It seems that Linden Lab is looking for a “Social Media Marketing Guru“. Why, oh why, is it “guru” and not something professional-sounding? I’m pretty sure that whoever gets the position, they won’t find themselves sitting in a Battery Street pod with their name and the word “guru” pinned on the outside; and while terms like this may sound super-cool and west-coast “hip”, they actually come across as a combination of trite, clichéd and outright cringe-worthy.
Or is that just my English sensibilities?
When you get past the hip-speak, the post looks to be a mix of both strategic marketing via social media tools to gather new users, and something of a communications manager responsible for Lab / user (resident) interactions.
The former, I can understand. social networks do have a potential to bring-in users to Second Life, providing it is handled correctly. As I mentioned in Tell me a story… the manner in which LL are currently attempting to leverage Facebook has “fail” written all over it. The entire approach is arse-backwards and as such needs to be redefined.
The latter has me a little worried; we’ve already had Amanda Linden proudly announcing the coming on the new Community Platform – and then promptly pointing at Facebook as “the” way to stay abreast of all the latest news on SL (sure a case of “foot, meet mouth” if ever there was one). Now it seems that we’re going to possibly see a further push of LL-to-resident communications away from their own platform.
I’m not entirely sure that if this is the case, it’s a good idea. Certainly, it is very, very gratifying to be able to Tweet to Linden Lab employees and get a genuine response; it’s genuinely appreciated when someone requests something or raises an issue and sees a positive response, coupled with action from Linden Lab. However, the fact remains that the vast majority of company / user communications should be taking place within the framework of LL’s own platform; the fact that figures show support of the new community platform is declining rapidly among SL users (some are predicting it’ll be as the Dodo within a month, although I personally think the decline will stabilise well before then – but will represent a very low-level of engagement from users) is worrying. However, this should not be interpreted in terms of users all being busy elsewhere. Rather, it is symptomatic of the fact that Linden Lab don’t have the courage or the skill set in-house required to manage a vibrant forum community.
Which is a shame; but it’s no reason to keep pushing communications channels elsewhere.
Returning to the more strategic side of the new position, I don’t claim to have all the answers, but I do hope that whoever comes in will take a look at Tell me a story… and will be savvy enough to understand Jonathan Baskin’s piece on “silly social media” and ineffective social media marketing campaigns. Certainly I hope whoever comes in will be allowed the opportunity to spend a lot of time in-world to understand the platform and the rich diversity of activities that go on in Second Life – and will be able to gather stories from the user base that can more effectively help shape the message to the rest of the world.
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 
disclaimer: i once worked for linden, but that was several CEOs ago and i never had exposure to the lab’s social media plans. also, i currently work for klout.com, a company involved in social media metrics.
but i wanted to talk a little bit more about sili valley and the funding situation at the moment. everyone knows facebook.com is the next “new new thing.” i happen to be more of a fan of twitter.com, but if you go by numbers, facebook is the place to be. and it’s not just consumers who think that, there are several new companies popping up to fill in the gaps left by FB and twitter. i should know, i work for one of them.
facebook is such a dominant force in silicon valley right now. rumors of their IPO are swirling everywhere as the money people try to position themselves to get a cut of the most popular valley creation since google. some engineers go work for facebook or twitter directly, but if you’re a small or medium sized VC, the way you play the social media game is by launching a small company you hope will get bought by facebook or twitter. a good second choice would be being bought by microsoft or google as they try to build out services to compete with the young upstarts.
there are quite a few things you can do to fit into the social media ecosystem. the company i work for now, klout.com, is fairly public about what it does. users come to the site to see metrics on their social media activities. other companies are making coin on the backend, building better widgets that could be used by the big guys to implement new features faster (or grow their user base.)
i don’t think anyone was thinking about social media being a major market force ten years ago when linden lab was just getting off the ground. or even five years ago when second life was in the middle of its hype cycle. but over the last five years, EVERYONE has had to develop a social media strategy.
the lab kind of fumbled it’s strategy a couple times. first it ignored social media. even as SL residents were building in-world twitter objects, the lab refused to add social media features to the stock viewer. next, they bought avatars united, but never seemed to know what to do with it. more recently, they’ve added the ability for you to link a twitter or facebook account to your second life web profile.
we all heard rumors over the last year that M Linden wanted to turn second life into a farmville-like game, where people raise 3D chickens and veggies. SL is many things, but “casual” is not one of them.
so here we are, in the middle of the social media funding swirl, and the lab hasn’t really hit a home run with respect to social media. and with all the money going to social media companies, i have to think peeps on battery street are thinking about how to divert some of that cash into second life.
how do you turn second life into an online property facebook or twitter would want to buy? even if you don’t sell to the big guys, the process of asking and answering this kind of question might reveal a few unexplored vistas of business profitability.
so my take on this? the lab is looking for an outsider to come in and develop ideas for how second life can be positioned in the social media value stream. but i don’t think it’s cause they think it would be cool, but ’cause the next phase of corporate funding will be based on it.
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It does look like they want someone to *present* and *represent* Linden Lab and Second Life in the social media world, and that IS badly needed. There is a lot said about both (LL/SL) in Twitter and Plurk, and LL is passive in the face of it all.
Virtually all the information and news in the social media about LL/SL comes from users. Although LL is trying to carefully control their image in their new forum, Twitter is the wild west as far as they’re concerned.
So, yeah, someone should be out there, hopefully someone who’ll talk.
After reading the job offer, I don’t see this as an attempt to turn SL into Farmville or preparation for sale, either. It looks like they need someone to take in hand what they’re neglecting now.
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Agreed.
The time for LL to IPO is long gone; I don’t buy-in to the Mark Kingdon wanted to sell off SL line either. As I’ve said in the past, the CEO serves at the Board’s leisure – and as such, any move from Kingdon to attempt such a push would like as not be strongly resisted from the top.
This role, to me, is clearly about leveraging social media to present a message, not to prepare the way for a sale.
The is inherent difficulty in using social media for marketing as it is still largely a hit-and-miss affair, although some organisations are wising-up. Conversely, it’s perhaps the strongest avenue for the use of narrative marketing, which I keep banging on about :).
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There has been a fuss in the papers recently about social media marketing managers employed by councils, it is the in thing. Where I work the marketing department want Facebook accounts for employees, which will become a union issue if they try and make me have one, but that’s a different matter.
I can see why LL would want someone with experience in this field, but as you point out and link to articles, there is a lot of hype and questionable results due to social media. I was reading recently (I forget where) that social media accounts for something like 3% in effective advertising stakes, email and websites were still beating it.
Which brings us back to the SL website, or rather the lack of effective marketing on the SL website. I’ve been to user group meetings where LL have discussed and promoted SL advertising beta, why aren’t they pushing this initiative via the forums? Why don’t they have adverts for premium membership, on the forums? People spend more time on the forums than other parts of the website, of course this doesn’t go for everyone, many don’t use the forums, but a forum user is likely to spend quite a few minutes reading the forums, that’s where the eyes are, that’s where promotions should be, they should be promoting their products all over their own website and pushing their communications there.
In the community feedback forum I requested that they put they feed the SL Office Hours feed into the forum because forum users like to know when user group meetings are taking place, it’s such a simple step to communicate effectively with tools they already use.
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There are two issues here, indeed.
I can understand wanting to push outward and leveraging social media tools to try and draw-in potential new users. While there are problems and concerns, as you and Baskin point out, the opportunities, if handled correctly, could be worth the effort; the market is pretty much untried, but people are beginning to get some practical ideas on what does and does work.
In SL’s case, the potentially biggest issue they face is that of integrating the marketing with an overall campaign to gain and retain users. Again, this is where Rod Humble needs to break the “traditional” island-base means of operating with Linden Research. Siloing the Viewer & user experience away from things like marketing is going to lead to the dots not being joined up to make a complete picture – which is a frequent problem in the Lab’s current mode of thinking as we see over and over again.
As to internal communication, I really fail to see why the Lab needs a “social media guru” beyond the point of them providing guidance and advice on how to better engage with the user community. With the greatest of respect to the likes of Amanda and others currently at the lab, they may well be good at strategic thinking, but their ability to engage with the user base and engage in useful dialogue remains inept.
Why isn’t the new Community Platform being properly utilised? It’s really not good enough to launch a new service and then either fail to utilise it or get the basics wrong (as we saw with the way moderator actions were being handled) and then say, “Oh, whoops! we’re still working out the bugs here!”
What was the strategy behind the new CP? What are the over aims for its use? If it is to encourage and improve LL / user communications, then it is about time LL started using the tools, as you point out. If it is about someone wanting to implement a cool tool that they hope will grow to have uses somewhere, while continuing to push LL-to-user communications elsewhere – then frankly, the lithium investment stands as another classic waste of money. In this respect, the best thing the “guru” could potentially do is point to the CP and say, “Wow! Look at what you could achieve with this!” and get management thinking sensibly about the tool.
As a communications tool, right now the CP is an epic fail. There is no other way to describe it. I’m sure someone someone is getting a feel good tingle when they see they’ve implemented “leading edge” technology and the forums appear active (if in decline, numbers-wise); but the fact is, the platform again seems to sit in isolation to everything else.
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I posted a link to a picture of mine on flickr that showed someone where to look for group land donations and tier issues, someone added a tag of “been r” which meant been reported, someone decided it was ok and removed the tag.
I have told Amanda that LL need to encourage users to promote user created content on their own site, and pointed her in the direction of SLUniverse to see how it can be done.
I login with the official viewer and see messages telling me to go to Facebook, if someone at LL can’t see why this is wrong, then I fear for them, they should be promoting the hell out of their own website and utilising it.
I fear I may be waffling.
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Waffling slightly, my Lord of Dee! 🙂
I’m confused over how / what / why something of yours on Flickr would be reported…but yes, the whole Facebook pushing in terms of news and views and updates is completely baffling, and really undermines the Community Platform as the LL tool for communication.
Question to Rod:
Was Lithium selected as a platform for practical use, or as something to look good on someone’s resume? Right now, it really looks like the latter!
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