Lack of viral infection kills "Life"

Despite all the initial media buzz and business interest in this virtual social site it really never got a first life.

Ahhh, Second Life -- A place where there really is no there there. Apparently there's no ROI there, either.

For those of you smart enough not to know, in Second Life people perambulate around the 3D world using digital replicas (avatars), buy land and buildings, and pay real money to purchase fake clothes, weapons and music. Reuters opened a "news bureau" there and staffed it with one "Adam Reuters" (right). Heck the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is even doing forecasts there.

Nor were they the only ones who wanted to jump on a bandwagon that wasted no time in looking for a shark to jump. Here's a short list of organizations that decided this was the next frontier of marketing: Adidas, Major League Baseball, Aloft Hotel Suites, Make Magazine, American Apparel, Bartle Bogle Hegarty, Reebok, BBC Radio 1, Scion, CNET, Dell, Sun Microsystems, Duran Duran, Vivos, IBM, Warner Bros Music, Leo Burnett, Wired Magazine and H&R Block.

That's a lot of marketing smarts (in addition to Duran Duran) going after an estimated 200,000 actual people. Perhaps they got lured in by  press reports which breathlessly claimed: "Membership has skyrocketed from 100,000 at the beginning of 2005 to more than 1.5 million by press time. Growth continues at a monthly rate of 10%-12%, but some analysts predict 9 million members by June."

Can't really blame Linden Labs for the coverage, though.  To quote CNet: "Critics contend that journalists don't understand the difference between "registered accounts" and "active users," and that execs at Linden Lab haven't exactly gone out of their way to clear up the confusion." (Don't you hate it when they critize your profession AND THEY'RE RIGHT?) 

But still an eighth of 3 million people doesn't suck, right? Well not if they see this as a superficial attempt to grab some attention. The German marketing research agency Komjuniti surveyed 200 Second Life users and found: 

• 72% of respondents expressed themselves as being disappointed with the activities of the companies in Second Life. 
• Over a third of them were unaware of the branded presence.
• 42% said they thought it constituted nothing more than a short-term trend, lacking durable commitment from the companies.
• 7% consider that it has a positive influence on brand image and their future buying behaviour.

OOOOOOPS. Who you gonna believe -- the research or the press? Maybe, in this case, both.

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