Novel idea: actually learn from users!

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Greg Verdino, chief strategy officer at social media consulting agency Crayon, argues corporate brands should integrate social media and community capabilities rather than simply creating branded spaces. For instance, he pointed to successful interactive corporate applications by book publishers involving virtual author tours and readings with authors.

So says Enid Burns (Mr Burns’ sister?) over at Clikz in an article about corporate brands and how they have so far got it wrong.

Of course, Enid talks about a report but there’s no actual link to it. Bloomin’ frustrating that! Perhaps ClikZ might like to listen to the blogosphere and discover that we really detest that ‘old media’, ‘mummy knows best’, ‘mummy has secrets she must keep from you to keep you safe’ practice!

The report, "Serious Games for Marketing: Learnings from Corporate and Amateur Efforts in Second Life," from One to One Interactive’s T=Zero research division, compares the efforts of corporate- and user-built locations in the virtual world based on aesthetics, popularity, and marketing to analyze why user-built sites seem to gather more visitors than name brand counterparts.

You can find the report here at the One to One Interactive site.
[note: important info about the report at bottom of this post!]

Overview

"Serious games" refers to the use of games and game technologies for non-entertainment purposes. Traditionally, the education, health, and military sectors were the primary actors in this domain, but in the past few years, marketing has arisen as a major sub-domain of this area. Examples range from the selling of advertising inside video games to dozens of small, experimental corporate-sponsored spaces in virtual worlds such as Second Life, to the fully realized first-person shooter America’s Army, developed as a recruitment tool for the U.S. Army. The results have been uneven, as most of these early efforts have had an experimental edge. This report releases findings that compare player engagement in some of Second Life’s most successful user-generated areas compared with some of the more ambitious corporate-sponsored efforts in Second Life.

In making these comparisons, particular attention was paid to:

• Production Quality
• Publicity and Advertising
• Social Infrastructure
• Role of Commerce
• Population Density

From this analysis, we learned that the top corporate builds are as good as or better than user-created builds in some areas, while lagging behind in other areas. Based on our findings, we offer five insights for the design of future branding and marketing-oriented builds in virtual worlds, such as Second Life. Download the full report, free of charge, to learn more.

For which, of course, you will be required to hand over your email address, name, birth-date of first child and naming rights of your next SL island…

For a tech company supposedly on the leading edge of VW and web2.0, why does their marketing have such a heavy web1.0 stench?

Downloading the report — important info!

Colleagues: here’s how you get around it — feel free to enter any ol’ details because you then get taken to the pdf itself, no matter if you enter ‘Mickey Mouse’ or not.

One To One: just let us have it without the heavy-handed marketing guff and search the blogosphere for mentions of it; you will then find your target ’sneezers’!