Promoting Yourself In Second Life (Part 1)
Understanding how to promote yourself, an event, or just to get the word out in Second Life can be a bit of a challenge, even for the professionals have trouble doing it. There are some tools and resources that are lacking in from the traditional marketing world and Second Life is a mish mash of press and blogs who covers a wide assortment of the action all independent of one another. While there are many methods to reach residents (such as notecard/texture dropping, group notices, and mass IM’s), they are limited, as most of them rely on targeting individual people/avatars rather than a global space of news.
With the lack of traditional tools, there are new tools and services that can help promotion in Second Life, most of them dependent on blogs and RSS feeds.
The first RSS aggregator was developed by Tao Takashi and called the World of SL. It spits out an RSS feed of the 187 blogs and Second Life RSS feeds that it follows (including this website nexeusfatale.com). While the World of SL is very useful in gathering a glimpse of what is going on in the Second Life blogosphere, it can be quite overwhelming due to some of the feeds it aggregates, such as the BlogHUD feed. RSS aggregators are great for mining current and top news, the problem is the selection process, it’s driven entirely by the human element and their choices for adding a website or not. While that process may be completely subjective, Tao Takashi has done a pretty good job in maintaining relevant websites to be aggregated. Another feed for those interested in fashion is the Fashion World of SL.
When the blogging community began to develop in Second Life, BlogHUD the first blogging platform dedicated to blogging within the virtual world. Using a wearable HUD in Second Life it publishes a short blog post to its blogging platform or your own WOrdPress, Blogger or Typepad blog. BlogHUD is very popular and a great way to promote an event or a location through Second Life, specifically due to its ability to include snapshots from Second Life in your posts. While BlogHUD is limited in posting length (a post this length is easier created through my Wordpress post page,) it’s more akin to a Second Life Twitter. BlogHUD is also limited to those who are using it (some 964 users).
Second Life Top Sites is a throwback to website ranking during the boom of created webpages on Tripod and Geocities. Due to the limits of website ranking through Yahoo, website promotion was done through top 10 rankings and website rings. These websites measured the popularity of your website through click-through traffic and website votes. There were many Top10 websites all geared to specific topics. Second Life Top Sites is an evolution of this platform following the same logic but includes traffic detail through their widget placed on a website (I have one on the right hand side of this webpage.) Based on a click throughs and traffic algorithm, websites are ranked 1 – 10 and displayed in order. The pitfall of this system is that blog posts or recent website activity is not included in its ranking algorithm. However being ranked does help some promotion of your website as, in theory, you will receive click through traffic from the website.
Second Life Blogs via Ring Surf is an example of a website ring (previously mentioned). Website rings are a collection of sites on a specific topic. Through a banner, websites on the ring can be scrolled through one by one. The recent evolution of this is any wordpress.com or blogger.com website has a “next blog” heading at the top of their site. Some web rings (not this one) also rank sites.
Click through traffic and website rings are limited in accurately representing a website’s importance, they are dependent on click’s but not content. Enter Social Rank and their Second Life dedicated portal Sweet Second Life. This platform combines the aggregation of World of SL, the ranking of a top 10 site, but does it smarter. Added to its ranking equation is the length of a post, quality of content, blog post comments, and frequency. The platform does a lot of things right in providing a top 10, the downfall, however, is that it’s still in beta. Since I’ve followed Sweet Second Life there have been two outages and several times it has not accurately updated my blog and other blogs. This problem is usually resolved by a sending an e-mail. While I do hope their platform fixes such statistical problems, it is a better measurement of a blog or websites ranking. Other interesting aspects of Social Rank are daily, weekly, and monthly top posts, blogs on the rise, and an indicator of which blogs are “hot” or are generating a lot of activity.
To best explain Alltop is as a combination of everything I’ve explained above. It is an RSS aggregator of selected blogs and websites and displays (or ranks) them based on careful algorithms (content, posting frequency and the human subjective element). The beauty about Alltop is the design, as it looks more like a dashboard of websites rather than a long stream. You can customize by removing (and in the future organize) websites to your liking and does not affect the total list. The icing on the cake is Alltop’s sense of humor, such as this quote concerning their header/footer design element:
Q. What’s with the banner near the bottom of the page? Is that a bug?
A. You fail the test. We put the banner there on purpose. We wanted to flip convention on its head by reversing the positions of the header and footer. Our (tiny) header is everyone else’s footer, and our footer is everyone else’s header. We did this to emphasize that “content is the top priority” at Alltop, not our brand identity. Also, the translucent banner contains a pun: “We’ve got [topic] covered.” Get it? Though we never planned it this way, some people also use it as a page marker to keep track of where they are on a page since the banner remains stationary and you scroll the headlines.
While Alltop is very new to me, the downside is the lack of numerical ranking (which isn’t integral to promotion, I do like their scheme better) and lack of an RSS feed. Unlike the Social Rank platform it also doesn’t highlight hot or interesting posts. This would be a nice feature due to its use of good content as a part of their algorithm.
While most of these tools don’t exist in Second Life, they are unbelievably helpful in gathering information. Most of the news and information about Second Life exists through blogs and websites because of the ease of use and some of the restrictions of Second Life. While I cover the ranking and feed aggregation services here, another way to promote yourself through Second Life is through the Second Life based media which will be covered in part 2.
