The stupidity of crowds

Here we go again....from the Ad Age digital conference 2008, 57% of marketers have voted Second Life as the most over-hyped trend of last year.

Most certainly: Some brands came in during 2007 and basically bombed. But the line of thinking coming from some of my colleagues in the marketing, branding and ad communities of what's gone on is a little disingenuous.

Say I roll out a campaign in the real world targeting certain media, and the readers, viewers etc of those media outlets fail to respond....who is to blame?

Me as the communications professional for not understanding the audience....or the 'stupid' consumers for not getting my creative genius? Statement of the obvious, but taking the latter approach would pretty soon leave me with no clients to speak of.

To take American Apparel as an example. It was a first mover who came into Second Life and then withdrew when it failed to sell very much at all in its virtual store. It was held up as one of the first case studies of brands + virtual worlds simply not going together.

But the problem wasn't Second Life as such. The problem was that if you are trying to replicate what you do in the real world in the virtual, then you've failed to understand what goes on there. And if you are more or less just selling versions of your real life products you are onto a hiding to nothing.

That's because in SL there is already an established cottage industry of people sitting in their front rooms who, if you look at fashion as one example, design virtual clothes for virtual personas for a (real) living.

There are countless sites devoted to virtual fashion, for example here and here. These people have an established customer base and following who simply didn't take kindly to real world brands muscling in and taking the food off their tables....especially as the real world brands very often simply didn't do as good a job as their virtual counterparts.

In contrast there are companies who have made a success of their presence in SL. Large corporations are using it as a collaboration and meeting tool. The educational sector is thriving. And some brands, Boots No.7 being an example, are sticking it out for the long haul beyond the usual tech boom / bust cycle.

Yes, Second Life has major problems, and as I said in an earlier post, any brand which has received the amount of free publicity SL has over the past year without any real impact on regular users, needs to re-examine the direction its taking, hence the recent move to hire a more 'professional' CEO.

But regards some of the - let's call it what it is - bleating - coming out of the marketing community regarding their unsuccessful forays into virtual worlds? If the extent of your thinking is to see this space as an opportunity to paste up some virtual advertising, as opposed to interacting with a living, breathing community....what do you expect?

Now....let's commission a stack of widgets to clutter up Facebook users' pages. That is sure to work!

Update: Rick van der Wal posts about Mercedes pulling out of Second Life and uses it to fire a shot across the bows of brands whose virtual presence essentially consists of doing nothing more than doling out freebies:

"When I think of Mercedes:

• Quality
• German craftsmanship
• Status
• Expensive
• Exclusive

Now what happens when we think of a free car you can hand out to anyone, and does nothing but drive, when we compare this to the vastly better (creative) cars out there in Second Life, created by involved users:

• Cheap/free
• Un-imaginative
• Nothing we haven’t seen before

...I’d like to extend this warning to brands that come to Virtual Worlds with portfolio islands and think they stir the conversation by handing out freebies with their logo on them with a little message said much better by Seth Godin: “No one cares about you and your brand”. In other words, get involved or go home."