Linden Lab have been doing a lot right lately in terms of community engagement and they deserve much credit for that. However it is inevitable that at some point they’re going to miss the mark at some point and so it turns out with Second Life’s 11th Birthday: Celebrating Your Second Life L$10,000 Contest.
A 10,000 Linden Dollar prize is not bad for a snapshot contest, but there’s a hitch and the hitch comes with the method of entry :
Participation is easy – submit your celebratory snapshots from inworld to the contest page on our Official Second Life Facebook Page. Click the contest tab, review the contest information and rules and start sharing. This year you will be able to submit up to one snapshot a day for the duration of the contest. Full rules, submission and voting dates, and details are all on the Facebook page.
Facebook, really? I’ve made no secret in the past that I’m not a big fan of Facebook. This is largely due to their absurd policies regarding pseudonyms and that really gets emphasised here because people who know others by their Second Life username may not know them by their real name, and why should they? They are different circles.
Facebook has a history of deleting accounts that use their Second Life user name, as Hamlet Au over at New World Notes reported back in May 2011. This is Facebook’s call as using your Second Life account name as a Facebook account (rather than Facebook page) is a breach of the Facebook TOS. No real argument from me about that, Facebook’s rules. Personally I think it’s a silly rule that dilutes social networking opportunities, but it’s Facebook’s call to do this.
Facebook can play a part in promoting a platform and I don’t blame Linden Lab for embracing Facebook, promoting Second Life on non Second Life properties is a very sensible idea but it’s really not the place to be running a community wide 11th birthday competition.
Linden Lab could allow entries on my Second Life or their Flickr page (you have to be signed in to Flickr to view that for some reason), or their own forums, Tumblr, Google + too. Hey they may even want to allow entries on Facebook, but it should not be the only place to enter the contest.
There’s a flip side to this too, Facebook do not want people creating Facebook accounts in their Second Life name yet a competition such as this may incorrectly lead people to believe that it’s allowed, it’s not and people should read the small print on the Facebook TOS.
This is not a new issue, Linden Lab have gone down this route before and every time it makes me groan. As I said earlier, I can see the promotion opportunities for using Facebook and it’s a great platform to potentially extend reach but this is a competition based around a birthday event and should have been created with the wider Second Life community at its heart.
Inara Pey, posting on the same subject, sums the issue up very well :
It is a shame that the Lab once again opt to use Facebook as the medium for a contest; doing so effectively slams the door on the contest for many who might otherwise take part, but who have no wish to be a part of the great Facebook machine.
Given other options are available which are not so controversial, it’s a shame that the Lab doesn’t give thought to them when running contests of this kind. Flickr, for example, would seem to be a suitable alternative.
There’s more from Inara on the subject, Inara isn’t generally as negative about the evils of Facebook as I am. A better option really would have been for Linden Lab to have multiple platforms to enter this contest and terms of conditions that said they could use the winning entry to promote Second Life on multiple platforms, including Facebook.
I still maintain that Facebook and Second Life are not a good match, for reasons I’ve been over many times before. Linden Lab should really think hard before engaging with Facebook in this fashion.
” Inara isn’t generally as negative about the evils of Facebook as I am”
Heh.
I personally loathe Facebook, although it has nothing to do with their attitude towards avatar accounts. I simply don’t like the platform :).
I’m perhaps generally more tolerant of Facebook where Second Life is concerned simply because I recignise (as you do as well, but many don’t), that there are a fair number of SL users who make use of it with their physical world identities, and have no issue with their FB account and their SL identity being linked.
As such, I disagree with the oft repeated calls for LL to “move away” from FB or views that LL are “wrong” to have any link with Facebook. So long as the latter remains opt-in, I’ve got no issue with it for the most part, unless it does start excluding SL users, as with this competition.
I don’t really have a problem with competitions exclusive to Facebook to be honest, whereas it’s better to be more inclusive, there are times when an exclusive competition makes sense in order to try and reach new users.
I don’t think the Second Life Birthday event meets the right criteria to be exclusive in this fashion though.
I agree Facebook shouldn’t be the only place where submissions are accepted.
But look at it this way, LL wants to put its best foot forward with the company that purchased Oculus. We don’t know what is going on behind the scenes. But we do know that the only alive and kicking VR is Second Life and right now, Facebook is a VR accessories vendor with out a VR.
You may be a few steps ahead of the game there but I like your thought process! They will want the technology demonstrated in a place with an existing community for sure.
We realize that a number of Second Life users have reservations about using Facebook and other platforms. In this case, we chose to run the contest through our Facebook page simply because we have a tool on our page that facilitates running a contest with all of the legal stuff (technical term) we need in place to run something like this, and we thought it would be of interest to the more than 366,000 followers of the official Second Life page. Our aim certainly isn’t to discourage participation, and we’ll certainly explore alternative ways to run similar contests in the future.
Thanks very much for the response. I do think there’s scope for Facebook exclusive competitions and the ease of facilitating the competition on Facebook is an advantage.