Virtual Worlds Are Going Private

As a virtual world, Second Life is a community of people who interact with each other, doing the same things virtually you can do in the real world. For marketers, it’s a cool place to be because customers are there.

But cool doesn’t bring in the cash.

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.

Most B2B marketers prefer private settings anyway to interact online with their customers and prospects. Electronic meeting programs like WebEx Communications let them know who they are dealing with. Second Life lends itself more to the pop-in, the person who has no relationship and who might even prefer to be anonymous.

Private virtual worlds can give you the best of both -- uh, worlds. You can find several companies out there looking to be your virtual world vendor; examples include Unisfair and Expos2. Businesses can use these services to set up virtual one-time event Webinars or week-long trade shows that can be staffed months after they “conclude” -- where customers show up and stay as long as they like, without being anonymous. They are invited to a secure area where they have the richness of a virtual world but also the control of an experience out of the public eye.

Unlike trade shows, marketers can use busy, high-level staffers to “work the booth” while sitting at their desks doing their regular jobs, providing far better customer interactions than they get from the entry-level folks often found in real-life trade shows.

Is anyone seeing any return on investment? Well, National Instruments canceled its annual roadshow and put on a virtual event for less than it previously cost to ship its equipment around. And they attracted more leads than with the old in-person events.

Here's a glimpse of the vendor's online event:

National Instruments virtual trade show

Source: Unisfair

A study conducted for Unisfair by The FactPoint Group shows that the average virtual world event attracts 50 qualified leads from events averaging over 1,500 attendees.

So, if you knew a way to run a cheaper trade show that drew more leads that could interact with personnel better equipped to hook those leads, why wouldn’t you do it? Second Life and other public virtual worlds might be cool, but private virtual worlds are bringing in cold cash.