Marketing in Virtual Worlds

Clicking through my RSS feeds tonight, I came across this great post in Massively.  It does a great job of talking about marketing in Second Life and how someone really has to spend time in the space to *understand* the space.

“Where are your marketers going wrong in virtual worlds? There’s a bit of a list, but we’ll talk about two particularly relevant ones here. One is mistaking the medium for the market, and the other is failing to understand how people are using the medium.

Mistaking the medium for the market is a pretty obvious one, but that doesn’t make it any less prevalent. It is a classic stereotyping mistake. Take a look at Second Life; “Freaks and geeks” is one of the most common views of the demographic. Another is that it is slanted towards the younger crowd (say, under twenty-fives or even under twenties). Both of those views are, essentially, dead wrong. If you’re operating your marketing strategy based on these views, you’ve shot yourself in the foot from the get-go.”

………………

“What you need to do now is to understand how the users are using the medium. That’s more than just a quick field-trip.

Just as you would do with marketing and product development in the physical world, you need to go and actually use the new media yourself. You need to interact with people, watch people, and find the gaps. If you don’t understand why people are using the medium or how they are using the medium, the odds are good that the only effect your messages will have will be negative.

Find out how people are using the medium, and the sorts of messages they are receptive to in that medium. Look for spaces in which your messages will fit, and how to place them there. Otherwise you’re just blowing your marketing budget on pissing people off.

You won’t absorb a new medium in an hour, or a day — and like more established media (newspapers, magazines, radio, film and television) the position of each medium in the attention-space of the market changes slowly over time, as do the uses that the market puts them to. As with these older, more established media, you have to keep current.

Every medium is a challenge and an opportunity, even the older media. Human interactions with media are constantly evolving and changing, and if you are keeping up, you will be more successful than those who are lagging behind.”

Read the whole post here. Please.