Altyrian View

Well as quickly as companies wanted into Second Life, it appears the mass exodus has begun. Ad Age had an article a few days ago, Time listed SL as one of its top five worst web sites, American Apparel has closed its virtual doors and bloggers have begun tolling the bell for the end of a short era.

But yesterday, as if in anticipation for this blog post, Neville Hobson alerts us to the fact that Dell has moved in to Second Life - not with an island (which they may alreay have) but rather by offering in-world Dell support. Neville learned about the in-world tech support through a Dell group that he joined.

Although companies are having a problem making a visable return on their invesment, it’s hard to ignore a community - virtual or otherwise - that has more than 8 million residents. Enter the public relations pros.

Although Second Life is turning out to be a place where companies are having a difficult time impacting their bottom line, it is still a great place to reach to reach a vast, affluent audience. As a social community with millions of people, there are still ways to communicate in a positive way with your audiences (Think “Fall of Advertising, Rise of PR“).

A great example can be found with one of my real world clients: the National Multiple Sclerosis Society. The Society does not have a build in SL, but there is an active MS group. Although the group was not started by the Society, it is a place for the Society to work with their audience. A similar grassroots effort greatly benefitted the American Cancer Society with the virtual Relay for Life. Second Life is still a great place for virtual meeting, collaboration, sharing of ideas and all of those thing integrate with PR activities.

Frankly, companies moving out of Second Life is probably a good thing for the community. Too much commercialization would hamper the growth of SL. Think about MySpace. The commercialism there has greatly slowed its growth and popularity. As public relations pros, we should look for ways to add meaningful dialog to the social community without intruding. In other words, we should do in Second Life what we are already doing in First Life.

Zetlady Isbell, the organizer for the SL Business Communicators group, has announced the the next meeting will be on Weather Island and will feature Lawrence Pede, Senior Manager, Corporate Development for The Weather Channel Companies. I really enjoy hearing what companies are hoping to accomplish in Second Life.

If you haven’t been to one of the SL Business Communicators meetings, this would probably be a cool one to check out.

According to the good people at 3pointD, MovieTickets.com is stepping up their Second Life offering. Now, you can view trailers, check show times and buy tickets by linking into the Web site through SL. Although people have been streaming trailers in to SL for a while, I think that this is a great use of the medium.

What I want next is for a major studio to screen movies – legal, porn-free movies – in SL. It’s always more fun to watch a movie with people. Maybe with SL, we have the option never to watch a movie alone again.

Here’s the link to MovieTickets.com’s SL build.

Last week I started a “PRSA / Public Relations Pros” (I had a character limit on the name) group in Second Life. I invite you all to join. Just do a search for “PRSA” in the groups window. You can also drop me an email for an invite. Just be sure to include your SL avatar name.

Obviously, this doesn’t replace the SL Business Communicators group that I am also in. While they focus on communicating in Second Life, I want this group to be communicators who happen to also be in SL. I hope that someday we can have programs and such so that the group is active and provides some benefit.

Right now, this is not an official PRSA chapter. I’ve sent an email to PRSA to get their feedback on our group. I included PRSA in the name to make it easier for PR pros to find us. I was also going to include IABC in the name, but I ran out of characters.

Just attended a very interesting meeting of the Second Life Business Communicators. As you can see from the photo, we had a great crowd! Roo Reynolds (aka Algernon Spackler in SL), the IBM Metaverse Evangelist, spoke to our group about IBM and it’s involvement in Second Life. A few really interesting tidbits from the meeting:

IBM is going to announce 12 new sims opening to the public either today or Monday. Those at the meeting who had seen the new island said that it was really cool. For me, the more interesting news was that IBM and Circuit City are working on a “new retail store for the future.” According to Reynolds, you can sit on a virtual sofa and try out different size televisions to help you decide which size works best based on your distance from the wall – that’s just one example of what they are working on. In the end, I think that any shopping experience could be very cool.

Well, yesterday I guessed that Second Life would probably 2 million residents this month, but I never thought that it would happen in less than 24 hours. I did a little math, and according to my figures (and adjusting for the time variance), Second Life grew 1.4% over the last 24 hours. Should Second Life continue to grow at that rate, there will be 3 million residents by mid-January.

If you don’t already have your avatar, you are behind the curve.

It looks that way. As of 8:19 a.m. SL time on December 14, Second Life is sitting with 1,982,813 residents. What’s amazing is that based on estimates and growth rates as soon as 4 months ago, it looked like SL would merely hit 1 million this year. I guess the press has been extra kind to Linden Labs.

The only downside is that the world seems to be growing much faster than the systems that operate it. Over the last couple weeks various search functions have gone offline because of “heavy database load” (think what would happen if Google was the only search engine, and it went down). It seems that everything is working now, but I’d guess the good folks at LL will be spending their holidays adding servers and updating systems.

Kami Huyse, APR, has announced that there will be a meeting of public relations professionals in Second Life tomorrow, September 14 at 4 p.m. EST. I’m really excited that there is a communicator’s group that meets in the afternoon, and it should be fun to meet other PR people from around the country while sitting at my desk. Here are the details:

What: Second Life Second Thursday Worldwide
Where: Comms Café in Second Life
You can find the café by logging on to the Second Life client, hitting the search button, entering “Comms Café” and then teleporting there.
When: Thursday September 14, 2006 (Friday in Australia and India)
Time: 3 p.m. Central Time U.S., and 20:00 GMT

Look for me tomorrow. I’m JohnT Randall in SL.

Larry pointed me to a blog that’s a new one to me called “Business Communicators of Second Life.” Seems that they have an SL group that is meeting Tuesday, August 22 at 7 p.m. EST.

Here’s a link for more information. I’m excited about joining some fellow professional communicators in Second Life. Hopefully I’ll see you there tomorrow!

On the surface, things appear to be going really well in Second Life. In addition to having an Altyris building there (I had to drop that in…), Adidas Reebok, Toyota and TELUS (a large Canadian telco) have all announced (or begun building) an upcoming presence in Second Life. Text100, a large public relations agency, has a build opening tomorrow. NOAA has a build that’s pretty cool. The American Cancer Society raised about $40k in the SL Relay for Life. Couple that with more media than the Mideast conflict, and you have a thriving environment.
But is there trouble brewing?
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