The WWF is a year or two behind on the “Second Life is cool” curve and have built Conservation Island. My favorite snarkblog Valleywag has been crowing about the virtual wasteland that Second Life is for RL (real life) marketers for years and others are starting to pick it up.
For those not in the know, Second Life is a virtual world that gives its residents incredible freedom, but at the cost of a clunky user interface and high learning curve. It took me about 5 hours of in world time to ‘get’ how cool Second Life was when I start playing a few years ago and it held my attention for a few months, but then I got bored with the lack of real community, slow loads, and lack of anything really fun to do.
So now the World Wildlife Fund has wasted a bunch of cash building Conservation Island, where you can chat with a virtual panda or elephant about how important it is to save the world.
What a big fat waste of money.
You used to be able to generate a far amount of real world buzz by getting into Second Life. All sorts of big brands took the plunge- American Apparel, Starwood Hotels, Adidas, and even Coldwell Banker. All have failed to come close to what any sane person would call being a success. Just about all of them were launched with great fanfare and then abandoned. Second Life’s technical architecture is not friendly to large gatherings of people (more than 40 in one place is a problem) and the vast majority of Second Life’s population stick to their home land and established in-world brands.
So the WWF probably spent ~$20k on their new presence plus the $1,500 a month in island maintenance for what- a few mentions on green blogs? No one is going to go to Conservation Island. It’ll be shut down within the next six months (unless they were dumb enough to sign a longer contract with their developer Enable Interactive).
Via My Green Element
Update: Check out this great walk through of Conservation Island by an in world SL writer. It’s a great read and goes into detail about why WWF’s is a stinker.
Update 2: For some unknown technical reason, one of the comments made below isn’t show up. It’s a good one and I’m tired of trying to get it to show in comments, so I’ll just paste it in here for your reading.
From chrischunfassbinder:
“and even Coldwell Banker. All have failed to come close to what any sane person would call being a success.”
While I can’t speak with first hand knowledge about the other corporations in SL that were mentioned in the above article, I can say for Coldwell Banker’s case, it was a success by far exceeded expectations.
- Generated thousands of in-world relationships and fostered good will by providing low-cost virtual land for sale and rental.
- While neither of Coldwell Banker’s two currently running projects in SL put them in the black from land sales and retals, as this was never a goal, the rental communities and land sales do contribute greatly in defraying land tier and operating costs.
- Initial project returned, and continues to return, a significant ROI from real-world and in-world media publicity and branding by distributed advertising in over 1000 sims creating hundreds of thousands of impressions.
- Deciding factor for their recent earning of “Most Innovative Brokerage or Franchise” from Inman. http://www.realogy.com/media/pr/show_release.cfm?id=422
“Just about all of them were launched with great fanfare and then abandoned.”
Yes, that is a problem and was becoming an all too common practice. This is where I feel the large majority of the backlash comes from. Can’t just build a neat looking and interactive 3D site and be done with it. It takes getting the word out to the masses already in-world well as having real reasons for them to visit, return and remember the location and corporation. Not to mention SL is all about being social, without live visitors in the same location and other forms of real-time and continual social interaction, might as well be using an off-line 3D design program.
As for Coldwell Banker’s continual live presence in SL. They’ve been live staffed 30 hours a week since early March. Mon/Tue/Thur/Fri 2PM to 8PM PST/PDT & Saturday Noon to 6PM PST/PDT. Main headquarters is always open for those interested in checking out services that are offered, pay rent, leave a message for a specific agent, pickup some exclusive home and building related ‘freebies’ and a whole bunch of other themed to match Coldwell Banker’s real life services are available.
“technical architecture is not friendly to large gatherings of people (more than 40 in one place is a problem)”
Yes, this is something all developers who plan for such close proximity, high traffic, needs must take into account. Various workarounds exist. “Mirror” locations, each in it’s own sim (max avatar count per sim, estate sim: 60-80 comfortably, mainland sim: 30-40). Build across four corners of a set of sims (estate sims: ~120, mainland sim: ~100). Or even go basic tech by distribution of high traffic events for everyone to enjoy by relaying audio streams, in-coming/out-going chat, even video being recorded from the host sim and then streamed to other sims or able to be watched in real-time with a regular video player (nearly unlimited).
As for Coldwell Banker, the project is spread over a hundred sims, concern about the max avatar cap per sim isn’t an issue.
Currently with SL a lot of things are being done right, others totally wrong and now the backlash is greatly helping many to see what works, what doesn’t and how to improve. As with most new technologies, early adopters take the risks while the mainstream and snarks wait and see.
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Noelle dEstries
Noelle d'Estries, an early GO employee who took on the varied roles of Community Manager, green celebrity blogger, and more. She currently runs worstcookever.com GO entered Noelle's life in February 2007 while she was burning tires in her backyard. A phone call from the green gods at GO, burnt out the fires. Now, Noelle happily wears her GO sweatshirt while eating organic veggies and asking for paper, not plastic. A regular at the local farmer's market, Noelle shuns raking leaves and lawn maintenance, while making gourmet foods constantly. When not staring at her computer screen, she spends time with her equally attractive dog, Tessa, cat, Tim and lover Paul. She currently holds all three point records at RIT and could eat avocados and drink wine for the rest of her life.
12 Responses to WWF wastes money on Second Life: No one will go to Conservation Island
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Ur u kiding me WWF is for the Future
Hmmm… more than six months seem to have passed since this entry was posted and Conservation Island is still going. So I guess you can’t be right all the time eh?
[...] Your page is on StumbleUpon [...]
[...] estate excess and pollution. When someone in SecondLife starts an avatar or buys property and then abandons the world – what happens to all this unused albeit virtual stuff? Will someone else come along and rebuild [...]
[...] in the World Wildfife Fund Conservation island in Second Life, and not for the reasons that outworlders like Planetsave.com are citing, of unconscionable expenditure of tax-exempt public-relations funds on virtual territory [...]
[...] WWF wastes money on Second Life: No one will go to Conservation Island & Blog… [...]
[...] Henderson said: August 20, 2007 “Once you start playing Second Life, you can’t stop WWF wastes money on Second Life: No one will go to Conservation Island « Blog Archive « … said: August 21, 2007 “[…] Via My Green Element […] Liam Epstein said: August [...]
Chris, I don’t know why your comment isn’t showing up so I just pasted it into the end of the post above. Anyone reading this should scroll up and see read his comment if you haven’t already.
“and even Coldwell Banker. All have failed to come close to what any sane person would call being a success.”
While I can’t speak with first hand knowledge about the other corporations in SL that were mentioned in the above article, I can say for Coldwell Banker’s case, it was a success by far exceeded expectations.
- Generated thousands of in-world relationships and fostered good will by providing low-cost virtual land for sale and rental.
- While neither of Coldwell Banker’s two currently running projects in SL put them in the black from land sales and retals, as this was never a goal, the rental communities and land sales do contribute greatly in defraying land tier and operating costs.
- Initial project returned, and continues to return, a significant ROI from real-world and in-world media publicity and branding by distributed advertising in over 1000 sims creating hundreds of thousands of impressions.
- Deciding factor for their recent earning of “Most Innovative Brokerage or Franchise” from Inman. http://www.realogy.com/media/pr/show_release.cfm?id=422
“Just about all of them were launched with great fanfare and then abandoned.”
Yes, that is a problem and was becoming an all too common practice. This is where I feel the large majority of the backlash comes from. Can’t just build a neat looking and interactive 3D site and be done with it. It takes getting the word out to the masses already in-world well as having real reasons for them to visit, return and remember the location and corporation. Not to mention SL is all about being social, without live visitors in the same location and other forms of real-time and continual social interaction, might as well be using an off-line 3D design program.
As for Coldwell Banker’s continual live presence in SL. They’ve been live staffed 30 hours a week since early March. Mon/Tue/Thur/Fri 2PM to 8PM PST/PDT & Saturday Noon to 6PM PST/PDT. Main headquarters is always open for those interested in checking out services that are offered, pay rent, leave a message for a specific agent, pickup some exclusive home and building related ‘freebies’ and a whole bunch of other themed to match Coldwell Banker’s real life services are available.
“technical architecture is not friendly to large gatherings of people (more than 40 in one place is a problem)”
Yes, this is something all developers who plan for such close proximity, high traffic, needs must take into account. Various workarounds exist. “Mirror” locations, each in it’s own sim (max avatar count per sim, estate sim: 60-80 comfortably, mainland sim: 30-40). Build across four corners of a set of sims (estate sims: ~120, mainland sim: ~100). Or even go basic tech by distribution of high traffic events for everyone to enjoy by relaying audio streams, in-coming/out-going chat, even video being recorded from the host sim and then streamed to other sims or able to be watched in real-time with a regular video player (nearly unlimited).
As for Coldwell Banker, the project is spread over a hundred sims, concern about the max avatar cap per sim isn’t an issue.
Currently with SL a lot of things are being done right, others totally wrong and now the backlash is greatly helping many to see what works, what doesn’t and how to improve. As with most new technologies, early adopters take the risks while the mainstream and snarks wait and see.
[...] ??????????????????????????? http://www.planetsave.com/blog/2007/08/21/wwf-wastes-money-on-second-life-no-one-will-go-to-conserva… ?????????Friendster?Wikipedia?Second Life???? [...]
I would venture to bet that I know more about virtual worlds than you dbacon, and certainly enough to have an opinion on Conservation Island’s chances of success. I’ve been hacking around computers and virtual spaces since back in 92, spent two years running the largest player run corporation in the MMOG Star Ways Galaxies, and was a resident of Second Life for a good year plus. I spent three months as an in world architect in Second Life and keep very up to date on the world of virtual space development.
I have no doubt that virtual worlds will be a huge part of our digital future and don’t mean my criticisms of the WWF’s project in Second Life to come across as a slamming of virtual worlds in general. But on this one project, at this one time, in this one platform, I’m right.
There is zero chance of me feeling embarrassed about this call in the coming years because Conservation Island won’t be around for that long. I am hopeful that we’ll see great green projects in other virtual platforms, but Conservation Island isn’t it.
There are so many better ways the WWF could have spent the money they wasted on Conservation island. While I applaud their willingness to try unconventional marketing techniques, I wish they had been able to see through the pie in the sky marketing spin that Second Life and it’s uber class of resident developers have been pushing.
For an individual involved with progressive ideas your comments regarding Conservation Island are painfully short sighted and serve only to diminish the efforts of others. Do yourself a favor and learn as much as you can about the concept of virtual worlds before you decide to make such unintelligent commentary. It’s applications will be as wide spread and ubiquitous as the www. Instead of dissing an idea that has such enormous promise why don’t you spend your time trying to come up with ways to overcome the temporary limitations that you point out? Over the next few years, you will come to be quite embarassed about your comments as they serve only to illuminate an overwhelmingly small minded thinker. Sorry, don’t mean to be so harsh, this is my first post EVER on a blog. Your comments are just so damaging to anyone trying to make things better!