engagement

Most of the events I attend in Second Life, including Metaversed events, are not targeted in any way other than implicitly through the content of the event itself. There are no qualifications necessary for entry. We seem content with quantity over quality, which is perfectly natural in a new medium I think. There are surely exceptions to this observation, and I'd love to hear about them.

On the web, provided your content is free of course, there's little need to pre-qualify visitors. Bandwidth is cheap(ish) and hardware costs negligible for many businesses. In Second Life, and other virtual worlds though, there is a limit on how many people can participate in your live event, or visit your server at any one time. There is also a limit on a company's human resources. We talk about engagement a lot when we speak of virtual worlds. About how it's better to engage meaningfully with 10 people than broadcast at 100, or 1000. So why are we not doing that?

Barriers

A good argument against trying to qualify visitors is that it puts a barrier between them and your content. Why would you want to make someone intent on visiting you jump through a hoop?

The other half of the problem may be that if you do decide that you need to pre-qualify, as far as I'm aware, the tools just don't exist. Right now, it would take considerable development to setup even an automated way of managing an islands access list. There are certainly no simple tools available for this. Do correct me if I'm wrong!

Hoop Jumpers

How much more likely are you to have a meaningful conversation with someone that's shown intent, and has been pre-qualitied over someone who wandered in randomly? If you're focused on learning in Second Life, and don't have a clear financial goal it may not make any sense to do any of this stuff. On the other hand, if you do have a clear goal for your presence, and a clear target group to aim at, wouldn't it make sense to spend less time on "everybody", and more time on the hoop jumpers?

In sales, it's preferable to be talking with somebody who wants to buy your product, rather than trying to persuade somebody that doesn't. Isn't it the same here?

One of the things that Second Life affords companies, is the ability to rapidly change track when the present course no longer makes sense. To make adjustments on the fly, even complete changes in business model (read, virtual world strategy..) is very web2.0, and Second Life, above all, allows for seriously rapid prototyping of ideas and builds through it's object and scripting tools -- at a level you wouldn't normally associate with large companies. In fact, only this week, Christian Renaud over at Cisco was (justifiably) cursing the hoops the corporate machine was making him jump through to get some stuff done. It's interesting to note, that in the virtual world, where he has domain, this is not the case, and more interesting yet to read about how the company has rapidly evolved its Second Life strategy based on first hand experience.

We had planned to do a gradual rollout of new content and some interaction, however the experience of participating quickly changed our direction. By April, we had redesigned our presence in SL, added four islands, and had the governance and infrastructure in place within our company to scale for the foreseeable future.

The first aspect, the redesign, was in direct response to how our customers, partners. Second Life Cisco User Group and employees told us they wanted to use our 'Virtual Campus'. We did away with buildings for the most part so avatars could get in and out easier, and adopted a user-centric model of navigation, so users could decide where they wanted to go (products, training, technology, building in the sandbox) and get quickly there.

This hands on approach to Second Life is what Prokofy and I discussed on Second Rant today. The first wave of corporate washouts in virtual worlds is past, it's time to learn from those experiences and move forward with the benefit of experience.

For those few firms, like Cisco, who entered in that first wave and are making a success of their Second Life strategies, it's time to teach what you know to others.

Of course it is. It's fairly useless on the 2D web. With the proliferation of AJAX based web applications which bork the whole concept of a "page view", the rise of social networks and blogs where brand control is a laughable concept and, the widgetization of the web, where content becomes untethered and free, traffic as a measurement of success is ridiculous. It is however, something people can easily understand and digest, so as part of the overall picture, it still has it's uses.

In a somewhat defensive post in response to the "SL brands ranked by traffic" meme that did the rounds a couple of weeks ago, Satchmo Prototype of the Electric Sheep Company calls for a ranking of brands by engagement rather than raw traffic figures, pointing out that many campaigns in Second Life don't even have a destination where "traffic" can be measured. Unfortunately he doesn't offer any suggestions on how we might measure engagement in the virtual world, so I guess we're stuck with traffic and product distribution right Chris?