Herding Virtual Sheep

Last Friday I noticed an article on MediaPost about a new product to allow the creation of branded virtual worlds. I imagine a lot of marketers would have the same two questions I did:

1.Why?
2.Who cares?

So I spend some time over the weekend exploring The Electric Sheep Company and some of their applications. The exploration turned up some interesting information.
The company is over 3 years old and has built virtual worlds for various clients on existing platforms like SecondLife. The WebFlock product, according to founder Sibley Verbeck, is “a tool set for embedding flash-based virtual spaces within Web sites and integrating those into any existing Web applications. . . Primarily we see it as enabling virtual spaces for casual audiences who are already coming to a given Web site.” The first WebFlock project is a virtual world for Showtime’s The L Word series, which I’d guess has an audience that would enjoy the interaction a virtual world will offer.

But that doesn’t answer the broader “why” question. I looked farther; not difficult, since Electric Sheep has a robust Flickr site (why don’t more companies take advantage of sites like Flickr to demonstrate product use/happy customers?). I see projects for the NBA Finals (broadening the customer experience, as I remember), the USG Division of Siemens (looks like a virtual pavilion in Second Life), Best Buy’s Geek Squad (what it’s like to be a Geek Squad member), a Starwood hotel under construction (a preview of a new “select service” concept under construction at the time), and many others. Many are targeted at a young adult audience, but companies like USG/Siemens and IBM clearly have a business audience. If you look carefully, you see that many of them are either event- or entertainment-oriented. The content also makes sense.

If there are reasonable strategic answers to “why,” that still leaves the issue of whether website visitors will use them. These are corporate applications; I’m sure the owners know but equally sure few will reveal any specifics. I did find some more general information about virtual worlds, however, that suggests there is more going on in this space than most of us probably know about.

KZero, a British research firm that specializes in virtual worlds, has a graphic of the virtual world space. It’s segmented by content type and shows whether each world is open or in private beta. There is a lot going on, even though it doesn’t appear to cover the short-lived event and other branded worlds. And, yes, I know it’s small and hard to read. The good news is that they have this data broken out by content type and also by age group. It’s interesting reading.

MediaPost notes that a company can expect to spend less than $100,000 for a branded virtual world using this platform. If you have a good reason for doing it, and an audience that is willing to participate, that’s not much in the greater universe of media expenditures. WebFlock is an interesting development that’s worth watching.

Sears Goes Virtual

Sears is not known for being either fashion forward or a particularly desirable destination for teen fashionistas. An article in AdAge (subscription required) yesterday points out that they are trying to change that. They have created the ArriveLounge (I don’t have a clue about the implications of that name) as the centerpiece of the campaign for fall back-to-school. Here’s the top and bottom halves of the web page so you can look at it and make your own judgment about whether this will attract the teen and tween crowd.
The AdAge article points out that Sears is partnering with sites including MySpace and Disney for custom content and sponsorships, creating games with a number of partners, and that they will have events such as fashion shows in virtual world where teens can also create their own avatars and clothe them in Sears garments.

The virtual worlds aspect intrigued me, because there was a list of sites that—not surprisingly—I had never heard of. So here’s a quick rundown:

•Zwinky is a portal of the IAC division of InterActive Corp. It is fashion-oriented and offers a variety of ways to be creative and expressive.

•Meez, a brand of Donnerwood Media, promotes the creation of avatars, which would offer opportunities for trying on Sears clothing.


•WeeMee is a WeeWorld social network that lets members interact through their WeeMees. What’s a WeeMee? “It's a cartoon that looks just like you. Think of it as your own personal avatar or icon.”

•The N is a brand of Nickelodeon Kids and Family, which is part of Viacom. Nickelodeon has experience in experience in virtual worlds and has a robust strategy for creating and monetizing virtual world that feed off their successful TV series and characters.

•Poptropica is part of Pearson’s Family Education Network. As you can see from the graphic, a “Costumizer tool” is prominently featured on their home page.

There may be more social networks in this teen/tween space, but these are the ones Sears has chosen for the Arrive Lounge campaign. Their media choices seem reasonable. The key to success will be how well they engage their target audience.

Several months ago I wrote a series of posts for eBrandMarketing about the “Mommy Ecosystem.” This strikes me as the same sort of social and marketing phenomenon. These teens and tweens are highly social creatures, so social networking is a big part of their lives. Not surprisingly, a number of networks that are more highly targeted than, say, MySpace has grown up to take advantage of the phenomenon. Marketers who target the segment clearly want to make use of these networks, as they must do to reach their target audience. However, they have to reach these young men and women on their own terms, not the marketer’s terms. That’s not easy. Sears doesn’t seem to have made any major missteps so far. It will be fun to keep an eye on this campaign and see if it does connect with this difficult-to-reach target market.

Visiting NASA in Second Life

One of my summer resolutions was to learn to get around in Second Life so I can see what’s going on. So when I saw that NASA had developed a cybertwin for its Phoenix rover, I gritted my teach and took a shot at it.

Fair warning; when you register you have to complete a four-step tutorial in order to get the bare basics of how to function in Second Life. It’s a bit annoying, especially if you’re too impatient to read the directions and have to keep going back. But once you complete four basic steps you have the key to Second Life and you can move around.

Still ignoring the directions as much as possible I searched for the NASA island and after a couple of failed tries (maybe I should have taken some of the advanced tutorials!) I teleported to the Nasa Explorer Island.




Here I am—or at least here my avatar is. There’s nice music playing; sounds like something from 2001: A Space Odyssey. I walked around the island and saw the main Jet Propulsion Laboratory Building and the Media amphitheatre. I wasn’t there when there was an event going on, but there’s stuff to do. I was going to try to launch Mars airbag, but I never found the mountain. There are also scheduled events—launches and demonstrations.









For those of you who don’t want to spend several hours figuring out how it all works, there’s a video on the site of MyCyberTwin, the developer of the “twin” (avatar?) of the Phoenix rover. It’s fun, but since it works off a knowledge base, it doesn’t seem to have a large repertoire. (View video here.)

It’s interesting and sort of fun. I plan to continue my explorations and report on them. But it also highlights the problem for most marketers. Do they have several hours to learn how to use something like Second Life, just because they want to see something in particular that’s going on?

Probably that’s not high on their priority list. Many of them could ask their teenage (or younger!) children who will be able to give them a tour, maybe not of Second Life, but of a virtual world that’s more age-appropriate. But some are just going to have to invest the time to understand what their target audiences are doing and how they can participate and create engaging events/activities/locations. Maybe a worthwhile summer activity for a lot of us!

Collaboration, Technology and Culture

Over the past few weeks I’ve had conversations with several different groups of people about collaborating over time and distance. We’ve come up with several approaches. One of the simplest for a small group seems to be Google docs.

Not surprising, then, that an article in yesterday’s WSJOnline caught my eye. It focuses on interactive advertising on Meebo; I was taken by the site itself. So apparently are the VCs; it has just gotten third round venture funding.

The basic premise is that Meebo connects all your IM accounts in a single place and gives you a lot of options to connect with “buddies.” They have apps like a widget you can put on web pages, an iPhone app, and they are working on Meebo Rooms, which sound particularly appealing to corporate users. Meebo has gone out of its way to create interactive options for advertisers to connect with this wired (young?) community (see whe WSJ article also).

There are other web spaces that offer collaboration opportunity. Business Week has an article in the May 2 edition, “The (Virtual) Global Office,” that focuses on Second Life. Out of deference to their use policy, I won’t link to it; I’ll just let you find it for yourself. Or maybe someone knows someone at Business Week Online. . . This policy sure seems shortsighted to me! I do, however, agree with Norma’s comment that technology doesn’t make people collaborate better. “Process precedes technology.” Absolutely true. It seems to me that culture precedes process.

A recent post on the AlwaysOn network calls this the social era of management, which they define as follows:
1.characterized by, or inclined to working together in organizations and communities
2.Of or relating to the structure, organization, or functioning of the organization as a social organism.
3.Something worked out to explain, resolve, or provide a method for dealing with and settling a problem of performance and progress.
They go on to describe a model they call Socialutions that involves Priorities, People, Process, Products, Progress and Performance.

And here I thought it was only about people communicating over distance and time! Seems there’s a lot going on in this space that all marketers ought to be thinking about in pursuit of Progress and Performance!
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More Virtual Worlds for Children

The annual virtual worlds conference is taking place in NYC today and tomorrow. Just a list of the speakers is instructive; there are a lot of major brands that are becoming players in the virtual worlds space.


The announcement that caught my eye was from Nickelodeon. They’re planning more virtual worlds to join Nicktropolis, now about a year old. They include the popular SpongeBob SquarePants, which will delight my grandson! More to the point, if you look at the comparative site statistics for the Disney Virtual Kingdom and Nicktropolis (both of which are relatively generic), versus the Barbie World, the wisdom of building a virtual world around a more targeted brand seems evident.

Virtual worlds have taken a lot of hits lately, but they seem to be here to stay, especially for the young crowd that likes to spend time playing games and communicating with a network of friends.

A couple of questions. First, is there a strong first mover advantage here? Even for kids there are a limited number of sites that they are going to patronize at any given time. The real question is, “Will they be loyal?” Kids? I think not. If their friends are suddenly all over a new site with cooler stuff, they’ll leave for the new one.

Second, when is a brand franchise strong enough to warrant this type of investment? Barbie seems obvious. SpongeBob may be also. But again, how many, how strong? And how do you keep the virtual worlds vibrant?

These are truly brave new worlds--watch for further bulletins from this space!
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Bob Iger's Igloo and Other Kid's Resources

Disney CEO Bob Iger was recently interviewed about the corporation’s digital strategy. The clip runs about 6 minutes and covers a range of topics, but the emphasis is on what they are doing in the children’s marketspace. He points out that the Internet is not just a Gen X/Gen Y phenomenon; young children also find the web fascinating.View the video here.

Disney has been active in the preteen Internet space in ways other than just promoting their theme parks and movies. Iger believes that children are turning to the web first instead of to television, and Disney must be there. They are. Just last year they acquired Club Penguin and launched Fairies, both virtual worlds aimed at preteens. According to the Gamine Expedition blog, the Fairies virtual world had 5 million fairy avatars last month. The blog post also has a list of the “clickables” toys that are a feature of the site. The Fairies world for little girls will soon be followed by a Radiator Springs world for little boys. In case you’ve been living on another planet, Radiator Springs is the mythical home of Pixar’s Cars characters, around which a whole industry has grown up.

Disney is not alone in recognizing the importance of interactive and social sites for children. AOL recently relaunched its KOL site in partnership with National Geographic, which has a wonderful children’s site. Note an important difference. The older sites are interactive and engaging. Disney is moving into virtual worlds where children can establish their own space, create avatars, and generally move in and take up virtual residence.

In fact, Bob Iger has his own igloo on Club Penguin. No, he won’t divulge the address, but he says it has amenities like a plasma TV and a basketball hoop. Assuming that he does hang out there occasionally, it’s a good way to add to understanding of an increasingly important market opportunity.Sphere: Related Content

Coke, Virtual Thirst, and Second Life

According to Coke, even avatars get thirsty!

Whether you believe that or not, Coke has just concluded its first contest in virtual world second life. Called “Virtual Thirst” it invited people to create virtual vending machines for Second Life. The machines were to vend experience—the essence of Coke—not cans of Coke product.

The contest had a couple of interesting aspects; participants could submit entries in a variety of different formats and Second Life avatars would be the judges.

According to the contest rules,

You may submit your idea in any of the following ways: - gift an object to us in Second Life - teleport your avatar to http://www.virtualthirst.com/launch (link no longer active; see graphic below) and use the drop-box to gift us your object
- share a video in YouTube - visit http://www.youtube.com/virtualthirst and use the "Connect with VirtualThirst" function to send us a message and attach your uploaded video
- share an image/description with us in MySpace - visit http://www.myspace.com/virtualthirst and use "Send Message" to post your idea as a message to us
- US residents only can also e-mail us your idea - send an email to Entries@virtualthirst.com with the subject line, "Virtual Thirst Entry" and attach your idea to the email. Please do not use the body of the email to describe or to link to a description of your idea. [emphasis mine]

The contest took place across several media channels, opening it to more participants and giving Coke insight into channel usage. It probably also increased the difficulty of picking the winning entry. Judges were avatars, members of Joseph Jaffe’s Crayon marketing services company. A blog entry by Greg Verdino, a member of the firm, shows how comments were used to implement “listening” as part of the program. He also makes available a screen capture of the submission process on Second Life, complete with avatars.

The winning entry was a video and the announcement gives a good idea of how the contest played out. Coke doesn’t appear to be talking about their perspective on the contest—at least not yet.

There’s been a lot of criticism of Second Life in the marketing and tech trade press lately. Second Life itself offers metrics for its use, which of course makes their credibility suspect. Second Life may or not have the sustainable model; time will tell. There are many virtual worlds now; Tech Crunch (see complete table here) did an overview recently.
The time may come when most Internet users will have a presence in a virtual world for social or business purposes. It’s another thing marketers must learn about, must experiment with. It looks to me as if Coke’s first try turned out pretty well. I’m sure they learned lessons that will stand them in good stead as they consider other interactive ventures.
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