The Power of Advertising

Rodvik’s Twittering has got tongues wagging, opened a dialogue and started to exemplify the reach of Twitter. The official @secondlife Twitter account has 22,862 followers as I type this. That figure could change during the course of this blog post, but not by much. Now some of those accounts will be dormant, many of them won’t see any official Tweets, but it gives a good idea of the potential for promoting Second Life on Twitter, because some people will retweet any initiatives, which then extends reach further.

This is low cost advertising, Twitter is free to use but there’s a cost implication with Linden Lab getting someone to Tweet, so it’s not a no cost operation, but it’s pretty damn low cost. Advertising is something Linden Lab don’t do well, some people find advertising a bit tacky, but it’s a cold hard reality that it needs to take place and Linden Lab need to open up their eyes not only to advertising initiatives of their own, but also of advertising via their customers, be that on the forums, blog sites, Twitter, Plurk ……. yes even bloody Facebook! Although the jury is out there with their silly no pseduonyms BS, but we’ll come to that later.

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Income Streams and Advertising

I’ve long felt that Linden Lab don’t do enough with premium memberships to sell them. Indeed I feel they should follow a lead from Mobile Phone companies and offer different deals. There are many people for whom the prospect of a weekly stipend and 512M of tier isn’t appealing, others would like a larger amount of tier.

There are those who would prefer a larger stipend and would forsake the 512M of tier as they don’t use it and have no intention of using it. Giving people choice is generally good. creating a premium package that appeals to different demographics is good, how about no free tier but advertising upto a certain Linden dollar value inworld or on the marketplace? How about a discount on marketplace advertising for premium members? How about different price points for premium membership where for more US dollars you get tier, the stipend and the marketplace or inworld advertising upto a certain value?

Then we get to partnerships, LL so far haven’t been that good on partnerships but their deal with GlamAdapt regarding Second Life Avertising Beta shows that they can do partnerships, unfortunately it also shows a flaw in Linden Lab’s own advertising.

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Sea Linden Explains Why Classifieds Have Been Limited

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.

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