Most of the news coverage of Second Life™ is about SL. But, the blog Business 2 Community has an article about how one can use SL to promote a web site. Different.

See: How You Can Use Second Life to Promote Your Website.

The author Lori Soard promotes SL as having 20 million users… that should tell you something about this author’s knowledge of SL… or lack of… At best we probably have about a million or two unique active users in a year.

Cirque de Seraphim

Lori presents a couple of case studies; Novelist Karen Kay and the idea of Health Promotion.

The odd thing is the novelist used her RL connection with readers to promote a class in SL. Seems this isn’t using SL for promotion, just the opposite. Then Lori says, “…This is a fun way to attract new customers, or in her case readers, you might not otherwise attract.” Have you ever tried to attract people in SL to an event? What results did you get?

The very best efforts produce a few thousand people. Long ago businesses learned that effort and cost invested in product/service promotion within SL did not produce the return needed to justify it. Lori never gets into return on investment.

The presented idea of Health as being a channel good for promotion in SL is way weak too. An experiment with 40 people produced the result that they felt more engaged in a meeting held in SL. In the case described ‘health’ was just coincidental. It was the meeting context that was queried. And that was only quantified on what people ‘felt’. There is no mention of information retention or change in behavior from content provided with any objective measurement.

The article concludes by presenting ideas one can experiment with. All are basically in the format of you can try and attract existing customers into SL…

Lori says, “Not to mention, most of your competition likely is not using this site to promote to potential customers.” It doesn’t occur to her there may be a reason for that.

The article should have been titled, How you can promote your SL place with your web site…

Recently news coverage of SL seems to have improved. But, obviously we still have people writing about SL that know little about it or how it works and what things we long ago learned don’t work. I suspect anyone that buys what Lori is selling will end up leaving SL with a bad taste for virtual worlds.

My hope is the promotional value of Project Sansar is better than SL’s, meaning one can profitably promote RL products/services from within Sansar.