New Comm Forum: Hummers, High Rollers and Second Life

Just back from a great three days at New Comm Forum in Las Vegas. I’ll leave it to my high-rolling PR and communications colleagues to give you the recaps of the conference:  Josh Hallet, Shel Israel, Katie Paine, John Cass, Shel Holtz, Shel Israel, Todd Defren,  David Parmet and pictures on Flickr.  A special shout out to Kami Watson Huyse, who did a nice write-up of the Viral Marketing session I moderated.

Instead, I am going to focus on a couple of topics, starting with virtual worlds like Second Life. I do have an avatar, and have wandered around a bit, but Second Life didn’t personally grab me the way it has so many of my colleagues. My 6-1/2 year old son was more enthralled than I was.

So when it came to discussions about the viability of virtual worlds as an environment for marketing, as  you can imagine, I was a bit of a skeptic. While I’m not crazy about the versioning terms Web 1.0 and Web 2.0,  the best way to explain it is that virtual worlds are Web 5.0. We just aren’t there yet.

However, I now believe, more than I did before New Comm Forum, that we will get there. Two things combined to get me there: my son and the New Comm Forum session on Second Life presented by Kami and Linda Zimmer.

First, last weekend, my son discovered Nicktropolis, a virtual world hosted on the Nickleodeon Web site. In Nicktropolis, he can engage with other children and the Nick characters like SpongeBob, Patrick and the Avatar, play games and earn currency which he can then use in various shops throughout the world to furnish his own room. He played on this for hours, and it made up for his previous disappointment that he was too young for Second Life.

More importantly though: he is actively engaging with the Nickleodeon brands in the course of the play. These familiar characters are a large part of the attraction of the world. For him, and this new generation of "digital natives," engaging with brands will be an accepted part of his virtual experience. Now, I certainly hope commercial engagement won’t be all there is, but it will be an integrated and integral part of the experience, not the "sore thumb" that it often appears right now. Because the people playing will expect and understand it, and the companies marketing in the virtual worlds will do a better, more organic job.

Companies will do a better job in large part due to the effort of pioneers like Linda and Kami, who will help us understand how to fit in and "play by the rules" in this new community, this new culture. In their session, they did a great job presenting both the current realities of Second Life as well as the longer term potential  for marketers.

One of the things they covered was how useful Second Life is proving to be for education,and particularly distance learning, allowing students to experience the personal interaction with the professor and fellow students that they otherwise miss. And then someone asked about porn. Because porn is pretty rampant in Second Life. You can certainly avoid it, but it is there. That’s one of the reasons Second Life is an adult world.

And I had an AHA moment.

The porn industry is an early adopter of new technologies. First to video, first to the Web. And now among the first to virtual worlds. In part of course, because it keeps getting kicked out. Pushed out of movie theaters onto video. Filtered out on the Web by products like Cyber Patrol.. But also because it is pretty good at following the money. If the commercial pornographers are there — if they think the audience will turn up —  virtual worlds absolutely have the potential to deliver  returns for more conventional marketers.  In fact, I’d bet on it.

AHA:

• We’ve got a "leading indicator"  in the porn industry.
• Virtual worlds like Second Life will be second nature to the new digital natives like my son, at home and at school.
• Engaging with companies and their brands in these worlds will be no big deal. Provided of course that the engagement is actually engaging, ie entertaining.

It won’t happen tomorrow. Or even next year. But someday, and probably sooner than we think.

Finally, a real highlight of Thursday night’s New Comm Forum dinner at Roy’s, along with the excellent company and wonderful food, was our transportation — the longest, most tricked out Hummer limo I have ever seen. Damn thing was so big, it fit pretty much our entire group of 20 or so people. Hopefully someone will post some pix.

Next post: more thoughts on 21st century press releases.

Tags: Second Life, Nicktropolis, New Comm Forum, New Communications Forum, virtual worlds