I went to a Linden user group meeting last night where Thor, Brooke and Sea spoke about advertising on Second Life websites and inworld. One area of concern for me has been why classifieds have been cut from 512 (or in some cases 1,024) characters, to a measly 256, as explained on the Jira in STORM-577. Sea Linden actually provided an answer that made sense.
The reason is keyword stemming, which GSA introduced and it basically meant that some adverts were holding the top spots in lots of different categories because of stemming, therefore limiting the amount of characters means less stemming and more chance of lower priced classifieds scoring well in certain areas, Sea also explained that she has engaged in a lot of un-stemming. Stemming basically means people can get more words for their buck, which in turn hampers others.
The answer of course still leaves some frustrations and means that writing human readable adverts is troublesome, but it is an explanation that leads us to a base to try and find ways to improve the classified system.
My thinking now is that classifieds should work in a similar fashion to the SL Marketplace, on the marketplace the item description isn’t indexed for search purposes as far as I’m aware, the title and keywords are, classifieds should follow this route and this allows people to use keywords that are limited but provide a nice human description in the body of the classified advert, allowing people to be more specific or write an advert that grabs someone’s attention.
I tire of classified adverts that are keyword city, it looks messy, but it does work for being found and that’s the problem, why write a human readable advert when you will be hampering your chances of being found by doing so.
Other issues discussed at the user group meeting included using the Second Life Advertising Beta ran by GlamAdapt. This allows you to pay in US dollars for an advert on Second Life websites, including user profiles ….I’m not sure that would be popular myself, it might actually backfire, but on the marketplace it could work for you. The adverts are based on page views not clicks, but the rates aren’t too outrageous but for me the big barrier is that you can’t use your Second Life US dollar account balance to pay for these adverts, you have to use a credit card, that missing link might make this venture far more appealing but I would imagine part of the problem is that GlamAdapt run this service, not Linden Lab.
One thing that did stand out at this meeting though was the lack of resident participation, there were three Lindens and six or seven residents, why such a low turnout? Was it the time? Was it a lack of advertising? Are residents not interested in Second Life advertising? I noticed the Tweet to say the meeting was starting, which was useful as the Americans have turned the clocks forward a fortnight earlier than we do here in the UK!
Was it the fact that many – like me – were not aware of the event. Was this an all invite meeting or one of Brooke’s invite only user meetings? Are there minutes?
It’s an Open User group meeting, details are here:
http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Advertising_User_Group
Low turnout may be because many residents don’t pay attention to the list of SL user group meetings, and it may also be because the meeting is held (or has historically been held) using voice. I work in a noisy studio environment, and putting on headphones to attend and listen is not an option. It’s also not an option for the large percentage of SL users who are non-native English speakers, and also for residents with disabilities. Follow that up with the meeting transcripts never being made available, and it’s likely to remain very low on the radar for some time to come.
This group has been made obsolete! Which is a shame as I liked the group, but yes turnout was low and I recall you being at one and making those points regarding voice and how you work in a noisy studio, which was a shame as your input would have been interesting but voice doesn’t suit everyone, I prefer meetings in text anyway as I’m often answering IM’s and can catch up with text, voice isn’t so easy.