Actually, that’s the point. I don’t want to be targeted. I get targeted absolutely everywhere else. As was said earlier, SL is an escape from RL. Leave us one place free of corporate and marketing hype and bullshit.

As for Aloft, I always wondered what they were smoking. Why do you go to a hotel usually? To sleep. Do you sleep in SL? No, you log off and go to your real bed lol. Now, if they’d put pose balls and SexGens in the rooms, we could all have gotten laid And that would have shown they understand SL better and gained our respect. I saw the hoo ha, went to look, and thought mmm, average build… If that’s the ‘quality’ of their RL rooms, I’ll stay elsewhere. So to me, that was negative marketing.

American Apparel? Never heard of them before SL. As one of the 75% of users who live outside the US, I don’t care a jot. Thinking SL is a US sandbox rather than a global entity might be one of the problems for marketers.

Are they running a club? Some sort of game (not casino) where you roam the hotel looking for treasure or trying to escape monsters behind every door while struggling to solve a puzzle? Are their other people there? Is it used to host parties, offering its space for rent as a happening place to take your friends and play?

If you built a real life hotel and had nothing to do, chances are you’d be equally ignored. Don’t be too shocked when people in VR who are interactive and here to play say “So what?” when you bring up your hotel.

On the numbers, I’ve said it before elsewhere, but I think that a large part of the problem is the whole orientation process. You land in a huge orientation island with 50 other or so people and personally I think that the sheer mass causes confusion and encourages anti social behaviour. When I created an alt and arrived in orientation island I was greeted with noobs asking “where is all the sex I heard about!.”

In our office, five of us have Second Life AVs. But three exist in name only, their owners having given up pretty much after the first hour in SL.

However, it’s by no means all bad news. The fact that regular residents are spending 90 mins a day online is incredible, and this is an audience that uses SL as a substitute to watching TV. Hence marketers have to get their act together and think of clever, engaging ways to target them.

I understood almost everything except the part about furries “looking for unattended suspicious packages, bottles of liquid over 3 ounces in size.”

WTF? Is this some furry meme that I haven’t heard about? Is it some kind of underhanded jab at furries? A compliment? Is it secret code for “the american health care system is in crisis?” Or did you just type some random words that made sense in your sleep?

Please enlighten me on this. Should I be looking for bottles of liquid? Should I avoid bottles less than 3 ounces? What do I do with it if I find one? WTF are you talking about? This is really bugging me now!
”

Sounds like either you are a furry and dont see it, or you’re not a group or persons being stalked by furries.

There are groups of furries who like going around and spying or stalking anyone who disagrees with them or talks shit about furries or are their definition of “bad people”

I see them coming in all the time to various sims, hell, I’ve seen them go into shops and plant bugs when they thought no one was looking.

They arent the only ones that do this, granted, but there are those who do, either to brown nose to the lindens, or to be controlling assholes and listening in for people talking shit of any kind.

ding ding ding! we have a winner

There’s many RL companies that do well in SL. There are others who seem to have no sense of what to do.

But hey, I like going to the educational events at the spaceflight museum ^-^

We can thank ESC and various dumb fucks for overpromising us to death.

As a marketing effort, it succeeded initially; like most people, I’d never heard of them before they came to SL, and I went and looked through their shop. But their clothes were unimpressive and uninteresting. I found nothing I would ever wear. They did nothing to hold interest. It’s like putting up a bare gray web page with a low-rez picture of a shirt, and expecting to get a lot of sales out of it.

Companies who want to use SL for marketing need to make in-world products and events which are interesting in comparison to what is already in SL, and then funnel the results of that interest over to their real world product.

Nissan did much better. The SL Sentra is great. It’s one of my favorite vehicles in SL, because it was designed to handle well in SL’s alleged physics. They’ve put real effort into their sim; there aren’t any regular events to draw me back, so there’s room for improvement, but I still tell newbies to go there and get a good car. And when I next buy a new car in RL, they’ve earned at least a fair comparison from me by doing this.

Aloft have a good build, but didn’t do any events, either. So the place was a ghost town. It was impossible to visit and not think of the Overlook Hotel from The Shining, which I’m pretty sure was not the marketing message they wanted to send. Maybe they’ll learn something with their relaunch?

Second Life, to a real-world company, is about marketing your brand. Marketing takes effort, not just one billboard or web page.

(And hey, anyone who wants some real, practical help with these things… IM me and we can discuss rates.)

Honey, it’s automated. We’re not mixing and matching to see fit here. If your post fucked up, it’s on your end. Not the Herald’s.