Coming via Pete Linden is news of an competition being run on behalf of Duran Duran to further celebrate their presence in Second Life.
Entitled “Your avatar at the DDU” (Duran Duran Universe), the competition will see the winner’s own photo signed by the group.
The competition was announced via a notecard which reads:
“Your avatar in the DDU” contest!
Get creative and take a nice, cool, crazy or whatever mood you are in snapshot of your avatar in your favourite location in the DDU. The winner will get his/her avatar photo signed by the band.
Simply add your entry (one per person only) from August 8th 2011 until August 22nd 2011 to our flickr group: http://www.flickr.com/groups/youravatarintheddu/ . People can vote your picture as their favourite until September 5th 2011. The 10 pictures with the highest count of favourite votes will be forwarded to the band to choose the winner. So head out right away and keep your cameras klicking. Good luck!
Nick, Simon, John, Roger
The DDU is location on the Khanada region (Surl). So, if you’re a Duran Duran fan – teleport in and try your luck!
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 
Next thing you know, they’ll open up a shop to sell skins so they can get into the Skin Trade.
-ls/cm
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all well and good .. cept for those fans who have been banned and/or not welcome at the islands. Good luck to the rest .. as long as you smile and nod you should be ok 😉
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Yahoo! Your avatar in the DuDU!
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THAT gets me “comment of the month” award for reducing me to fits of giggles. Considering what is happening in the UK right now, I needed the tension-breaker, thank you, Indigo. 🙂
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Duran Duran’s marketing agency (or person) is to be congratulated. As silly (or not) as this may sound, it’s actually the kind of promotional activity that actually works. I’ve been blessed with luck for doing similar things — using the pretext of Second Life’s ability to personalise avatars and take pictures of them, which can then be placed on Web sites for fans to vote upon and get prizes — in 2007. They were all very successful, and by “success” I mean that the return in brand awareness could effectively be measured and correlated with cost. Cutting the jargon: you don’t always need to pay millions of dollars to reach millions of people, of which just a handful will buy your products/services (unless, of course, they will also buy services costing millions of dollars). A marketing strategy that costs a few hundreds of dollars, reaches a few hundreds of people, but among those, a few will buy services costing a few hundreds of dollars, is also a “successful” strategy — with the advantage that setting up a million-dollar-campaign has a huge overhead cost and takes time, while setting up a notecard and a Flickr group costs effectively “zero” (well, we have to take into account a few hours of meetings to discuss the idea and the 15 minutes to write the notecard and set up a Flickr account, of course).
You know, companies who have embraced that model in 2007 would still be around doing marketing stunts in SL, because, well, this strategy really pays off. Duran Duran is just coming late to the scene, but… they’re so late that everything they announce is “news”. I have this strong feeling that if they continue to do similar low-budget strategies in SL, they will internally see them as “being successful” and keep doing them until others start scratching their heads and ask them why they haven’t thought about that before…
It’s not “build it in SL and they will come”, but “figure out a way for them to interact in SL and spread the news on the online social environment” that leads to measurable results. I wish Duran Duran all the luck 🙂 Sometimes it doesn’t pay off to be a pioneer, like all other companies who came to SL in 2007…
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