There have been lots of articles recently about businesses leaving Second Life, although most of those seem to have come about because of the first person posting the article and the others regurgitating it over and over, and others that say businesses are wasting their money there. As an example, this one from Wired magazine titled How Madison Avenue Is Wasting Millions on a Deserted Second Life, and that seems to be the focus, all businesses are wasting money since no one is there when you visit them in Second Life.

The author is missing the mark on lots of things in this article, the one thing that is correct is they are wasting money in some respects, as with all things, if something is created for a promotion and it looks beautiful, the best example ever created, etc, but they don’t market it properly, no one is going to go look at it. As I am writing this, I am standing on the platform at the Coke Virtual Thirst Pavilion, crayon 172, 83, 532 (PG), Second Life URL, it was deserted of course when I got here, but in the ten minutes I have been working on this, many other people have already teleported in and are walking around checking out the various things they can do. I believe the traffic total has grown by at least 40% since I have been here, granted, the traffic total currently is only 37, but hey, it is growing because of all the press recently and people are actually finding out these things are here.

This best part about this little trip is the virtual pavilion is on a platform floating about crayon’s island, so I took the opportunity to parachute down. It is kind of exciting to see how long you can wait to open the chute, hehe, check out the pic.

See how easy it is to get sidetracked. My second trip to jump off again, I saw Eric Reuters on the platform, I think everyone named Reuters actually works there, correct? Anyway, he didn’t stay long as he looked like he was having trouble stopping, he was running in place. Could’ve been exercising I guess and hit the teleport by accident. LOL

Anyway, in the Wired article he talks of these big companies like Coke wasting advertising dollars on something that they get no traffic from. I mentioned above that the traffic was growing as I was there, nothing meteoric mind you, but the wired article alone was probably a big part of that. With all of the publicity that Second Life gets, just having a presence there can get you some good media coverage, one just has to search for Coca Cola and Second Life at Google news to see that.

Now, their first question when building something for Second Life should have been, why would these people come to our island to start with? Avatars don’t need to drink anything, so what good is Coke to them? I can see many ways to get people to visit a Coke machine or one of their spots in SL. They just had a virtual coke machine contest to see what people from Second Life would like it to do, but, not sure of the results of that competition as of yet. Me, I think it should offer some kind of coupon they could offer each avatar once for them to print out, a coupon they could change occasionally to give them some incentive to return, they could offer a different t-shirt every month that every avatar could grab for free, if they wear it, it’s free advertising, and could be designed for practically nothing and hired out easily. They could give away free Coca Cola branded radios, any number of things they could offer for free at little cost to them.

Anyone who is looking for some help in creating a good presence in Second Life can email me at this address, eubeenhadd at gmail.com, that is a serious address, hehe, just a nick I used to use when gaming. If you need some help, contact me there, if we can’t get you what you want, we know people who can. We are doing many builds for celebs and businesses, and we have ideas on how many businesses can have a presence that helps them in world and out.

Popularity: 6%