Why destination guide editors should be taken into account

Yesterday I wrote a blog post on the importance of pictures for web promotion and for the Second Life destination guide. I explained how to make a picture relevant for potential customers and what steps to consider for the image creation. I even recommended to pay professionals for creating a picture. This is something I shouldn't have done, because Linden Lab might decide to take a different path and make your investment useless.

Game creator Loki Eliot on his sim "Escapades" (photo taken from his SL feed)

In a comment to my postSecond Life game creator Loki Eliot pointed out:

A photo tells a story (Game promotion 1)

I had a half finished post on the role of pictures - for web promotion in general and the SL destination guide in particular - in my drawer for some time. Today I saw Iris Ophelia from New World Notes underlining the importance of photos for event promotion:

If you're organizing an event or a fair, do me a favor: Ditch the stock photos and hire someone awesome like any of the artists behind these, because they'll hook you up with eye-catching art that actually tells me something about your event.

I could not agree more with her. In the past Months - since I am writing this blog - I realized that most game creators invest hundreds or even thousands of working hours into the creation of their builds and the scripting of the game elements. But when it comes to the marketing of their game release, they seem to believe that a good product does not need much marketing. 

This picture from Billy Dollinger would be a great promotional image for a football game - much better than showing another empty stadium...

Here is a countering quote from a marketing professional and I totally agree on his point:

There’s a widely known theory in business: “If you build it, they will come.” This actually couldn’t be more incorrect. [...] One thing we’ve seen is that most startup founders focus so much of their time and money on their product and the launch that they completely neglect to develop a strategy [...] for acquiring users and actually marketing the product. 

All Second Life game reviews that I have published on my blog - so far

After four Months of blogging, 31 blog posts, 16 game reviews and 4800 page views I thought that new visitors would appreciate to find an overview on all my blog posts on SL games. Such a page can now be found in the top menu under the heading "All Game Reviews". Hopefully some people will find the service helpful.

I am a bit sad that not a single Second Life game developer has used the possibility to "Showcase their game" yet. It is a normal thing for the Second Life artist community to send out press releases about their exhibits to Second Life travel blogs. This habit seems to be completely unknown in the small SL game creators community - if you can call the small bunch of Second Life game creators a community. As far as I can tell, they do not seem to interact much with each other or to share resources in any way.

Picture from Electrobit City

The only game - as far as I am aware - that has been actively promoted to SL bloggers was THE GARDEN. Madpea games and Loki Eliot do at least provide information about their games on their own websites. No wonder that it is much easier for me to regularly report on their games.

As I am a hobbyist writing for my personal enjoyment, there is only a small selection of games that I can review at a certain time. Especially if no informative text blogs from the developers is available to me.

Game creators can showcase their games

I have recently added a new page to my blog Second Life Play Instinct where game creators have the possibility to submit information about their games. In the past I have been asked by content creators to blog about their releases and I did not find sufficient time to do so. Second Life Play Instinct is the only blog that is centered around games in Second Life. As every content creator deserves to have their game presented you now have the chance to submit your presentation and I will publish it as soon as possible.

I hope that people will use this channel to advertise their games and that readers will enjoy this new way of presenting locations in Second Life. 

The SL Profile Feed - Linden Lab's unexplored "Shared Creative Space"

Overcoming the gap between in-world and logged-out

Linden Lab is now marketing itself as "Makers of Shared Creative Spaces". And they even might have created a "shared creative" space by accident. It could become the intersection between the in-world SL experience and the web. It could also become a multiplayer interactive online narrative. I am talking about the SL profile feed with its snapshot function. Most people haven't realized its potential and they are not even using it. But let's start from the beginning.

Can I seriously be talking about the SL profile feed - this feature that never got adopted by the SL users? The SL feed is what you get to see first when you click on someone's profile in the viewer. It's basically an overview of past status updates made by a resident. When Linden Lab acquired  Avatars United in 2010, they integrated pieces of that social network for avatars into the Second Life platform. As a result the profiles of the residents switched to a web-based layout and SL profile feeds were added. However up to now the majority of SL residents doesn't write any status updates and their feed remains empty. Most of the time you'll find automatically generated entries like "Xyx resident changed their display name to Xyx+".

Nothing shared at this moment...

So where is the potential? Well at some point Linden Lab added a little but decisive new feature: the ability to directly upload snapshots from Second Life to the feed. SL residents can now publish their in-world experiences to the web directly from the viewer itself. So far the SL experience is mostly limited to what is happening in-world. Either you are there or you miss. At best you can hope that someone is going to tell you about it.