Brave New Future of SEO & SEM? Marketing thru Second Life
I came to hear about Second Life after reading about it in a blog by Greg Sterling, former editor and director of the Kelsey Group’s Interactive Local Media program. If you haven’t heard about it, read about it in this article. Second Life is basically a virtual reality (“VR”) platform (or, “world”, or “metaverse” if you will). People go in there, buy VR property or other objects, and interact with thousands of other participants.
“So what?” you might say. So, how does this differ from World of Warcraft, the Sims Online, or EverQuest?
First, there’s no goal to Second Life, per se — users just go into the thing, hang out, and interact with other users and the virtual environments. Second, users can own property in this world, and they can sell the property for real money in the real world! (Contrast with EverQuest, where they’ve actively worked to keep people from selling characters on eBay and such.) Finally, people have begun marketing through this new media — like gangbusters!
Copyright 2006, Linden Research, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
People like Anshe Chung are now making hundreds of thousands of dollars per year by designing and selling the SL virtual real estate. Others are offering services like architecture, event planning, selling artworks, scripting, and even financial or legal services. Some universities are now teaching within the space, too!
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 10/24/2006
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Filed under: Futurism, Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, SEO online-marketing, Second-Life, SEM, SEO, virtual-reality, VR
Verizon to Spin-Off Verizon Information Services & Superpages.com
Verizon’s official announcement regarding the spin-off plans came out just a short while ago. Verizon Communications Corp. is spinning off the business unit that I work for, Verizon Information Services, and its local information website, Superpages.com.
The new company’s name is “Idearc Inc.”, and it will operate under marks of “Idearc” and “Idearc Media“:
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I’m not allowed to make any sort of forward-sounding business statements in relation to this until the spin-off is completed, due to the usual SEC rules. This is one of the common-sense limits one must place on one’s self, if one is an employee who happens to blog in one’s personal time! 🙂 (Wow! That sounded inhuman and recursive, didn’t it!) While I am an employee of VIS, I’m not speaking here in any sort of official capacity for my company, and any interpretations I place here are completely my own viewpoint. Obviously, nothing I say should be used in making stock purchase/sale decisions!
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 10/18/2006
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Filed under: Design, Marketing, Yellow Pages idearc, Idearc-Media, Local Search, Online-Yellow-Pages, Verizon-Information-Services, Yellow Pages
7 Tips for Achieving Online Brand Recognition
I’ve worked for Verizon SuperPages.com for about a decade now, and it’s always been a bit deflating when John Q. Public asks me where I work, I tell them “SuperPages.com” — and then there’s sometimes this faint look of incomprehension that crosses the person’s face as they fail to recognize the name. Oh, sure, they recognize the Verizon name, if I drop that — and they often tell me they use our wireless phone service or somesuch. But do they recognize “SuperPages.com”? Not always.
Why is it that our brand name doesn’t have wider recognition? I’d wonder. After all, our site has certainly been around long enough, and has been used by plenty of people. We’ve been one of the primary websites of a Fortune 10 company!
Well, maybe we finally reached the tipping point where this is concerned, earlier this year. We noticed that the SuperPages.com name was mentioned in the Sally Forth comic strip. Did we reach brand identifiability with this? Is having your brand name mentioned in popular culture media the sign that you’ve finally arrived — that your brand name is at last graduating into the coveted household brandname recogizability status that trademarks like Coca-Cola, Ford Motors, Wal-mart, and yes, even Google, have enjoyed?
It’s made me wonder what it takes to build and achieve a recognizable online brand in this day and age. How is it that a well-founded, major corporation like ours has worked for years, spending millions in promotion, while a relative upstart like Google can come along and zoom past us in brand recognition within just a few years?
I have some ideas on the subject which traditional marketers may not agree with, so read on and I’ll describe what I think it takes to make it into the mass consciousness.
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 10/11/2006
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Filed under: Marketing Brand-Name-Recognition, Branding, Building-Online-Brands, Marketing
