The Alphaville Herald

LL Hires Press Flak

by prokofy on 27/10/06 at 6:17 pm

By Prokofy Neva, News Desk

Jebus, while the Herald reporters were off boozing it up in Athabasca right after the game erm platform uh metaversal accessorator was down for 3 days a few weeks ago, Linden Lab went and hired a PR flak! It’s now confirmed from the Herald’s previous report that the flaksters are hard at work.

There I am wrangling prims out in Grace this afternoon and the SL Press Club group dings me and a person named Alexandre Quadrifoglio comes on and says, “Hello everyone, I wanted to quickly introduce myself. I’m Alex Q in-world, and work closely with Catherine in managing Linden Lab’s public relations efforts…As the volume of press inquiry remains high, I’d love to be in touch with you guys…”

Of course your humble correspondent asked 1) if he worked with Lindens why didn’t he have the last name Linden 2) was this gig an open bid deal? I found out that in fact yes, the Lindens have hired Lewis PR, a public relations firm, to assist them with press work. LL will continue to handle press inquiries in-house as well.

Aimee Weber, who is plugged in and has subscriptions to stuff like this, instantly pointed me to the announcement in PR Weekly, which I, being a non-content-creating dweebus, never read. Note to Herald interns: get on it!

I did have a few tips for Mr. Quadrifoglio you can see after the jump.

1. Put a picture in your avatar profile — get rid of that tell-tale grey that reminds people of poorly-performing overcrowded asset servers! A *must* for inworld PR profiles! Otherwise, people think you are some kind of griefing alt.

2. Put picks in your picks. Otherwise people think you are a Linden alt whose real life takes place on your main.

3. Put some witty stuff in the skills box like “knitting and tatting”.

4. Don’t fill in the first life page with actual FL pictures but instead put in some humorous but deeply meaningful saying like Philip Linden has, “”So shines a good deed in a weary world” -WW”.

SL Press Club is a closed group but it isn’t all that FIC-y — you are an organ of the press in SL, IM Catherine Linden to be invited.

Was the bid open? Here’s what the news archive says at the site: “LEWIS won the campaign following a two-way pitch process. The program will be led by vice president, Morgan McLintic, who will coordinate global strategy and lead a team of five in the US. He will report to Linden Lab’s director of marketing, Catherine Smith.”

I asked Mr. Q if he not only took press inquiries but also placed stories, and he said “We do it all.” I explained that for its part, the Herald not only covers the news, it makes the news, and we like our SL news *crunchy*!

Welcome to Second Life, Alexandre!

Photo: Sign at combat sim Carnage.