I've been listening to marketing podcasts (if you don't know what a podcast is, stay tuned for later posts) lately, particularly casts like Across The Sound (below) from Joseph Jaffe. A few others like Managing the Gray by C. C. Chapman (also a partner of Joseph Jaffe in the new company crayon) and For Immediate Release (also a partner). These guys are big into the "New Marketing" or "social media." Social media is a coming thing. May be here already. Connecting via the internet in ways that were not possible even two or three years ago.
But SecondLife is a different thing. It's a 3-D virtual world. Not a game. No objective. No winning. There is a possiblity to trade real money. But note..that's trade. There's a market. A market requires sellers (of virtual Linden Dollars or L$), and buyers (with real $ in some currency). There is also an exchange which allows residents (that's what a person is called in SecondLife, almost always abbreviated SL) to buy L$ for US$.
My first reaction to all of this was, "This is neat, but I don't get it." I thought it was just age (I'm kind of a old codger in the PC world since I remember when there wasn't a PC and my first PC was a Trash-80 [Radio Shack's TRS-80] with cassette storage and 64K RAM [woohoo!]). I was also trained as a CPA (though I've always worked in IT).
Anyway, if you Google "SecondLife I don't get it," you find out that I'm not the only one. I could take comfort from that.
But there's this nagging at the back of my mind (what's left of it)...Toyota just opened a virutal showroom in SL...GM has a virtual showroom...Honda, I hear. And Jaffe, Chapman, and the FIR guys just opened Crayon in the virutal world. They may be a lot of things, but a quick read of their blogs and a careful read of the various published books from the group will tell you pretty quickly that stupid they're not.
So...
I will get it. Just give me time. And if you find Baacus Celt wandering around in SL, tell him where to go...
...wait...
I didn't mean that like it sounded.
Across the Sound: ATS #61 - The New Marketing Podcast from crayonville Island
