The Alphaville Herald

Practical Marketing 101 From Panty Hog

by prokofy on 03/02/07 at 8:28 pm

By Prokofy Neva, Dept. of Virtual Estate, Simulated Entrepreneurs, Seamy Underbellies, and Commodification of All That You Once Held Dear, NOW WITH CAPTIONS FOR THE ATTENTION-DEFICITED!

Prim Prim-Primer and Prime Prim-a Dona Tateru Nino is telling us over at the Blingsider that Practical RL marketing just can’t exist in Second Life.

There’s only image enhancement, she says, in corporate marketing campaigns. “Face it, you can’t really practically market a physical world product or physical world service in Second Life. Attempts to do so haven’t really worked out all that well and end up damaging the image of the marketer or the brand,” says Nino confidently.

I guess she hasn’t ever been to Panty Hog.

I discovered this newcomer to Second Life the other day, on an errand of mercy, trying to see why a Japanese Zen garden in Bongwhang, which had been donated to our SL Public Land Preserve, wasn’t getting much traffic. When I had last left the sim, after selling my own land there, which had suffered from blighty and intrusive neighbours, the sim was on the way down — but I hadn’t seen how low.

Still, if you just hold your nose a bit at the nature of this subject matter, and keep in mind that we are a very long way from Mark Wallace’s high-minded obsession with lacy underthings, you’ll be impressed with how female entrepreneurs can monetarize their time online in Second Life in ways that Tateru and her fanboyz just aren’t admitting…(NSFW)

Cindy, one of the famous princesses of Panty Hog in RL.

EMPOWERING FEMALE ENTREPRENEURS

See, the Lindens, in their California hippie utopian bliss, fantasize about modest third-world women in long, native costumes, supervised by protective patriarchal men, finding an outlet for their weaving and other colourful pots and such. The picture them hooking up to Second Life, the way some of them have hooked up credit cards to the Internet even in villages that barely have running water, let alone flush toilets. But…we’re probably still aways from that idyllic scene, what with the problem of broadband, graphics cards, and grasping and greedy local bureaucracies who try to control the Internet and the telephone systems. So, what the Lindens are getting instead of their third-world bliss is a bit of mediocre Middle America, but hey, it pays the bills.

QUALITY-CONTROL AND THE TRUST CIRCLE

But if you are willing to give up your hippie dreams, and look at what people really use SL for, you can’t overlook the successes of a thing like Panty Hog. Here’s a business, that like ebay, brings together a willing buyer and a willing seller at exactly the right price and place — the anonymous Internet and the even more anonymous Second Life. Panty Hog on the Internet appears to be a successful portal for used underthings that enable many women to make money literally just by sitting at their computers and doing nothing more stressful that soiling their panties. Great for them, and great for their apparent ready supply of admirers. SL is a match made in heaven.

The enormous wealth of diversity, interplay, and entrepreneurial spirit that human beings bring to such an enterprise is impressive, once you overlook the seamy subject matter. Like ebay, they’ve developed a kind of “Good-Housekeeping Seal of Approval” and a ratings system to reward the honest and productive, and discourage the scammer and the illegitimate. They seem to police their own, and create incentives to have the good drive out the bad.

There’s even something called “Panty Trust” which styles itself as “the official verification and dispute resolution service for the used panty community”. I mean, these are serious, dedicated entrepreneurs we’re talking about, who are WAY head of the big toads in the small pond called Second Life. They have auctions, parties, RL/Sl mashups, and it’s only natural they found Second Life!

RENT A RL OUTLET

At Panty Hog in the suggestively-named Bongwhang, there are stalls that the girls can rent and you can pick the RL pictures and see the RL connections. Some of them are sad, of course, in the BDSM vein. But this is adult activity in an M sim and nobody will likely bother them — they seem to have an efficient system for keeping security high and lag low.

Panty Hog fits right in with the entire Second Life sex-trade ethos, of course, and Tatero and friends couldn’t be more wrong when they think there’s no RL/SL trade possible in SL. Do they get out much? With an interface that allows adults to find each other an mutually masturbate successfully, without danger, and at a ridiculously low cost? Hello?? There’s the porn pictures, the porn movies, the links to external Internet porn, and RL meet-ups of all kinds, some of the decidedly scary — huge money-making opportunities in SL.

Ok, so we get it about THAT subject. What else is there?

FOR THE MORE HIGH-MINDED

Books, I was thinking, given that amazon.com is so popular. I know that Amazon is poking around in SL, and they were working on some sort of thingie, but have you heard about them lately? I began poking around to see what ever became of the Jnana guy. Traffic: 15. Not tumbleweeds, but freebie prims.

Well, unless the guy decided to borrow a page from the PH people, I don’t think his intention was to have the cubes providing “free pubic hair and nipples” so prominently displayed at his lot. I understand a RL loss may have forced him from SL, and we’ll have to see in the coming months, but I wonder about the whole concept, having gone to their roll-out months ago and been skeptical back then. Jnana stores was going to be about using this software for enabling people to run through menus to compose the elements of their dream thing…but will people sit still for it?

“BLUE SCREEN OF DEATH”

The problem is what I call Second Life’s “blue screen of death”. Tekkies don’t seem to get it, but those baby-blue, drop-down, clunky, slow, stupid command screens that drop down in your face, reminding you of Lee Linden telling you on Wednesday mornings to “get out of the pools for the update,” are just plain ANNOYING. Yeah, I get it. They either are meant to link you to an Internet site since we don’t have web-on-a-prim yet, or are meant to dance you through menus on scripted objects. But they’re just show-stoppers. Some people never get through them. Others never want to bother. I find even playing a trivia game or exploring something that looks fun and innovating like the Jnana stores is just annoying after awhile with those stupid blue things. The way they drop down like a guillotine, and keep repeating, requiring you to hit “ignore” (they lag, and hitting them twice makes them repeat obviously) — I hate it. So do many others. You have to be a hardcore, die-hard IRC channelly nerdball to think there isn’t something wrong with these things. Can’t somebody CHANGE that interface???

BOOK CLUBS

OK, but look, books are really a going thing for the RL/SL practical marketer, no? They offer chances not only to make books come alive with 3-D representation, and enable anybody to make a bookstore for peanuts and put out their niche line, they make it possible for people to meet, discuss books, put up criticism, share links, build scenes, act out scenes, etc. Given how popular book clubs have become with Oprah and the book-club movement in schools and RL neighbourhoods, SL might prove a natural for this sort of activity. It will require some patience and dedication, as it does in RL.

I found such a lovely little bookshop in Yurim named Coelacanthus. . They made some use of skin, too, but you could also find serious offerings. Still, traffic: 60, despite A for effort. It just isn’t catching on–yet.

CAN IT GET BETTER THAN GIRLS’ GYM?

Philip of course, has this dream of serfing the Internet and finding 30 other people looking with you at the same book and being so thrilled that you will want to descend down from the Internet and chat with them. Well, I personally found that I kinda got “done” with this sort of instant intimacy with strangers back in high school gym class in the locker room, but for others that enjoy such sweaty proximity, virtually anyway, it might work. Unfortunately, while Biz Week was giddy about it some months ago, nobody is really doing this yet. I’m not sure I *want* my book browsing experience to be “shared” with my “long tail” friends-of-the-moment, especially if three of them are there by accident, three are fucktards, and three of them want to crash the page. The chances of plucking out the actual interesting readers becomes a harder-to-grasp thing, best served by events, groups, and chatting — the longer, more patience-requiring features of SL. It might work.

BRAINSTORMING ON PRACTICAL MARKETERS

What else? Well, here’s my list:

Good:

o ebay items — why doesn’t ebay have a thousand links already to SL given the obvious connection of Pierre Omidyar? My bet is that mass taste is something he’s willing to harness to make money, but not something he’s willing to foster as a cultural matter in SL. Fortunately, people who need to buy things will walk around that robot and hawk collectibles able to be visualized easily in SL.

o stuff ebay won’t allow — game loot — we are likely to see WoW and other salons spring up, no? to trade loot that ebay won’t allow.

o education — not just fancy Harvard or NMC stuff, but community college and extension stuff, and user training especially for balky stuff like computers, especially for SL — when someone can figure out how to set up a low-cost and trusty fixer station for SL problems and people’s computers to compete with indifferent or busy Lindens, they will make a FORTUNE.

o charity — more visualizations of things beyond the big American Cancer Society, littler things like St. Nicholas’ Church

o localization — language training, escort interpreting, conferencing, etc.

o time-shares and niche real estate, i.e. condos

o tourism — repros of the RL place and buildings and prototyping

o blogging — 3-D meetings and machinima or video watching adds the enhancement that podcasting does

o political campaigns — but not by meet-and-greet with the principle, more likely networking for supporters to chat, share t-shirt designs, plans for demonstrations or happenings, like Meet-up

o Mail-Order brides — a cleaner version that porn sites, these are prone to rip-offs but in fact make many people very happy on both sides of the ocean, and it’s only a matter of time

o Psychic Friends — I advertised to help a Psychic Friend get set up in SL on Craig’s List and the Village Voice — didn’t find any takers but it’s only a matter of time. Imagine if your Psychic Friend is someone you sit with in an exotic, immersive setting who helps you more anonymously than with a credit card on a RL telephone that no one can see.

Bad:

o illegal drugs, legal drugs like Viagra that become a spammers dream — we’re already seeing this

o more extreme sex — MySpace stories are just waiting to happen

o scams or rip-offs — more and more surveys, earn money at home, blah blah blah

o Nigerian letters — these will pose as charities and may even have especially compelling avatars and builds now

o rigged gambling — we already have this!

In other words, if you need to figure out the RL Practical Marketing — look for what people ALREADY sell on the Internet! No need to get clever about it!

The combination of free accounts, anonymity, lower-cost transactions in game currency, removal of time and travel barriers, exposure to large asynchronous multinational audiences and significant synchronous audiences, an active blogosphere and engaged RL media, the presence of big corporations, and the use of even group tools and the events calendar, as ricketedy as they can be, are great factors for entrepreneurism in SL.

If anybody thinks that the sleaze of Second Life will ruin a marketing image, I think they’ve underestimated the ability of SL sleaze to co-opt and subvert even a staid, corporate image like Pontiac. When a half-century-old automobile company can feature Gideon Television as their mascot for games and fun on their corporate island in SL, you have to realize something more than the technology is disruptive: this is not your father’s automobile company.