It’s The People, Stupid!
Ok, everything else goes on hold until I rant about this. Here, have a clip from New Scientist Technology Blog:
[...]Time Magazine placed secondlife.com on its list of “5 Worst Websites“.
Despite spending a lot of money establishing a presence in SL, Wired ran this piece saying that real world companies that opened up there are realising it was a mistake. Wired’s editor explains how he fell out of love with SL here. The LA Times ran a similar piece. Clothes retailer American Apparel has closed the virtual store it opened to wide fanfare in last summer.
The main problem reported is that expensive virtual headquarters are almost universally deserted, and are bad PR for the companies involved.
I recently attended a conference where it was suggested that integrating artificially intelligent characters into SL could help.[...]
What are you thinking? What the bloody hell?
First off, Time proved they were a bunch of idiots with that article, Wired was way off, the LA Times was just intellectually masturbating, and the American Apparel store offered boring clothes in a boring store and was rightfully being ignored.
The problem isn’t that the builds are deserted. That’s just the result of the problem. The actual problem is that they give nobody the impression they should stay.
How do people get the impression that they should stay?
PEOPLE.
Think about it. If people didn’t matter, most real stores would be gigantic vending machines. They’re not. They are staffed by real people.
So what’s your solution? AI? Are you drunk? PEOPLE, my boy, not DOLLS.
When I went to the NBA build it was staffed, and it was awesome. People left me alone and judged by my body language I was looking for something. They also could tell that I really wanted to be left to myself, but offered the little tip I needed to get to where I needed to go. When playing the game there, they were available to play with me. They were cool, and they knew basketball. They could TALK basketball.
Now there’s no staff, so there’s no traffic. After all, if you’re abandoning your sim, and you built it, it must suck.
Events are run by people, not by AI. Imagine an automated game show. Stupid beyond all reason. Nobody gives a crap if a machine is going to belch out a bunch of pre-fab toys for everybody to play with. They DO care if somebody is going to host a game, or give a conference, or perform. They’ll come for that.
These builds run upwards of half a million USD. If you don’t want to flush that money down the toilet, the solution is very low-tech: PEOPLE. Pay a bunch of kids minimum wage if you want, just like you do at the mall. At least they can talk about the product, and if you find good ones they can run events too. Compared to the overall budget for these things, the cost would be a drop in the bucket.
August 3rd, 2007 at 9:47 pm
Companies showed up as bigger idiots than we knew they are. It was a surprise really. It was hilarious to read that we usually try to score some virtual sex than to grow warm feelings about their brands. And you hear that from the same guys that make their living from the “sex sells”! My rant on that….
August 4th, 2007 at 11:17 am
Totally. It’s like the Time/Wired/LA Times are criticizing people for not clustering around a bunch of billboards.
Why should we? What’s the point?
August 4th, 2007 at 12:11 pm
There seems to be an amazing sense of entitlement amongst some advertising folk - I suspect that they are too used to being able to automatically throw their products into our sensoria with billboards and commercial breaks and banner ads, and thus any medium which doesn’t allow that is clearly a broken one.
August 4th, 2007 at 12:19 pm
Part of it is that the adverturkeys are just now discovering (or being forced to admit) that the emperor has no clothes. With billboards and TV commercials, they can pretend that X number of people driving by or being on the couch = X number of people paying attention to the message. With Tivo it became crystal clear that people would skip the bloody ads if they could. With SL we’re proving once again that no, we will not seek out the ads if we don’t have to. I suspect it’s not actually a matter of people paying less attention to marketing messages, but of it becoming ever more difficult for the marketeers to pretend to their clients that we ever did.
August 4th, 2007 at 12:22 pm
Very well said, Mike. That echoes my own notions exceedingly well.
August 4th, 2007 at 12:28 pm
I know this is millionth time, but I really don’t get it….
do they really think we are paying attention on TV commercials? I mean, every school of marketing will teach that advertisements should be agressive and to send as much subliminal messages as possible because nobody pays attention to them.
August 4th, 2007 at 1:46 pm
Simply stated, straightforward, and head dead right on the nail.
I would have been wondering myself about the line of thought: If our advertising doesn’t work, it’s something wrong with the consumers.
Though having worked at an ad agency (though I was hired to take care of their web communication), I can’t say I am all that surprised, to be honest.
I have friends communicating to companies about SL in Europe. I will certainly send them here.
August 9th, 2007 at 1:07 am
Inteligente análisis, muy inteligente.
“the solution is very low-tech: PEOPLE” es algo tan sencillo, y tan incomprendido por las grandes compañías.