Second Life: Back to PR 101?

“Whew! All those virtual, spiky-haired avatars were running, swimming and flying around without any reliable public relations consulting. How did they manage to get anything done?”

Aaron Uhrmacher from Text 100, the first PR consultancy to establish its offices in Second Life, denied that RL companies are establishing the presence in SL just to get coverage in real life media. He claims, instead, that the real value of virtual worlds comes from actual engagement with the virtual communities.

Personally, I’m not convinced. And some of the residents of Second Life also seem to disagree with this view. Interestingly, PR professionals have managed to gain quite negative media coverage in the SL media, especially The Second Life Herald. According to some residents, PR agencies have largely abused SL in several ways.

Apparently, what upsets them the most are the “first claims” in the RL media – claiming they were first to do things that some of the residents did long before. Whether they are purposefully stealing other people’s merits or just displaying poor knowledge of SL history, isn’t the issue. Some of them are just doing a bad job as PR professionals. They obviously failed to understand one of the most important norms in SL community.
Another issue bothering the residents is the phenomenon of channel abandonment, as well as lack of respect in communication.

One blogger who was present at the Intel SL press conference made this comment on his blog:
“So let me get this straight. We can come and listen to a dry monologue about a new Island opening that was news last week, provided we don't actually talk to each other, or the Intel guys, and that we "show some respect" and direct questions through people that clearly need to go back to PR 101? “

In response to such behavior the residents of Dreamland, which constitutes 10% of the land mass and 10% of the active residents in SL, voted to ban dishonest PR and marketing flacks from their region. Such misuse of SL will join the list of bannable offences like theft, violation of intellectual property, sexual harassment, online rape and distribution of child pornography. Nice, ha?

It seems to me that some PRs need to brush up on their professional ethic and basic skills, such as doing research and developing relationships with the communities they are part of. So far, some of them didn’t do a very good job for PR as a profession, or their clients. Whether they want to admit it or not, I think most of them are primarily using SL to achieve certain goals for their clients in RL, and don’t show real interest in the (rather small) SL community.

Andrew McGregor (Text 100) about Second Life




Steve Rubel about Second Life