PSILOG

Here we go again: Second Life as "the" phenomenon of our times... The strange thing is that the concept as such is more mature than we often realize and it seems that they're the ones attracting the attention and finally breaking open "the market" for this way of thinking. (who remembers ...)

Is Second Life the solution? Not really. I believe it's an interesting concept, but I have to concur with Eric Kintz list of reasons why SL is not a mature marketing enabler  and it appears to be confirmed by the Répères study of last March.

Part over the overstatements of success lie in the absence of good measures in the public arena. The typical 'number of subscribers' is the a-number one fluke. It's always impressive but lacks total actionability. What does it mean: number of subscribers? It ends with the number of people having registered at any given point. But how to run a business on that premise alone? SL has crossed the mark of 6 million residents in April. Pretty impressive, but... when we know that:

• The ratio between Residents and Unique Residents is 1.62 (in other words: every account has 1.62 avatars) we end up with  some 3.7 million residents
• The number of Premium residents (people actually paying a monthly fee to be on SL) is a mere 75.000...
• With at any given time having somewhere between 16.000 and 35.000 people online (say on average 25.000) and a land mass of 502 square kilometres, we have an occupancy of 48.9 avatars per sq.km or about the same as Burkina Faso
• In marketing terms: we can still do pretty decent marketing in Burkina Faso, but let's look at monthly avatar spent: 43.6 Linden $ which is roughly 0.16 USD or 0.12 EUR, not much hope in terms of building a viable marketing model for existing brands...

But, I admit, I do spend time in SL, exploring and experimenting. As a social medium it's one of the best experiments so far. It does lack some features and enablers, but then again, there is no such thing as a perfect medium (yet) that manages to create a true mixed reality environment.

Back to the measures. What would be interesting are the development (or publication) of more relevant measures that reflect the inner workings of the system. As such SL offers a 3D social environment where people can meet and interact. Measures that reflect social cohesion, node/cluster development, density & reach, but also radiality (the relationship between network outreach and the provision of new information & influence) would be the prime determinants of value in the Linden case (or for that matter any social networking environment).

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