The Alphaville Herald

LL Luvs LEWIS Spinmeisters

by Pixeleen Mistral on 20/10/06 at 6:07 pm

Morgan “LEWIS” McLintic to cover RL with spinning ad-cubes?

by Pixeleen Mistral, National Affairs desk

Morgan McLintic is loved

Feeling the need for perhaps just a wee bit more soft and fluffy press coverage, Linden Lab recently sent some love to Morgan McLintic of the LEWIS public relations firm – Mr. McLintic is leading a new LEWIS/Linden Lab PR operation. In his blog, Morgan says SL is a fine thing that “touches a range of disciplines from entertainment, to education, to marketing, to non-profits, to the media itself in a very immediate and intimate way”.

Fair warning then. Touching “the media itself in an very immediate and intimate way” suggests the press should avoid wearing X-cite genital attachments on our avatars at media events. Or did I misunderstand? Better safe than sorry – I’ll send word to Reuters, the SL Bling-Zeitung, and other metaverse media outlets.

Look for a PR campaign to launch at year-end to “promote broad adoption and roll-out into Europe and Asia” – evidently going hand in glove with language-localized versions of the Second Life software. Let us hope that the SL infrastructure can cope with even more PR-driven mass avatar migrations – there may be some question about that for those who have been in the welcome area lately. In any case, a front page spread in PRWEEK at the end of the month will help everyone understand how putting 2 dozen avatars in a sim with a light saber wielding pianist impacts public relations.

While educating the PR world to Second Life’s potential is a worthy pursuit, there may be some more immediate spinning needed with bloggers like Matt Mihaly calling bullshit on SL and Clickable Culture’s Tony Walsh asking pointed questions. A possible reality-based backlash against the uncritical press-fueled faith-based SL hype is something that Mr. McLintic’s team may need to address at some point soon.

Work on this may already be underway – unconfirmed sources report sighting a 5 person LEWIS quick-response team outside their San Francisco offices – apparently assembling real life 10 meter plywood cubes while special “message textures” were being photoshopped inside the offices. Speculation is that the spinning RL ad-cubes are a workaround for the SL asset server and lag issues that have plagued SL for months.