There is a good post on Massively that discusses some of the ill conceived marketing efforts in Secondlife. I have not been spending much time in Secondlife lately. This is partly due to not having much in the way of spare time. I have also found that there is very little new things to see there, or at least if there are they are hard to find.
What is there is a large amount of saturation marketing, most if it for Secondlife businesses. I should not be as surprised as I am that a portion of people cannot see a new medium as anything more than a different medium. I mean that a new medium like SL gives new opportunities for how to interact with an audience. Instead of taking advantage of this, some marketers ignore the potential and simply treat it the same as they treat other mediums. The evidence of this is in the number of billboard style advertisements that proloferate the SL landscape. There is nothing different with these ads from any banner ad on a website.
My disapointment with SL in general is that it seems to have stagnated in a particular form. Most of the changes that are seen in the last year or so is tweaks to the interface rather than any radical new interaction methods. I am surprised that the world continues to be bound by many of the realities of the physical world like size, perspective and physics. With the exception of the ability to fly, the ‘physical’ interactions with the SL world are very similar to those we have with the real world.
For the marketer though, even though the medium does offer new methods of interaction the rules of marketing stay the same. Understand your target market, understand your product and understand how a campaign gets the message you want to the people you want.
My personal view of SL is that there is potential there for a method to better interact with data. The reality of Secondlife is yet to live up to that promise though. I won’t be too critical about this though as I don’t know exactly how they could achieve this.