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Is it 5.2 million or 500,000? How many inhabitants really "live" in Second Life? For that matter, what constitutes “living?” And who really cares? My guess is that the inhabitants don’t care too much. But the marketers do.
Of course it is the marketers who care, making them the first official census takers of Second Life. After all, how to approach this emerging marketplace if we don’t know who is there? Intuitively, we start to ask how many total visitors? Uniques? Average time on site? How many conversions? Then again, is this even the best means of ensuring a proper census?
I’m sad to say that interactive marketers are committing the same crime that their traditional counterparts did at the advent of the Internet. Applying a set of metrics designed for the 2D Web is perhaps not the best means of measuring success in an alternate world.
Before you draw your swords, remember that Second Life was first a place. It became a medium later…or rather a place that became media, through this medium known as the Internet.
So how to measure branded experiences in Second Life? Is it fair to simply say that it should not be compared to anything else you have ever seen? That raw numbers don’t even begin to measure the lifetime value of a good experience? You tell me.
Then again, for those who are feeling a bit more drastic, there is always the Neopet solution: No food? It dies.
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Comments
Channeling (and paraphrasing) Terry Eagleton for some reason today, but I really do believe popularizing anything involves making complex concepts simple, which is an inherently antagonistic proposition because if you can make something complex simple, then was it really so to begin with? And if anything simple masks complexity, then why call it simple in the first place?
All that out of the way, the "easiest" measure would be the "worst" and likely the one they're going to devote the most time, energy, money, and resources to: counting every head, icon, and representation as if it were a real person, and extrapolating data, proving once and for all how out of touch and possibly irrelevant they've become in new media space.
The "best" measure is arguably the most difficult one for agencies to grasp, as it's based on the two most simple, most basic, and most intuitive concepts of all: collective emotion and experience in its own context, through observation, study, and nomenclature when the time is right, and devoting time, energy, and resources to stoking a climate to ensuring that such can happen if this space should meet their place needs. At least they'd be participating, contributing, and making something come about that's useful.
Posted by: Ryan Turner | 04.05.07