cool doesn’t bring in the cash

Marketeer Mike Moran says businesses are leaving public virtual worlds for private ones, where they can control the interactions with customers.

The excerpt is below. As examples he mentions Unisfair and Expos2.

Mike Moran:

“Sure, you can have a presence in Second Life that attracts attention no differently than having a billboard on a busy highway. Second Life can also be a mall kiosk where you show your message to an individual customer in an interactive way, or it can be a virtual showroom or branch office, where customers can interact live with your personnel the same way they would on the phone. Many companies are putting seminars on for their customers in this cool virtual environment.

Still, though a few marketers have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy and develop an island in Second Life, you don’t hear much about a return on that investment.

Does this mean that Second Life avatars don’t deserve your marketing dollars? Not necessarily. B2B marketers are beginning to use virtual worlds to connect to customers in a whole new way. But they’re not using Second Life.

You see, Second Life, for all its good points, is a public place. Like most public places, you don’t know the identities of most of the people you see there. And you can’t easily control which people see your marketing messages, which means that competitors can listen in anonymously, too. So instead of using public virtual worlds, such as Second Life, some companies are experimenting with private virtual worlds where they can have controlled interactions with customers and prospects.”