Marketing communication in SecondLife

Commerce in virtual environments is taking a lot of forms. Videogames are taking advantage of microtransactions and delivering different versions of the game at different price points and subscription levels. Virtual worlds like there.com (defunct) and Secondlife encourage actual commerce as residents buy clothes, cars, homes and home decor, etc.These are microtransactions, too, with most items costing mere (real world) pennies.

I started the project with participant observation: I went shopping and talked to people about shopping, goods available, how to determine quality. I joined store customer groups. I read store and designer blogs. Then I got more actively involved in inworld commerce. I started a company with an inworld store and a web store so I can see what kinds of data store owners have available. I have a store blog and a facebook page. I have been to workshops for store owners.

The research activities so far have suggested some research questions so far

• What is the role of freebies - traffic builder or economy destroyer?
• How do you attract new customers in an environment with little mass media?
• What motivates people to open an inworld store? (many store owners have said they're definitely not doing it for the money)
• How effective are the various means of communicating with customers - inworld (group announcements, group chats, events,....) and elsewhere on the web (blogs, twitter, facebook, plurk, ....)

The Role of Memorials in Virtual Worlds

During an earlier interview project on why people bring religion into the virtual world, I ran across some memorials to Second Life users who had died in real life. Since then I have heard of memorial services and displays for residents whose real life owners passed away.

This behavior is not limited to Second Life. Facebook lets family members edit a deceased family member's facebook page to create a memorial for friends. Friends have staged inworld funerals for World of Warcraft players who died in real life. These preliminary observations suggest several research questions:

• What form do these memorials take? Are there user or world characteristics that explain the differences in form?
• Do these virtual memorial activities resemble memorial activities in real life?
• Do any theories about real life memorial activities seem to explain virtual memorial activities?

• Griefing in SecondLife Definitions, examples, and several explanations of behavior many consider anti-social
• Serious Games Summit Presentation on Advergames Description of an experiment I ran and whether participants saw advergames more as advertisement (with lowered expectations for the game play) or as games (expecing these games to be as fully developed as other games they could play on the web). Participants indicated overwhelmingly that they considered advergames to be games and were disappointed when the gameplay was lacking and blamed the advertiser.
• Understanding the Appeal of Zombie Films - paper presented at International Communication Association annual meeting My dissertation drew on disposition theory - people's evaluation of a movie (for instance) is based on how characters they like are treated. I looked at zombie movies because there are few redeeming characteristics given to zombies (unlike vampires who are often treated as sexual beings). In a content analysis I looked at zombie movies over time and discovered changes in how both humans and zombies are treated. This suggests that projects can not just choose content based on genre, but must take into account changes over time and development of sub genres.
• Online Political Discussion Groups - paper presented at American Political Science Association annual meeting
• Political Participation Annotated Bibliography An early attempt to identify resources related to political participation which I drew on for several projects
• Virtual Communities Annotated Bibliography An early attempt to identify resources related to virtual communities which I used in several class projects

Return to Kim's homepage