In part 1 we discussed how big marketers are using the virtual world of Second Life to interact with their audiences, spending millions of Dollars doing so.

More than 65 companies have already launched their Second Life presence, turning out to be more interested into Second Life than actual users.

Many have learned from previous bad marketing experiences of reaching out into new terriorities without adequate experience and are now hiring people from within Second Life to support their activities, rather than entering with their old bags of tricks.

A Marketing Disaster Waiting to Happen?

But while the virtual world seems to offer endless marketing opportunities, some data would suggest that Second Life is a marketing disaster just waiting to happen.

The virtual world currently has a total of 2,965,539 residents, but only 1,037,804 of these have logged-in in the last 60 days. When writing this article, only 25,845 of them are online this minute.

While the audience the size of a small country might be worth marketing to on a small scale to make a decent profit, anecdotal evidence shows that:

a) these people are not really interested in, as an example, the retail stores set-up by real-world companies in the virtual setting, rendering them empty most of the time, and

b) many of these resent the presence of marketers so much that some residents of Second Life are fighting against their practices in the virtual world.

With the kind of money going into Second Life right now, this might be a disaster waiting to happen once the results don't come through.

Even companies looking to use Second Life just for market research may run into problems trying to apply their findings to the real world, where the psychographics and behavioral patterns are different.

Migrating Traditional Models into Virtual Worlds

The biggest problem is migrating traditional models into virtual worlds, such as in the case of retailers opening retail stores in Second Life. If you're doing it for branding, that's fine. Give away everything for free and then try to make the sale in the real world (although again, to do this, you would need much scale).

But for e-commerce, migrating the traditional retail model into the virtual world smells of disaster.

While we love browsing products in real stores, Second Life cannot come even close to that experience with its rather difficult user interface and inadequate graphics that would motivate you to grab an item from the store shelf and pay real money for it.

It is somehow difficult to see someone browsing through Amazon's thousands of books by moving left and forth from shelf to shelf.

There's a better method, and it's called online search, and it gives you results without lag and in a manner that's easy to use. Sorry, but the usability just isn't here.

What Will Work Then?

Nissan seems to be just on the right track, offering Second Life residents free test drives of the virtual copies of their real life models.

Simple logic would say that marketers entering this virtual world would have to go up and beyond to create added value for the residents, giving them the tools and items to make their virtual experience better.

Free items that duplicate the real products might be a good start, allowing the residents to have a full demo of the product before buying it in the real world, as Nissan is doing, but even more towards enriching the user experience by adding new functionality.

The iPhone for example could be a perfect fit, with Apple making a fully functional virtual copy available to every user, with the ability to listen to iTunes music, watch videos and communicate with their friends.

Or Nike giving you running shoes that increase your gamespeed.

Or Sears giving you a free internal decorator to furnish your virtual house with their furniture, hoping you would perhaps then want to do the same in real life.

Or universities offering in-game courses on how to improve your gameplay. For example Harward offering a free course on making money in the game, and then hoping to enroll these students later on.

The opportunities seem quite endless.

Getting From Service to Purchase

But the challenge is getting from offering an in-game service to actually making the sale in the real world.

In this case, companies could try to mimic direct marketing 101 tactics, but of course not forgeting the added value requirements of Second Life.

a) When doing your furnishings in Second Life, Sears could allow you to print out your settings, take them to the nears physical store, get the same selection there and make a purchase with a small discount ... or even get additional free interior decoration consulting prior to making the purchase.

b) An upgrade to this would of course be making the purchase available directly from the virtual world, with the ability to pay with your virtual Dollars or your credit card, and have the products delivered to your home. And as some are speculating, Sears might already be going into this direction.

c) Retailers could make use of real world coupons, distributed within the game. You try a pair of running shoes and then order them online with a discount coupon.

d) If you're already getting a free car ride in the virtual world, why not use the same interface for your users to reserve a test drive in real life, perhaps even delivering the car to their front door?

e) The university, which first offers you Second Life training, could then go on to sell you some virtual in-game classes on real life business, or even have an in-game consultant help you apply for real life courses ... helping your choose the right courses, discussing financial options and so on.

Common sense tells me that the success of marketing initiatives will depend mostly on how marketers will be able to relate the virtual experience with the real world and facilitate action on the side of the residents.

But even with all of this, the number of users is still far too small for these activities to really make much of an impact right now.

Even if the user base is growing, only 1 of 6 people that try Second Life persist for more than about a month. So people that try it are mostly running away after experiencing the troublesome user interface and user experience.

Will the User Experience Kill the Possiblities?

Either way you look at it, the user experience right now is not even close to what would be needed to reach mass penetration.

OK, let's say that the next version fixes this, the user experience vastly improves, people come and stay in hoards and the sheer mass makes Second Life or an alternative virtual world a strong branding & communications tool.

Certainly this would make in-game companies, if they behave of course, a hit with the up-and-coming younger demographic that almost seems to be forgeting about the real world, and a future smaller number of older adults.

Actually, this might become the best way to reach the younger demographics that are turning away from television and blatant advertising as it is.

But even with excellent user interface and much more realistic graphics, can a 3D model even really work online when it comes to sales?

Can such a 3D model be made to really support direct sales?

Browsing a webstore, if usability standards are obeyed, is easy, actually much easier than browsing a traditional store, if you know what you're looking for. And when more webstores start offering 3D models of their products, this will only enhance the power of e-commerce ... but still within the same browser-based 2D model.

Well, the one thing that the 3D virtual world model has going is a more personal experience. When browsing a 3D retail store, a real life virtual assistant can easily give you advice, suggest purchase options and even work out a payment plan for you.

You can of course do that in a webstore as well, but moving around with your 3D virtual character in a virtual setting with a virtual live assistant does seem more personal.

So perhaps, in the future of a couple of years we will start seeing integrated e-commerce models that combine the ease of use of the 2D internet with the personal impact of the 3D virtual world.

Right now the virtual worlds seem mostly good for branding, although lacking the appropriate scale. But in the future we might see them getting more into e-commerce, customer management and communications, and more. Time will tell.