region to get here.
BOSS: You were donating to a charity box with your pixel dick attached and a group tag say “EscortZ Uzer.” Really?
The moral of that short tale? Always keep separate personal and business avatars.
The one thing missing from that letter? Well, if you are going to dispel common myths about Second Life and Second Life users, surely you can’t omit the myth that, ‘All Second Life users are nymphomaniac hermits, living in their parent’s basement, are morbidly obese and will spontaneously combust if they ever go out in the sun.’
Yes, some people actually believe that. Ok, ok, so we probably all know a Second Lifer who does fall into that category. But I have come across so many non-users who absolutely couldn’t believe I was using Second Life. “Isn’t that for freaks and weirdos? You could be doing something so much more productive.” A common statement. I gave up trying to educate and now tend to respond,
“Yes, of course Second Life is for freaks. And yes, I absolutely should be taking a leaf out of your book and doing something more productive. What did you just spend the last two hours doing? Watching some crap reality TV show? Festering in front of another repeat of some hideous Sylvester Stallone movie in which he uses ONE VOICE TONE for a full two hours? Or maybe you got really productive and read a trashy magazine about which celebrity no mark is having sex with some other celebrity no mark. Meanwhile I just had three enlightening cultural debates with people from three countries thousands of miles from here about literature, human rights and the value of the internet in entertainment. You are right, you really are far superior to me and I should be bowing to your fine example of how to waste two hours of leisure time.”
Hmmm… went off on a bit of a tangent there, didn’t I? Oh well.
/end rant.
Categories: Second Life
Tymmerie Thorne
Oh man. That letter makes my head hurt. Obviously written by someone who has NO experience in communications or marketing. You NEVER call attention to anything potentially bad — i.e., the adult content. Here, she highlights it, puts glitter on it and points to it with a laser pointer. My advice? Don’t use Amanda’s amateurish letter unless you wish your boss to laugh at you.
And I never mind your tangents!!
Axel
Yeah,just mention Second Life on none-Second Life sites,you’ll get people thinking that you want to yiff. Seriously it’s the public image,i don’t have to tell how many times newbies go into a PG sim and keep asking for sex. The media is mostly to blame,they only cover sex and such. Why don’t they mention the fact it has singers,combat,freebie hunts and such.