Jezebel Bailey has taken up the Relay For Life baton from me, whereas I covered Fantasy Faire 2011, our Jezebel is covering the Relay For Life Home & Garden expo and to that end has already put the spotlight on two of the sponsors, Stonewood Homes & Interiors and Shameless Bits. I thought I’d inform you of this as an example of communication, because communication remains an issue with Linden Lab, most notably the blog, but also information that doesn’t get blogged.
Blog updates have been discussed by Tateru Nino, in a blog post that saw the strange appearance of the ghost of John Howard Galt, who has a strange view on communications to say the least.
I don’t think we’ll be hearing much from “Howard” for a while. Now unlike Howard, who feels there are less than 2,500 following blogs, groups on Twitter etc. I note that the official Second Life Twitter account, @SecondLife, currently has 23,037 followers, now some of these accounts may be inactive or not paying attention, but it’s a decent amount of reach, but what should Linden Lab be reaching them with?
Well how about some blog posts hey? I discovered that improvements to privacy settings on our profiles have been made not from Linden Lab, no, I found out from Ann OToole in a post over at SLUniverse. I mean, really, isn’t this something Linden Lab should be happy to announce?
However even when they do blog, the design of the blog is such that it may not grab one’s attention. Take the example of the ten photogenic locations blog post, did that grab my attention whilst logging in and out of the main site? No I found out about this blog post because SLUniverse has a blog bot who reposts links to blogs, as he (or is blog bot a she?) posted here. Now this is all fine and dandy but as Linden Lab blog so infrequently these days, is it really that difficult to put new blog posts square and centre in front of our eyes?
When Amanda told us Facebook was the best place to find out about great things happening in Second Life, I was a tad annoyed. One reason for that annoyance was Facebook, and I still find it annoying when I see the message of the day telling us to go there, but mostly I was annoyed because it simply isn’t true. Twitter and Plurk arguably have better Second Life based communities than Facebook, but the place to find out about the great things happening in Second Life should be the Second Life website or inworld, this is where we should be gathering the very best information.
Obviously not all of the information can be contained there and that’s where Blogs, Twitter, Plurk and Facebook can be of additional benefit, but they should be feeding from information provided by Linden Lab, of course there’s the press corps who are supposed to be given information, I’m not sure how well that works as I’m still awaiting a reply from Pete Linden and I’m sure I’ll be waiting a long time for a reply, but that’s not the point, the point really is that Linden Lab need to talk to us, like lovers do, walk with us, like lovers do.
Linden Lab need to talk, that’s the point of social media and a great place to talk is on their website. What Linden Lab do, we talk about, sometimes that means a warts and all exposure and I’ve never been shy to be critical, I’m not going to be shy about spreading the good, the bad or the ugly. However when Lindens speak, the chatter gets going and there is no such thing as bad publicity, even the discussions of the sometimes adult nature of Second Life have generated publicity that will catch someone’s attention.
This concept isn’t that difficult to grasp, if Linden Lab talk and that leads to talk talk talk talk all you do to me is talk talk. Simples!