AOL Leaves Second Life: The Good News

AOL’s departure from Second Life is a welcome validation that the concept of Your World, Your Imagination is not dead.

As reported at VWN quoting from the AOL blog:

According to the official blog, the project’s goals were to learn more about how to interact with customers in the virtual world, and while AOL is leaving Second Life, the company has its sights elsewhere: “We’ve gained a lot of insight from our participation in Second Life and we’re now refocusing our efforts in virtual worlds. While we have closed AOL Pointe, you will soon be seeing more of AOL products and content across the metaverse.”

AOL believes that their power is in being a provider – spreading their brand and their content in packaged, controlled and contained nuggets. Second Life was a learning experience and they’ve decamped for greener pastures. The reality is that AOL’s departure proves, to me at least, that the future model of shared creation and user communities, as represented by Second Life (amongst other outputs of the “Wikinomic era”) has been validated. The failure of a large media company to propagate content and brand messages in an environment that contains some of the brightest minds, creative talent, and a vast tool set for content creation shows that it will be those who believe in the idea of ‘proprietary’ IP who lose out as the tidal wave of “Wiki-Worlds” continues to blow the lid off the old media-centric business models (the same models sinking the music industry, and seeing the erection of phalanxes of lawyers around the movie biz).

Brands Can Win Using Traditional Models
However, there are still lots of ways that brands can succeed in virtual worlds. We typically think of brand management as being related to things like return on investment models, marketing, intellectual property, and product. Corporations will continue to make large amounts of money because they can create process out of the production, sourcing, distribution, marketing and messages about their brands. These processes can be very difficult to replicate and so it’s unlikely that we’ll see an end to companies who can take advantages of global markets, production streams, and spreadsheet-driven approaches to marketing and advertising in the near future.

Brands, as compared to products, are meant to take something with features and benefits and layer on top of it an additional story through media, experiences, visuals and interactions. This story should communicate some emotional connection, a response, from potential product users so that they associate things with that brand other than just that it’s white, or has great traction in the rain. The power of great brands is they communicate an essence that transcends the product itself.

Virtual worlds are thus wide open opportunities as they grow, as the audiences widen, and as the technology stabilizes. Virtual worlds are places where we can touch, feel and participate in stories – and if brands can help to craft those stories and experiences in a way that helps to communicate brand essence, and the number of communications and the impression of those experiences exceeds the cost of creating them, then brands win.

Brands LOSE if those experiences are diluted or marred by griefers, technology failures, hackers, or unstable platforms. More importantly to brands, the nightmare scenario is not a technology failure, but rather the appropriation of the brand message in a way that not only results in a poor performing brand experience, but results in one where there are negative associations with the brand. A bunch of flying genitalia during a product launch would be called a NEGATIVE brand association.

So…there are lots of brands. And there are lots of companies whose services or content is ‘branded’. AOL is a content company. Giorgio Armani is a clothing company. Both are more than just content because both are also meant to embody an attitude and a brand essence. There are LOTS of opportunities to create engaging brand experiences IF you know what you’re doing. Understanding how to secure, support, and use the tools and talent in virtual worlds goes a long way to creating successful brand experiences.

There are alternative technologies, ways of dealing with ’security’ issues, and a lot of talented people who can create stories appropriate to virtual environments. Those stories can be large builds or they can be events. They can be one-offs or they can be kiosks. And there are different ways to measure return – from simple traffic, to engagement, to viral dissemination.

Greenies is an example of a story and, yes, branded experience (although a Rezzable rather than corporate brand) that demonstrates that branded experiences can work, and be talked about, and have an impact, and have traffic. Brands that understand and work with resident talent can build the equivalents of the Greenies brand if they have the capacity to take risks and create engagements that make sense related to the stories they are trying to tell.

For every Greenies, however, there will be a CSI New York – beautiful builds that don’t engage, whose storylines run thin, or whose layers of interactions don’t contribute anything new or useful to a community comprised of both talent and the non-talented but thrill-seeking.

Future Brands Will Recognize that Users Create Brand Value
The deeper message of the AOL departure from SL however, is that there’s a fundamental failure of brands to recognize SL as a platform for understanding future business models entirely. I don’t know the demographics of SL, but based on the blogs, events, number of universities, the content that has been created by its users, and the work of people like Robbie Dingo, Starax, or Jon Brouchard I would hazard a guess that you’re looking at a fairly intelligent, creative, thoughtful, forward-looking community.

So – question: if you had a chance to connect with 10s of thousands of people who are at the leading edge of thinking and creation, would you try to impose your own model for production or creativity on them, feeding them brand experiences, or would you use this instead as a test bed for future models of concept, product, brand, and IP production? Would you want to observe how this group reacts to your brand, or would you want to give them the tools to communicate a different vision for how brands and experiences are developed entirely (trying at the very least to stay ahead of the tidal wave of the ‘user’ age, and maybe as a result your competition).

The reality is that the Wikification of IP is upon us. The open source approach to creating content is winning – Wikipedia is proof. Linux is proof. (Vista is also proof, but in the inverse).

Second Life is the test bed for the Wikification of not only objects and communities, but also concepts and ideas.

Giorgio Armani tried to force feed its brand into the SL community and failed miserably. Not only did they ignore the talent within SL, but they thought that their brand message and content would be sufficient unto itself to engage a community of what I can only call futurists – people who have embraced a world they can call their own, where new methods for collaboration (see Wikitecture), learning and content creation are being cobbled together from the SL toolset (and often in spite of it).

CNN is starting to get traction in SL, because they have the right idea – let the users create content and see what they come up with. What do they tell you? What does it mean? The machima of Robbie Dingo has far greater power, at the moment, than anything some movie studio is coming up with in this creative community – CNN may not have extended its tools beyond handing out cameras and an anchor desk, but the idea of recognizing the collaborative and creative nature of the media at least wasn’t lost on them.

Giorgio Armani should have taken a different tack – hand out TEXTURES and invite the user community to re-express the GA brand.

AOL should do what the music industry is only now, and only in dribs and drabs and very reluctantly starting to do – give out its content, let users run with it, mash it up, smash it together with other pieces of content and see what comes out.

Second Life reminds us that the power to create does not reside with corporations or with brands. The power to create is in our own hands, and the tools for expressing what we can imagine are growing steadily easier to access and are increasingly ubiquitous.

To AOL and those companies that don’t get this, or who aren’t willing to change their business models in response, please:

Don’t slam the door behind you on the way out, but close it quickly please, it’s pleasantly warm in here and we’d prefer that cold air doesn’t get in.

You’re more than welcome, however, to look through the window now and then to see what we’ve been up to since you left.