As I am not certified for a SL press pass, I look to the SL press for news and information on things happening at Linden Lab, I used to look at the main blog but that seems to be in sore need of some care and attention. The forums aren’t so bad, and the mesh forum for those interested in mesh, is interesting viewing, even for those who don’t like mesh, it’s interesting viewing! However for general information I keep an eye on the SL press and SL Press member extraordinaire; Inara Pey, has an interesting post regarding SL8B, or more to the point about the lack of Linden involvement at SL8B. I agree with the main thrust of Inara’s post, to quote in part:
“SL8B represents a marvellous opportunity for LL to reach out to the user community and communicate with us – so where are they?
I’m not talking about glad-handing or getting involved in in-depth discussions about who, what, when, where, how and why; rather I’m talking about getting up on stage and giving an overview of what is coming down the road, thing like:
What is happening with Viewer 2?
What is Mesh going to look like? (Given many haven’t see the results from the Beta Grid)
What is happening around service improvements like Group chat and server-side lag issues?”
The SL8B Blog itself is on its own blog, containing far more information about happenings than Linden Lab’s own official blog, have they outsourced the birthday event or something? I know Linden Lab officially take a hands off approach to SLCC.
However it’s a celebration isn’t it, why should Linden Lab be boring people with forthcoming attractions or new features, or making exciting announcements when people could be getting down and funky dancing to Mankind Tracer, Grace McDunnough, DJ Splash Kidd or Sim Restarts …. oh wait that’s an actual Sim restart! Well they should be talking to us because they can!
Linden Lab seem so reluctant to promote themselves that it’s painful, Hamlet Au over at New World Notes has a post about how well IMVU are doing and IMVU do use Google Adsense heavily, Linden Lab don’t. Now Google Adsense isn’t for everyone but I’ve mentioned before how I feel Linden Lab don’t use their blog or forums well enough in promotion and here we are, with the Second Life Birthday event, where Linden Lab don’t seem to be taking advantage of having the eyes and ears of their customers focussed upon an event.
Many people will of course ignore SL8B, many won’t even be aware it’s happening or even care it’s happening but how about a few simple things, blog links, notecards, landmarks, logos for people to place on their own sims to catch the eyes of passing residents? Promote the event, talk at the event, engage with users, make people excited…. ok maybe that’s going a bit far but hopefully you get my drift.
The advantage Linden Lab have over, say, Blizzard with World of Warcraft, is that Linden Lab can hold interactive events in their world to a higher level of richness than Blizzard can, they can reach their customers so very easily and yet they don’t seem to want to.
They can also do more with SLCC because they can link live people to inworld people so very easily these days with video feeds inworld. They should be talking the pants off of people regarding what they are planning and creating a vibe that people then talk about on blogs, forums and inworld discussion groups, the opportunity to do this with Second Life is great.
Blizzard of course get involved with their own community convention in the shape of Blizzcon:
“BlizzCon® is a celebration of the global player communities surrounding the Warcraft®, StarCraft®, and Diablo® universes. This two-day event features discussion panels with Blizzard Entertainment developers, hands-on play time with the latest versions of Blizzard Entertainment games, professional and casual eSports tournaments for players to showcase their talents, social events for players and developers to meet one another, community contests with great prizes, and much more.”
They even sell virtual tickets for Blizzcon at USD$39.95, Linden Lab don’t even need to do that as we’re already in the Second Life virtual world where they can engage with us, exemplifying why their platform is good for company to customer engagement.
The most important thing though really, is for Linden Lab to stop being so meek about telling us what they’re doing and shout it from the rooftops, even to those of us who aren’t SL Press!
Hear, hear!