Like Sand Through the Hour Glass …

… so are the days of our marketing lives!

I recently blogged about the upstart virtual worlds like Second Life and their potential use in advertising campaigns. Well, just like that, along comes a Wall Street Journal article about how Second Life has fallen on hard times as experimenting marketers have delayed, cut back, or just plain abandoned their involvement with the virtual world.

Not all feel that the virtual world craze is going south, however, pointing to the continuing growth of other, newer virtual reality sites. There are at least a dozen other virtual worlds out there in cyber space, and marketers are watching closely to see who is going where. The sudden explosion of these homes for one’s alter-ego has marketers struggling to keep pace with lightning fast changes in consumer preferences.

What’s happening to Second Life? Some theorize that it’s due to the need to use special software to create that alter-ego. Others feel it’s because Second Life fails to provide enough to do to keep a “resident’s” interest.

On the other hand, word comes that Microsoft has invested $240 million for a 1.6% stake in Facebook for the exclusive right to sell advertising that is targeted to the social network’s denizens. Microsoft beat out Google for this apparently highly desirable right. Astoundingly, the deal values Facebook at $15 billion (with a “b”)!

Where is it all going to end? No idea. The only thing we can know for sure is that no matter what you call it … new media, web 2.0, or even web 3.0, the internet is a tremendously exciting place to experiment. But whatever you happen to call it, it is our responsibility not to thrust it upon our clients just because it’s new, but to test constantly to see if the opportunities of the web are relevant to the targeted goals we hope to achieve.

Grant Johnson

Johnson Direct LLC

800-710-2750