Some thoughts about Second Life and Social Marketing Consultants
I have been trying SL on and off for a couple of months - mostly off btw as I have a life. I have been quietly watching real world brands, agency’s and consultants get all hot and bothered about it and the supposed potential. I have to admit that I was intrigued BUT hang on a minute a couple of things have jolted me into writing a few comments.
1. There is a growing debate about the energy that it takes to run an online world like SL - apparently it’s carbon footprint or whatever its called is massive.
“..the average citizen of Brazil consumes 1,884 kWh, which, given the fact that my avatar estimate was rough and conservative, means that your average Second Life avatar consumes about as much electricity as your average Brazilian.
So its not environmentally friendly then, which leads me to my second point ..
2. SL and Web 2.0 seem to have seeded the rise of consultants like Social Signal and a myriad other pro social bloggers who seem to have this slightly holier than though vibe. I’m using Social Signal as an example as I met them a couple of times briefly, they seem like ok people so nothing personal. They are positioning themselves specifically as social media / marketing experts, into all the environment and community stuff and generally being the kind of citizens that make me feel a bit lazy in comparison. Nothing wrong with that other than they make various claims about pioneering this and that and seem to be very over excited about SL. Which begs the question Social Signallers how does slightly over excited support for such an environmentally unfriendly business square with your erm social and environmental position?
Like I say nothing personal but when you and others like you (particularly in Vancouver) position yourself specifically in this way one has to assume that you will also be aware of the environmental impact of the technologies you are promoting.
3. The numbers for SL are so small that it beggars belief that so may brands are getting involved. I am going to do some more research and see what demo information there is because I am convinced there are may users like me - technically competent, interested BUT completely turned off by the dodgy graphics / environment and the overwhelming feeling that I could be using my time better. I am sure most people try it and then never come back.
More to come
Not to worry! We don’t take any of this personally, Simon — we’re
all working to find the best tool for the various challenges we take on.
You might want to give the comments thread under Nick Carr’s back-of-
an-envelope estimate another read, though — especially towards the
bottom. Markus Breuer makes a pretty persuasive case that the actual
energy use of an avatar is about four per cent (!) of what Nick calculates.
In any event, the amount of energy any particular tool consumes —
whether it’s Second Life, a streetcar or your own blog — is only
part of the picture. You have to weigh such costs against the
benefits it achieves. (Which is one reason why Al Gore’s right-wing
critics, who point to his home’s energy consumption, are so far off-
base. That, and the fact that he diligently counters it with carbon
offsets… but that’s a whole other story.)
Running the server that powers ChangeEverything.ca requires its share
of electricity — probably not that dissimilar to the draw from a
Second Life sim — but that energy helped bring us the phenomena of
Got Hats? and Envirowoman. We never try to justify a tool for its own
sake, whether it’s blogging, podcasting or Second Life; we look at
what it can do to advance our clients’ goals.
There’s a more subtle point that’s often missed when people react
against technological change: the activity a particular tool
displaces. Transit uses energy, but it’s an improvement over the
private automobile; manufacturing solar panels takes resources, but
they pale in comparison to, say, coal-fired generation of
electricity. The frequent failure to recognize those advances is one
of the more unfair uphill battles that renewable energy and other new
(or renewed!) technologies have to fight.
So when you consider Second Life, by all means consider its energy
consumption. But think about this, too: one of the most hideously
wasteful activities we undertake, activists and corporate executives
alike, is air travel. And immersive environments like Second Life
offer real prospects for replacing travel, especially now that
features like voice conferencing are being added. Already, companies
like Sun Microsystems and IBM are turning to options like SL to
supplant face-to-face business meetings.
Now, if you want to argue that Second Life has a long way to go
before its interface is comfortable and easy to work with, and before
it has the kind of stability we’d all like to see, you won’t find
much disagreement from me. But its growth has continued at an
impressive pace; the number of people “in-world” at any given time
has roughly doubled even since I wrote the white paper you linked to.
That tells me that there’s an experience here so compelling that
users are willing to leap the hurdles thrown up by tech shortcomings
to get to it.
And those shortcomings are being overcome, bit by bit. Open-sourcing
the client software (and soon the server software) will help. Better
performance, improved rendering and an increasingly compelling
feature set are amplifying Second Life’s underlying strength: an
online interactive experience unlike any other, one that allows rich
engagement and dialogue.
It isn’t for everyone (as someone who doesn’t click with SL, you’re
by no means alone!) — but then, no medium is, especially online.
We’d do our clients and their publics a disservice if we rejected a
tool out of hand because we dislike it. Assessing it dispassionately,
and asking it who it can help us reach and how it can help us engage
with them, is something our clients rightly expect from us.