Mike Butcher

Nic Mitham at the K Zero blog (a marketing and branding company) has posted a map of all the real-world brands he could find operating in the virtual world of Second Life. It’s a hard-wired map which would well do with uploading to Flickr so that people could start to tag it with their own knowledge. This needs a little crowd sourcing… Here is the link to the big version. It’s interesting how some brands cluster. Why are Adidas and Reebok so close? The same question could be asked of Sony Ericsson, Vodafone and CHannel 4. And again of Sun, Intel and Comcast. I guess they are trying for the high traffic areas, which is clearly a tactic which mimicks the real world.

Hamburg-based research firm Komjuniti has published the first extensive survey of Resident attitudes toward marketing in Second Life. MTV, Coke, Dell, American Apparel – they are all at it.

The results [PDF] are that 72% of 200 respondents said they were disappointed with real world company activities in Second Life; just over 40% considered these efforts a one-off not likely to last. Only 7% of respondents in the Komjuniti study say that SL-based promotion would have a positive impact on their future buying behavior.

It gets worse.

As GigaOm reports:

To play in Second Life, corporations must first come to a humbling realization: in the context of the fantastic, their brands as they exist in the real world are boring, banal, and unimaginative. Car companies are trying to compete with college kids who turn a virtualautomotive showroom into a 24/7 hiphop dance party, and create lovingly designed muscle cars that fly, and auction off for $2000 in real dollars at charity auctions.