Getting Out of the Office

Several weeks ago, after reading an item in Ad Age a few about American Apparel having its own island store in Second Life, I decided I had to check it out. “Second Life,” Ad Age explained, “is one of several virtual online worlds where trendsetters are flocking to exchange ideas, egos, and virtual property using IM-equipped ‘avatars,’ or highly customized 3D representations of themselves.” At left is my avatar (avatard? do people say that? is it offensive?) self: Murk Story. Since my readership here is dominated by people I’ve met, who thus know what I look like in real life, I won’t dwell on similarities and differences. I’ll admit, however, that I wanted my avatar’s aesthetic to match that of this site.)

I really am out of the office for the rest of this week, but before I disappear for a few days, I thought I’d post this dispatch from my experience getting out of the office, while I was still in the office….

It took me a little time to get the hang of how to do even basic things, like move around. But eventually I found my way to the store. An American Apparel marketing guy told Ad Age that the virtual retail space opened in May, and the company has “sold over 2,000 items to people outfitting their avatars.” Admittedly, I don’t have a huge amount of free time, so I was only to make brief and sporadic visits, but I hardly ever encountered anyone at the store. Once I found someone there, but she didn’t answer any of my chatted questions, just stood there — maybe she was even newer to Second Life than me, and hadn’t gotten the hang of it. Another time I evidently interrupted a couple involved in some sort of sex/foreplay/flirtation thing. They made fun of me, then ignored me until I went away.

Just like real life!

I decided to change tactics, and go to an event. There are already a surprising number of events tied to real-world selling and marketing, and I figured I’d go to a Q&A lecture with Julian Dibbell, author of the new book Play Money, and maybe the first journalist to really understand (I mean grok!) what virtual worlds could be, a subject he started exploring in print in the early 1990s.

The event was scheduled for 9 pm Eastern last Thursday, on New Globe island. I logged on early so I could teach myself how to raise my avatar’s hand, in case I had a question. (This turned out to be a waste of time; questions were taken via IM.) I arrived at the venue about 20 minutes beforehand, took a seat, and started taking virtual snapshots and sending virtual postcards to people who probably have better things to do. (Sorry Paola!) The other early arrivals were avatar flunkies for Millions of Us, which is “a company dedicated to helping businesses understand and harness the power of virtual worlds.” They flew around — you can fly in Second Life, which is pretty cool — and at one point rearranged the chairs.

The actual event involved W. James Au, or Hamlet Au, an “in-world” journalist, interviewing Dibbell. (Here’s an interview with Au, and here’s his blog, New World Notes. In terms of covering Second Life, from the inside out, in every dimension, he seems to be The Man. Or The Avatar. Or, whatever.)

Au’s avatar quizzed Dibbell’s avatar through a chat function, and I sat with 30 or 40 other avatars, reading/listening. I stayed for about an hour, and had mixed feelings about it. Obviously Dibbell was able to draw an audience that I assume was geographically dispersed, and throughout the talk people were buying books (which I guess are mailed to them in real life, though I have to admit I didn’t check into that.) On the other hand, it seemed like it took ten minutes for him to communicate points that could have been made in about 45 seconds in real life, and for me at least, staring at my computer waiting for words to scroll by at the speed of someone else’s typing is not a top leisure activity.

Still, there were some interesting moments. Sometimes instead of going through the proper question procedure, members of the audience just chimed in. One little exchange of interest to me:

Julian Dibbell: maybe i’m nervous cuz here i am in SL, where the powers that be are so anxious to keep all talk of games and play far away from their baby
Kealiha Trudeau: naw
Dear Leader: totally
Julian Dibbell: and maybe that’s a wise marketing move on their part
Hamlet Au: It’s a game! (slap!) It’s a platform! (slap!) IT’S A GAME AND A PLATFORM!
Sidra Stern: lol
Sulla Milk: we are all here to MONETIZE
Misty Rhodes: lol
Dear Leader: no it’s a monetarized socializing platform
Sulla Milk: or find perfect hair gel

This suggests some uncertainty and ambivalence about where this virtual world stuff is going, how it relates to commerce, marketing, money, and all the usual stuff of the real world. (To read a fuller and more streamlined account of the Dibbell event, see this post on Au’s blog.)

It’s actually kind of shocking to learn how much marketing has already gone on in Second Life (and other virtual worlds). There have been a number of book and music-related events, with many more to come (here’s Au’s post about Suzanne Vega’s upcoming performance). Evian, Budweiser, Nike, Levi’s, MTV, Kellogg’s, and the American Cancer Society are among those named in a recent Harvard Business Review article as having dabbled in virtual-world promotion. Second Life has been written about at some length in Business Week, and someone has just launched SL Business: The Premiere Virtual Branding Magazine.
Attitudes about this among the avatars seem to be mixed. So, now that I’ve taken the time to look around in Second Life, I’ll be returning to see what’s up, how those attitudes change, what marketers are trying, and so on.

What I’m mostly interested in, however, are the brands and products and entrepreneurs that exist only in Second Life.

More about that in the weeks ahead.