{"id":3095,"date":"2013-05-03T19:25:48","date_gmt":"2013-05-03T18:25:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sl.governormarley.com\/?p=3095"},"modified":"2013-05-03T19:25:48","modified_gmt":"2013-05-03T18:25:48","slug":"outside-companies-should-create-their-own-second-life-faires","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sl.governormarley.com\/?p=3095","title":{"rendered":"Outside Companies Should Create Their Own Second Life Faires"},"content":{"rendered":"

Fantasy Faire<\/a> is over for this year, but what this year’s event has left me wondering is why aren’t there more faires and why aren’t there more faires with outsiders involved? Now by outsiders I’m talking about people who don’t see Second Life as being their natural place, such as people who don’t really use Second Life but could use it for promotional purposes.<\/p>\n

Now let’s just pause for a moment here, Linden Lab have brought advertising to their website and a lot of this advertising is from people who don’t see Second Life as their natural place, there are adverts from all sorts of different companies there. Why not harness that advertising potential and point advertisers in the direction of the Fantasy Faire website and say, hey, here’s what you can do in Second Life to make feature rich advertising.<\/p>\n

Now there are a few reasons why this sort of thing generally doesn’t happen. The first is that Second Life is a rather small subset of potential consumers for any organisation to be concerned with, I mean there are plenty of us here but there are not eye popping amounts. Another reason is that Second Life users get a bit uppity at times about outsiders advertising on Second Life properties, some of the feedback about the website adverts demonstrates that. Another reason is that advertisers don’t want to be associated with dodgy content.<\/p>\n

Some of these factors can be overcome, but let’s just imagine what could be done with a Fantasy Faire for fantasy authors and MMO companies. This could bring new users to Second Life, a short faire on this scale would mean people weren’t tied to tier in Second Life to display their wares, but they could get some damn good promotional material out of a short term event. The game companies should have no problem making avatars for Second Life, whereas the authors could work with, Linden Lab or even, shock horror, Second Life residents to help them build displays to promote their books.<\/p>\n

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The thing with Second Life is that you can get people from all over the world looking at your products, in a 3D environment there can be added richness. I’ve always felt in the past that the reason a lot of the corporates left is because they didn’t work with residents. They’d build an island and expect people to come to them, rather than bringing their product and going to already established areas where residents flocked.<\/p>\n

Fantasy Faire is a really good example of how a faire can work in Second Life, there are plenty of others throughout the year. I’m not suggesting that the corporates should come in and replace the existing Faires, indeed it would be very disappointing if they did, but there’s certainly scope for them to make their own faires and by doing so, they may realise that Second Life is not that bad an environment at all.<\/p>\n

An alternative of course would be for a company to sponsor these Faires, but I fear they’d get the heebie jeebies about certain content, but hey Fantasy Faire sponsored by Blizzard Entertainment might fly, as long as they didn’t want too much editorial control, I’m not sure how Linden Lab would feel about that, but there is potential here for Linden Lab to point out that Faires in Second Life work.<\/p>\n

There may be concerns that these companies could takes users away from Second Life, but that argument would hold for the website properties too. There may be concerns that if people come to Second Life because company A are here, they may stay here and not use Company A’s product, but I don’t think that’s a strong argument either.<\/p>\n

Faires in Second Life generate publicity on blogs, Flickr, forums yadda yadda yadda, there’s potential here for companies and authors to build new networking opportunities, events like Fantasy Faire are something Linden Lab should be promoting as an excellent use case of Second Life.<\/p>\n

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