Second Life and Business Presence: The Center Must Hold.

DarkLondon has a good summary of discussions related to business presence and [w:SecondLife]. But in all those discussions, everyone is trying to find a silver bullet in some academic sense when they are missing the most important aspect of any business presence.

The key to a good SecondLife presence has 3 factors:

1. Good Product/Service.
2. Good Interaction.
3. Good Community.

Most conversation neglects Good Product/Service. Just because the [w:blogosphere] or marketing (and how different are the two now?) say something is good does not mean it is good. In some ways, a SecondLife presence is a litmus test...

Good Interaction is product/service dependent. If you sell widgets, a presence should have information on what the widgets do, how to get a widget, how to use a widget - and maybe even allow people to give feedback on how to improve upon the widget. Feature of the presence should be as consistent with other SecondLife presences as possible so that there is little or no learning curve associated with it. A good presence is a double edged sword - we see it in blogs and in forums on corporate websites - bad stuff does get said, and while some tend to bury those issues... successful companies tend to bring these out to the fore and address them publicly.

A 'good presence' in SecondLife is much the same. If you ignore the community that revolves around the product through the presence, you have nothing.

Last, but by no means least, is the community. The community has a voice. A presence should crush barriers between the community and the business. It should be a permeable membrane, allowing informational and opinion [w:osmosis].

But Traffic Says...

Traffic is a big game in SecondLife. Everyone wants high traffic numbers based on what the land reveals, but any smart business would be interested in the quality of their traffic. On the web with advertising on websites, it is seen as a percentage of the amount of people who click on an ad versus the overall traffic. Anyone in SecondLife can create a high traffic area - few create an area where the traffic is of high quality. What is quality? Once again, it revolves around the product or service as well as the community.

Many people make the mistake of trying to isolate one part of this triangle and talk it to death. While each side is important, it means nothing by itself. The smaller one side is, the longer the other sides must be. That is how simple the concept is... but if you want to dig into trigonometry, it can get very complicated indeed. And this same triangle holds true for weblogs and any other form of interactive technology...

The Center Must Hold.