Adver-Whatever

So, what IS the future of virtual worlds?

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For all the talk about virtual worlds being the wave of the future, they don't really seem to have the kind of audience that would even begin to suggest that. Most people who register for Second Life once never actually return, and there is only a group of a few thousand that log in on a regular basis. Besides, that group is largely annoyed by the presence of marketers, and wants to be left alone to do... well... the kind of creepy things that people in Second Life do.

Far more popular is World of Warcraft, which is just a virtual world as a game - but because it's a game, it can't be used for any of the same purposes that marketers have been trying to use Second Life for. Then, of course, there is the ever-popular Webkinz, but it's hard to call that a "virtual world" as much as just a kid's game with a built-in chat room. We have seen the potential of virtual worlds, but despite numerous attempts, no one really seems to be able to make one that will appeal to a mass audience as anything other than a game.

After long debates with my boyfriend over whether or not virtual worlds will ever really "work", I attempted to come up with a model that combined them with the popularity of social networking sites such as Facebook. My Second Life meets Facebook mash-up looks like this:

• Everyone starts with an island of their own, which basically serves as their profile page, which they can customize as they choose, and where they can store their personal information. You can also connect your island with friend's islands, to create communities.
• Different parts of your island can be designated "professional", "family", "friends" etc., and only certain people can see these parts of your island, getting rid of the need to keep up several different social networks for different purposes.
• There is no real money exchanged for virtual goods. However, you can obtain virtual money with which to do things like customize your island or your avatar. You'd be able to do this by:
  • Playing games similar to Facebook applications (i.e. getting scrabulous points or turning someone into a vampire earns you money).
  • Advertising revenue. This is how I'd incorporate ads into the world. Besides having their own islands, advertisers could pay individuals virtual money (based on island visitation) to allow them to place games, merchandise, or company representatives on their islands.

It's obviously a work-in-progress, and there are a few problems I keep running into. First of all, I have no idea how to make it easy to check on your friend's status updates easily without turning the whole thing into a social network with a virtual world sadly tacked on to the end. Second of all, while I know that there are lots of people out there who spend hours every day just goofing around on Facebook, I don't know that this kind of thing would appeal to all Facebook users - especially without the aforementioned lack of an easy way to check people's updates. Any and all suggestions on how to make that work would be welcome.

My idea was that virtual worlds would work well as social networking devices, because this is what people seem to be trying to use them as anyway, but I don't know that this is necessarily the best way to go with them. I've also heard it suggested that these kinds of things will never catch on without the invention of a kind of virtual reality that would make it more like actually meeting with people in person. Assuming that Second Life is not the end-all virtual world experience (and I really don't think it is), what direction do you think the next generation of virtual worlds should take?

I am one of the 65%...

...of people in America who spend more time with their computer than with their significant other, according to a study by Kelton Research and Support.com. This struck me as a kind of sad, but completely unsurprising statistic. Rather a lot of us live our entire lives online, and increasingly on various social networking sites. In fact, I can't even keep up with the number of social networking sites out there, and I've joined four or five of them in the last 5 months. A few days ago, Gina Kim of The Sacramento Bee brought up the point that many people are involved in more social networking sites than they can reasonably be expected to maintain. Sure - I check Facebook and Twitter every day, but I've found that I just don't have time to do much with Myspace, LinkedIn, Flickr, Technorati, etc - especially not for the national average of more than 21 minutes per site per day.

I've heard solutions proposed that would enable you to update everything at once, but that only solves half the problem. People don't join these networks on an entirely ego-centric trip (or, maybe they do...), they join to keep up with what is going on with everyone in their lives, and to generally keep themselves entertained. Being able to update everything at the same time doesn't really help you if you still have to go around and check every last one of these networks every day. (I can picture my dad shaking his head right now, and I'm well aware that the obvious solution is to not join so many freaking networks, but we're going to completely bypass that solution in order to maintain our odd obsession with keeping up to date with everyone and everything at all times.)

Recently, David Jacobs gave some interesting insight to the future of these networks on his podcast, The Social Media Morning Show. In his post on 1/22, he talks about the importance of what he terms the "glance-ability"  of a site. Because we are generally checking these social media sites during or instead of doing other, decidedly more important, things, the sites that make themselves more convenient for us to check are going to be the ones that succeed. The example he uses is Twitter. Using a simple program called Snitter, he can have all his Twitter updates show up at the side of his desktop, making them easily "glance-able". This enables him to stay connected and up-to-date, without needing to take 3 hours out his day to do it. When I thought about it, I realized that this is exactly why I check Twitter and Facebook so much more often than anything else. Everything that I need to know is right on the front page, and I can  update and get all the "relevant" information that I'm looking for in about 5 minutes. Sure, there are those out there who really do want to spend 3 hours a day checking social networks, but I think that for a lot of people who frustrated with the number of networks they have to maintain, the sites that make themselves the most convenient will do the best. 

Workaholics Not-so-Anonymous

I’m finally back in Ithaca for what looks to be a particularly grueling semester after a month-long winter break. A few days ago, Greg Verdino brought up a subject that I should probably take to heart in the coming months. It’s easy for a lot of people, myself definitely included, to fall into habits resembling those of a workaholic. I may actually be worse about this than many.

I get more excited about school or work-related things than almost anything else, and it’s what I talk about more than anything else. I take my work with me everywhere – I’m only 20, and I haven’t had a real “vacation” in years. I am generally the person in any group project who will try to do the whole thing themselves for fear that otherwise, it won’t get done. I get impatient with people who have priorities other than school / work, and irritated when someone asks me to do something other than my work. I worry constantly about the future, even when things are going well. I’ve been known to work late into Friday nights, long after my roommates have gotten incoherently plastered, and my work habits have long been a source of complaints from my boyfriend.

In other words, I’m a mess (or possibly, just a normal, stressed out college senior). I’ve seen a lot of theories about why raging workaholics do what they do, ranging from fear of getting in trouble, to some kind of self-actualization. I can’t offer any good explanation for why I work so much – there’s probably no good reason for me to be taking on so many things at once. My only guess is that I’m hoping that doing all of this work now will somehow make my life better somewhere down the line. Wonder how long I’ll have to keep telling myself that before I realize that my life isn’t actually getting any better?

Next semester is going to be tough. Between five difficult and time consuming classes, I’ll be working a paid job and an unpaid internship, as well as continuing my commitments to the American Advertising Federation, the Public Relations Student Society of America, and my school’s newspaper, The Ithacan. My boyfriend is fairly convinced that he is never going to see me again.

While it is really too late for New Year’s resolutions, there are probably some things that I should resolve to do in order to preserve my sanity and actually enjoy a few minutes of my senior year. Some good ideas were offered in Anne Zelenka’s post: 5 Boundry-Setting Tips for the Work Obsessed. I should probably schedule some non-work related activities every once in a while. I should also probably establish some personal, non-work related goals (i.e.: move out of my parents’ house by the end of the year… that’s an idea). I should also probably take a step back every so often and take a serious look at my schedule. If I’m doing too much, I need to drop something. In fact, I could probably stand to repeat that sentence to myself every night before I go to bed.

So I suppose what all this is coming down to is a call for help. As of this moment, I’m fine, but if anyone notices me consistently blogging or twitter-ing or Facebook-ing that I’m not sleeping anymore, please, please, call an intervention. I’ll be working to catch it myself, but please don’t let me kill myself this semester. :-)

Well, I'm excited

While the Age of Conversation bum rush event is still on hold, there is some new and exciting news to report. Drew and Gavin are at it again, organizing another collaborative publishing project. Last time, over 100 bloggers got together to work on what turned out to be a wildly successful Web 2.0-type experiment, which raised over $10,000 for Variety: The Children's Charity.

Now, in an attempt to top last year's fun, they are leaving the topic of the book up to anyone who wants to get involved in any way. Well, mostly - they've narrowed it down to a few topics to be voted on. But all together, it makes for a much more collaborative experience than the last book.

I'm fairly new to the blogging world, and I realize I've got a lot to learn, but I plan to contribute a chapter, and I'm looking forward to getting involved. To anyone else who wants to join in, email Drew, and be sure to get the word out!

Bloggers Beware

Well, I wasn't previously aware of the many dangers of blogging, but after XKCD's latest web comic, it looks like the blogging death toll has gone up exponentially. Be careful that none of you are killed in a tragic blogging accident!

My little case study

Lacking anything better to rant about today, I’ve decided to come back to something I’ve been meaning to talk about for a while now - a case study that I found fairly interesting. During my school breaks for the last year and a half, I have been working as a sales associate for Aerosoles Shoes in both of the two stores located in Orange County, CA. I keep coming back because it really is a great job – laid back, not terribly difficult, and hey – shoes. However, last summer, one thing began to bother me more and more: their entire marketing strategy. It seemed simply unforgivable – especially on the West Coast.

There was absolutely NO advertising, in fact, no one I knew had ever heard of the brand before. Even the people who walked into the store often asked if we were new to the area (we very much weren’t).

In addition, even though the company had a long history of appealing to older women as a place to get extremely comfortable shoes, they had recently switched designers to appeal to a younger, more fashion-oriented audience. This not only made their whole marketing strategy very schizophrenic, but it also placed the already faltering stores into a completely saturated market. Do you have any idea how many fashion shoe brands are out there? Umm – a lot. They had created a double-sided problem for themselves. First of all, they were alienating their traditional customers as more and more older women walked out disappointed in the new styles, and second of all, they were failing to attract new customers, as the young audience continued not to know that the brand existed.

There were also several little problems with the stores themselves and the company website. The stores were all heavily decorated in posters of models wearing the shoes, which is pretty normal. However, someone in corporate decided it would be a good idea to cut off the model’s heads in the pictures, and then use background colors that were so dark that the shoes couldn’t be seen – making me wonder why they bothered to pay all the money to hire a model and print out all of these useless posters. The website didn’t include all of the styles available in the stores, which was infuriating for me when I was in Ithaca and didn’t live near a store. In addition, the descriptions of the shoes on the site didn’t do nearly as good a job of describing the benefits and details of the shoes as the sales associates were instructed to do on a daily basis, which seemed like an incredibly inconsistent message.   

So after a long summer of thinking that everyone in corporate must be something akin to a headless chicken, I sent a long email to customer service explaining my issues, even though I assumed that with all of the company’s other problems, they probably didn’t listen to complaints of any kind.

I was wrong.

The very next day, I got a long email from Jules Schneider, the president and founder of Aerosoles, asking me questions about some of my comments, and explaining some of the things the company was working on which addressed problems I had mentioned. I didn’t agree with all of the tactics they were using, but I really did appreciate the response, and it kept me from giving up on the company entirely. Specifically, he talked about their VIP program, which I had known about as an associate, which distributed coupons, and let people know about sales. He mentioned that promotion was “a battle of cost and benefit” and that it was all about keeping current customers happy, because “the greatest marketing is satisfied customers.” That’s all well and good, but I don’t think it really works when you are trying to completely change your target audience (no matter how highly old women think of the company, the younger audience will never hear about it, because they aren’t in the same social circles). But that’s a rant for another time.

The thing that struck me the most about his email was the fact that he and others at corporate had been listening to the complaints of customers and other associates such as myself, and they recognized that they had lost some vital product qualities, and steered away from who they had always claimed to be as a company. Keeping this in mind, Jules stated that they were “on a very comprehensive program” to get back to their roots.

Having gone back to the stores to earn some extra cash over my winter break, I have seen that he really meant it. The products have really gone back to their comfort-based roots, and while they are still stylized more than they were in the past, they are, once again, appealing to the traditional older audience.

Many of my other problems still stand: they are still cutting the heads off models in the posters, the website still doesn’t have all the styles, and there is still no advertising on the West Coast, but Aerosoles’ claim to be a customer-oriented company has been proven true: the one thing that the company does extremely well is listen to complaints, and completely change directions when needed.

Advergaming on a Whole New Level

Yesterday, my dad handed me his latest issue of Wired magazine and told me to take a look at an article about "the future of advertising". The article, written by Frank Rose, talked about ARG's, or Alternate Reality Games, and focused on the rather elaborate effort made by Trent Reznor of the band Nine Inch Nails for their latest album, Year Zero, released in April of 2007. The game was fairly well publicized, but to give you an idea of the scope of the effort, it began in February as clues to a website found hidden in T-shirts sold at one of the band's concerts. It continued on as hints hidden in flash drives hidden at concerts and in songs as they were released. And it ended as a secret underground concert in which fans were contacted via cell phones they were given, driven to the concert in a bus with blacked out windows, and then rushed out by "SWAT" teams with flashing lights and flash bombs. All of this was Reznor's idea of "the world's most elaborate album cover" for a concept album about a scary, dystopian future, and it got millions of people involved and excited about what was coming next.

This is by no means the only time that this kind of thing has been done. Rose claims that it all started with Steven Spielberg's AI: Artificial Intelligence, and has been done for everything from Halo 2 to Audi to the television show LOST. I've seen some of my friends get very excited for similar games about JJ Abrams' upcoming film Cloverfield, and the Batman film to be released this summer, Dark Knight. 

Reznor really emphasized that what he was doing with Year Zero was not marketing, and ARG's don't necessarily have to be driven by a marketing perspective. Rose mentioned at least one game, called Perplex City, that attempted to get people to solve very similar types of puzzles to tell a story. However, it ended up being too expensive and difficult to keep the game going, and as far as I know, no non-marketing models of ARG's have really succeeded. But so what? We've discovered a way to get people to really engage with a brand and to seek out more information instead of having to bash them over the heads with it. Hooray! Right? It certainly won't work for audiences of all ages and interests, and it certainly won't work for all brands (or will it?), but there is a group of young, tech-savvy people out there who advertisers have been tearing their hair out trying to reach, and Reznor's project and others like it have reached them in spades. Maybe this really is the future of online advertising: not banners or silly advergames, but hugely elaborate puzzles that get large groups of people feverishly involved.