Blogging the SLCC: Case Studies-Selling Real Life Products

With the mainstream media in the middle of a backlash against Second Life and virtual worlds marketing, here comes a blitz of case studies on just how successful some of those programs can be. I was a little late (we were preparing for a panel this afternoon on Second Life and the Media at 2:30 SLT  if you’re following in-world), but I arrived in time to hear representatives from crayon talk with Michael Donnelly, Director of Coca Cola Worldwide Interactive Marketing, about the virtual thirst campaign, along with some insight into building virtual campuses, and selling real-world goods through iWOOT. Donnelly’s list of urban myths alone are worth looking at: “People said Virtual Thirst was a failure and Coke is pulling out of Second Life. Do I look like I’m pulling out?”

Integrating real life brands in Second Life.

Wanted a way to distribute in world and solve thirst.
Coke case study:
Stage two: One of the neat parts is that we partnered with Brittany Mason to go out and find prototype builders who would build us a Coke machine, anything it could be. WE knew it would hard to explain to people what we were trying to do, so we tried to connect with creative people and let them go.

We tried to generate buzz and interest.

We went out for submissions and said, “This is not about, can you build. This is about can you imagine.” Everyone can think of something fun to do. My eight-year-old son was coming up with ideas. And we did traditional media outreach with press releases and stories. And in-world we had a pavilion built by Millions of Us. We wanted a temporary space where people could come and hang out and try the different prototypes. And the submissions we got were all over the place. The shortest we got was one sentence. The longest was four pages of text, just details and details and details.

Michael Donnelly from coke Stage three: This idea that crayon brought to us resonated with me and my amangement. It resonated with what we call the “Coke Style of Life,” of creativity and fun. The machine would dispense experiences. And the advisory board has since designated a winner, and we’re in the production mode of creating this project now. And then we’ll distribute it for free in the hopes that it will distribute virally around the metaverse.

Gauging success: We tried to look at participation. There were over 300 posts in the blogosphere linked to over 33,000 times. There were 150+ photo posts in Flickr. There were 31,000+ video views and 160,000+ minutes on YouTube. All along with mainstream media coverage.

And the virtual thirst program isn’t the only thing we’ve done. WE also launched the Happiness Factory 2 movie in SL last week. The movie looks at what happens in the machine when we’re out of stock.

I want to make a strong point. SL is important to us, but it always has to be part of an integrated plan. SL was a perfect platform to launch around the world, but we also had mainstream media.

Urban myths:
Wired said Madison Avenue is wasting millions of dollars in virtual worlds. I can’t tell you how much it was, but it was far, far less than people are sayin.

Virtual thirst was a failure and coke is pulling out of SL. Do I look like I’m pulling out? We’re in an intermission before the next phase.

Coke built a destination and nobody came. WE didn’t build a destination or an island without a long-term plan. WE just wanted something there for the promotion. WE had 12 different events throughout the project, and we almost filled the grid each time.

It’s just another SL project. This is much more than SL. This is an integrated social network.

Coke didn’t sell any more cans of soda. It wasn’t about selling more cans. That’s the most important thing, we can’t deny that. But this was about lifestyle branding.

Corporations like coke are losing interest in virtual worlds. That’s obviously not so.

Lessons learned:
Listen and communicate with the community, not at them. Partner with pros, crayon has been phenomenal. SL is community driven not location driven. This is about community, not prims. Success is organic, and being flexible is good. We embraced our critics and changed midstream. Someone said our prize wasn’t that good, so we enhanced it. I’d rather people say harsh things about us than nothing about us. Maximize success by using multiple channels. That’s just basic marketing 101. Strike a balance between art and science. That’s a Coca Cola mantra. There’s a lot of science behind the metrics. It’s about experience and selling product.

Finally, I want to be absolutely clear, because some in the press weren’t clear about it, THIS HAS BEEN AN ABSOLUTE SUCCESS FOR COCA COLA.

I couldn’t expect anymore.

Costs and benefits of a virtual campus:
Dr. M Fetscherin and Dr. C. Latternann, Rollings College and University of Potsdam.

I’m looking more at the business side. At the end of the day, you have to make an investment. I want to share my experience and answer three questions. How do you integrate a virtual campus into the students’ lifestyle? How do you structure a virtual campus? How much does it cost.

So why a virtual campus? It’s an explorative project, and all the students are using technology to connect. IT’s about supporting and extending technology to connect.

Campuses and educators were using the first two versions of the Web. If you want to be competitive, you have to have a website. I think the next space is whether an educator should use a virtual worlds.

Integrating SL into Student Life Cycle:
1. You can integrate before students come to campus. Do PR events, give tours, and provide video on YouTube for viral marketing. You have a real attraction between campus faculty and students with tours. It’s another channel to communicate. And it enhances brand awareness.
2.Once you’re there you can give a virtual class, offer office space and advising.
3.After the student leaves, you can connect your campus organization. You can organize job fairs. And it hasn’t been done yet, but it’s a great idea to organize venture competitions.

How do you structure the virtual campus?
1.You need a walking campus where you arrive.
2. College space.
3. Student Union
4. Research and Development
5. Faculty connections

What are the costs?
I was very moderate because I assume most institutes don’t want to spend too much money. I put the lowest figure you can get.

For one island, you have a sunk cost of $980. For building an island, you have fixed costs of $10-$25k. And you have variable costs of rent and maintenance of about $150 per month to add new features. You also should allow for $1000 a year to update the campus

There are nonfinancial costs. You need to spend a lot of time educating the administration, faculty, and students.

What are the benefits?
•    Financially, quantitative analysis is difficult. We want to increase enrollment. One student more is good.
•    You also get PR and buzz
•    Non financial
o    New communication channel
o    Connect to students, the millenials

The key strategic factors
You need to get strong leadership and support from the administration. You need to involve as many stakeholders as possible. Get clear external and internal communication.

You need to educate a lot of people, so it might take 3-6 months.

Conclusion:
They’re explorative projects with a lot of opportunities and risks. The cost is between $15-$30k, similar to building many websites.

Brian Meeks
I tumbled down the rabbit hole in April 2006. I devoted the next nine months or so to learning about design and prims, talking to anyone that would talk to me. I’m hear to talk about my second client,  iWOOT (I Want One of Those).  They seel electronic gadgets. You can come to our sim and buy a flying monkey for lindens and have it sent to you in real life.

[shows video of sim]

When we first started talking to iWOOT, there were few people who had done work with real-world products. We wanted to set reasonable expectations. It would take time, just like it did with Internet shopping, to build interest. We’d have to explain to people how it was fun.

We had our launch and got a fair amount of real-world press. Our traffic the first few weeks was spectacular. We had some expected drop off, about 30%, and then it flattened out and remained consistent.

We’ve spent some time staffint the store. I try to be there a couple of hours/day to talk to the customers and restructure our events. We hired a ninja to staff the store, because nothing says “Welcome. Come in. Don’t leave the store without buying something” like a ninja. We did a treasure hunt with metal detectors and a top prize of 100,000 Lindens. The woman who found it spent around 9 hours wandering around the sim through my secret panels.

We’ve got a few other things to try and attract people. We’ve got a ten-story maze with prizes on top. We did a survey to gather data and prepare for this presentation. We asked if people were greeted at the door. We don’t staff it 24/7, but 52% of respondents were greeted by myself, a worker, or a ninja.  I was pleased with that, but having thought about it, I’d like to increase it.

Then we asked how important it was to have someone greet you, and 60% percent said neutral to unimportant. So we’re still figuring out what is important.

I feel like if virtual worlds continue on their path, ten or 20 years down the line, there won’t be real-world products. I was worried we were ahead of the curve, but I think the prep work we did to set expectations paid off, and our customer was very pleased.

Q&A:
Q in-world: How do you measure success in metrics and is this translated into money beyond duration of vistis?
Meeks: We have 30 metrics that we report every Friday to the client. We track sales, where thy go in the sim, length of time. The thing our client has been most interested in is the feedback from the surveys and clients. Even something like “A good concept, but seems too expensive” is helpful. If you’re used to buying something for 300 Lindens, but a real-world product gives a sticker shock for 1300 Lindens, it takes a while to get used to. Or “I’d like to keep SL and RL separate.” There is value to understanding that some people in SL wouldn’t want to give their real-life information even though they’d do it on Amazon. Another person said, “It is good.”

Q Prok: I wanted to ask, this is a world that has 300,000 people logging in every day, and a lot of your campaigns are linked to the outside world. Have you ever considered doing something, like it used to be that every gas station had a “Drink Coke” sign, putting billboards up or integrating with the world and sponsoring concerts and sporting events.
A from coke: We had the “Paint the town red” campaign to put our logo everywhere. We chose not to do that in SL out of respect for the community. Some people don’t want the brand in their face. So we tried to allow it to spread virally. It was there before we got there, and there are plenty of places it’s not. We’d consider sponsoring music. We haven’t yet.
Meeks: On Tuesday we’re having our first live music event and the following week we’re going to do a test of competitive hugging. We’re going to see how quickly we can crash the sim with people inviting their friends in. If it’s successful, we’re going to start challenging other teams. Metaversatiltiy has agreed. The Italians are talking trash.
Campus: IT’s a question of control. The NMC provides space, but you have no control of the environment of brand awareness. We wanted to take the next step. That’s why we tried to integrate that along with the students’ life cycle.
Crayon: One thing on the music side, because that’s close to my heart. We made sure to reach out to artists during the virtual thirst campaign. And we reached out to specific artists who built machines to sell them around the world. They got exposure and sold CDs. So we’re definitely interested.

Q:This might be more specific to iWOOT because it’s an ecommerce question. We had problems with people not trusting security five years back for virtual worlds. How are people addressing that?
A: Overall, it seems like people don’t mind taking the 2 minutes to register on our website. I’d like to have that exist in-world. We did have an issue with the floods in the UK. One of our distribution plants for iWOOT was hit, and we had to contact several people and let them know it would take a while to get their product to them. They were nice about it.

Q: I wanted to ask Coca Cola, my background is in entertainment marketing licensing, it seems like there’s an interesting question about your IP. Some people see SL as a hotbed of theft, others see it as a collection of fansites. How do deal with that?
A: Every brand has to deal with that. One story, Second Life Exchange took down some Coke shirts thinking they were doing us a favor. We asked them to put them back up. We don’t want to be known as the guys that take things down. We’re encouraging consumer-generated media. It’s hard to say what’s going to happen in the future, but we’re interested to see it.

Q:Where does it cross the line? If someone has a coke machine and is charging lindens to get can does that cross the line?
A: That happens, but it hasn’t crossed the line. Let’s be honest, we all know how much a Linden is worth. We chose to give away the machine for free, but it was a big debate, we didn’t want to hurt the economy.

Q Glenn Linden: Prok asked about dealing with residents. On a related note, how do you market to the SL community instead of the outside community?
Meeks: With IWOOT we created a group, did classified ads, and we’re testing the levels at which we spend on the ads. We lowered the amount a few weeks ago and had an average increase. I feel like if there were more avenues for advertising, that would be great. I intend on doing some advertising on the Metaverse Messenger, 3pointD, SL Herald, place like that.
Crayon: The approach we took was that instead of trying to market in-world, we were trying to attract the typists, the controllers of the avatar. They’re the early adopters. We market to the residents, but not necessarily through SL. There’s a huge overlap between the bloggers, podcasters, etc.