You hit the west coast and all of a sudden you’re surrounded by Starbucks.
Not Starbucks at the major intersections, but Starbucks on every corner, between the corners, above the corners. And even though I’ve been trying to avoid it because I’ve never really LIKED Starbucks, (does anyone actually like Starbucks coffee? Or do they just like knowing the secret code for ordering a no-whip-double-dip-triple-hit-machiato-grande-al-fresco?), but the reality is I’ve become a little over-caffeinated, I’m struggling a little with jet lag, and it’s the only thing open at 5 in the morning.
Besides, I came here and swore I wouldn’t drink the Kool Aid. Or drink the chai. Whatever it is that an aging hippie or a surfer dude serves you before catching a wave while sending tweets from his iPhone. Because whatever that stuff is they drink out here, I hear it has them all believing in the Singularity and the certainty that technology will, hmmm, save us all. Or make us better. Or let us all connect with each other from our air-tight rooms while global warming melts the pavement outside our doors. So, no chai for me, I’ll stick to Starbucks. It’s a brand you at least know.
All of which is by way of an extended excuse for thinking big thoughts about Second Life. I blame it on the coffee.
Sure, SLCC is about to hit, and I owe it to the organizers to be optimistic and Californian about the whole thing, try to be a technolbertarian for a day or two while I pretend that the whole city isn’t at a grave and imminent risk of sinking into the sea.
Turning Left at Duct Tape Drive
OK, so let’s start with Linden Lab, which is on a street named Battery, which I suppose is better than Duct Tape Drive, and perhaps ironically it’s at the corner of Green, so I suppose the idea of virtual worlds being good for the environment was sort of easy messaging to come up with, although they might want to think of selling some of those open source car things out of the loading dock.
I think Williams Sonoma has an office across the street where they probably manage their e-commerce or something, and the big agencies like Sudler & Hennessey and those types are here, probably sitting half-empty while the tech sector and the rest of the economy gets its hype on again.
So the Lab is on a street named Battery, and it’s jammed in between all these agency type places with wood-beamed ceilings and even though there’s hardly anyone walking around, they do so with a forced-casual, hey I’m not in a rush but actually I need to stroll in a casual way back to my desk because I’m on a deadline and my options are below water kind of way.
That kind of place. Every town has one right?
Now, what I want to talk about is the neighbor, but before I do, I just thought I’d share a few things that surprised me:
- There is no little souvenir stand attached to the Lab selling “Gotta Love Lag” t-shirts
- There’s no cardboard cut-out of Phillip that you can take your picture with
- The best I could tell the asset servers do NOT sit out in the back alley protected by a punctured tarp.
In other words, not much to see really, except for a lot of what appear to be focused and quietly productive people, none of whom seems as hyped-up on caffeine as I am, but who do glance at the wall now and then at the great big screen showing a rolling crash and concurrency rate and a bunch of other in-world stat stuff, just like M said on Metanomics.
The Gold Diggers
But what I wanted to talk about wasn’t the Lab but Levi’s.
See, Levi’s is a few doors down. Their world HQ and museum and out-sourcing admin offices or whatever are all jammed in a little campus-looking spread of buildings with these nice little gardens and fountains and stuff meandering outside.
And I felt like popping in on the Levi’s people….I wanted to see if they had a giant screen with the latest customer comment cards scrolling by, or a sales ticker of some kind, little blips whenever someone buys a new pair of jeans in Idaho or Paris or Kyoto.
That’s my feeling of walking around. I’m looking through the windows as if the fact that someone has a pirate flag in their cubicle will really give me some kind of burning insight into what makes the place tick. It doesn’t, and what I end up with is name plates – Sudler & Hennessey, which is a brand that means something to me personally; Williams & Sonoma; that little silver sign that says “Second Life”; and Levi’s. And sure, different brands mean different things to different people, but I couldn’t help thinking about the life cycle of brands, or what makes a great one, or how a great brand, a Levi’s say, can sort of lose its shine a little but still somehow persevere.
I figure that this coast has been home to a lot of great names. Some of them became great brands, some of them got swallowed up by other great brands, and some simply got swallowed up, just sort of fell off into the sea, it’s that kind of place after all.
And I wonder: will Second Life be swallowed up, will it slide off into the sea, or will it, against the odds perhaps, become a great brand, a Levi’s maybe, something that 100 years from now is maybe a little faded and frayed and has perhaps been aggregated or has aggregated others, but is still somehow synonymous with what it means to be a great brand.
Tipping Points
Right – so clearly I’m over-caffeinated and maybe it isn’t Kool Aid or chai I should have been watching out for but Starbucks itself. And just to show you how delusional I’ve become after a day or two on the west coast, I’m going to make the provocative, 100% arguable and naive claim that in 2010 Second Life will reach a new tipping point.
Not the kind of tipping point like last time when the brands came in with all their fancy malls or whatever. But the kind of tipping point that has roots, that has a foundation, that is built on the sort of steady, focused plodding that you see people doing as they do their fake-casual walks with their Starbucks in hand.
SL will be back on the Wall Street Journal/Business Week table of contents (if not necessarily the cover), but not with some Anshe Chung “we’re all gonna get rich selling real estate” way, but more like how the New York Times has been covering SL lately: hey, it’s here, we don’t want to sell you hype, but you need to know what’s going on, just like you need to know what’s happening at IBM, or what Apple has planned for tablets.
So, this tipping point will be marked by serious enterprise use of SL (and Nebraska or whatever it will be called), past the “hey let’s save money on meetings” thing that’s the big rage (and which is going to lower the value of virtual worlds in general if all those Flash-based “virtual conference” things don’t quickly die) and into its use for data visualization, innovation, and deep collaboration.
It will be marked by a steady increase in the user base for SL, heading up into the millions range of monthly users and will top a few hundred thousand concurrency.
That kind of tipping point: the one where things grow, and the clip gets steadier, and you suddenly turn around and you don’t need to explain it to your mother anymore, in fact maybe she’s invited you over to her beach house to show you the chair she made out of prims.
OK….so I’m not going to detail my arguments why I think this is true. We can talk about it at SLCC – hit me up in the hall or whatever.
And I’m not entirely naive either. I mean, Cisco and Microsoft and Google and Apple maybe….who knows, any one of them might have a ‘world killer’ in their back pocket. Even Amazon was building something a while back although it’s not clear they’re still working on it.
The Lab can also trip as it does its high wire act. Another open space pricing thing. It’s servers all melting down one night and destroying our global inventory. Whatever. I’ve got to hedge my bets a little right?
But follow along with my basic premise here: let’s just say that all the hard work they’ve been doing lately with all their road maps and Web portals and land reorganization starts to pay off. Let’s just say they come out with a new viewer that actually makes it significantly easier to navigate and do stuff. Let’s just say they get better at orientation. Let’s just say they can actually do some creative stuff that brings in new users. (Wow, imagine if they advertised even. HAHA).
And let’s just say they do it now, because let’s just say they feel like I do, that there’s a window of opportunity, and it’s closing, but it’s still open wide enough for us all to rush through.
And my personal belief is that 2010 is it. If they miss it, they miss it, in my opinion, and maybe we’ll all find ourselves in a similar boat until we figure out how to program 3D in a browser or something.
But if they make it, they can go public or they can sell out to IBM or they can form a Foundation and Pip and Mitch can sit around extolling open source. Whatever – it’s all free coffee and chai if they can pull off the juggling act of the next 16 or so months.
But what’s critical isn’t JUST that they do all the things that they need to do to take advantage of this window they have, it’s that they ALSO come out of it in a position to pivot Second Life into becoming not just a successful platform, but into becoming a great brand.
And THAT, perhaps, of all the uncertainties, is the greatest one of all.
What Does the Second Life Brand Mean?
You can have a great product, a great application, and even a great company. But the thing that makes you more bullet proof than anyone else, the thing that means you can often claw out of danger, or rejig the business, is having a great brand.
Netscape was a great application, and probably a great company, but it wasn’t a great brand. Actually – I’d propose that any company that hasn’t figured out how it’s supposed to make money probably isn’t a great brand, they’re simply a good front for venture capital infusions.
AOL could have been a great brand, but then they decided to become an ISP, and then a convergence company, and then a media portal, and then a company with limited choices.
Apple is a great brand and always has been, even when it was almost destroyed. You may HATE Apple, and they may be evil closed-source IP-protecting control freaks. But they’re a great brand, and the people who hate them seem, primarily, to be techies, because I can tell you that my mom doesn’t care about shifting her songs across her many devices or what the DRM is on her iTunes, she only has ONE device, and it works just fine and the packaging is nice and she wonders if the computers are just as friendly.
Apple is a great brand because it creates beauty and simplicity out of life’s experiences, when other technology companies take those same experiences and make them complicated, and obscure, and friendly to someone who knows who Lessig is but not so friendly for my mom.
Levi’s was a great brand because it represented solid workmanship suitable for the rugged frontier and the individuals who belong there (or who wish they belonged there).
Nike. IBM. Coke.
You tell me: are these sneakers, computers and drinks? What are these things?
And I’ve heard lots of ways to describe brands, and there are probably as many ways to build great ones as there are brands themselves, but I’d propose that they all have something in common:
- They embody some sort of aspiration
- They clearly articulate that aspiration through both the products themselves and how they’re sold
- They are embraced with an often religious devotion by core communities
- This results in a “brand halo” that makes them desirable to wide audiences.
And I believe that Second Life has the potential to be a great brand. What’s partly missing, of course, is the second bullet. But remember I’m going on the premise here that the product is headed for a tipping point: the first hour will be improved, the interface will rock, you’ll be able to find stuff, you’ll be able to meet people, things will make sense. (OK, remember…caffeinated!)
But what’s really missing, for me at least, is the brand aspiration, the brand value. Nike isn’t about shoes, it’s about personal achievement. Second Life isn’t about virtual goods, it’s about something else.
I don’t believe for a minute that the brand represents the ‘improvement of humanity’ or whatever – that’s a mission statement for the Lab, not a brand value. Besides, I don’t usually log in to improve humanity, I log in to play with prims, or to attend a conference, or to chat with people.
Maybe it has something to do with what Tom Boellstorff said: that Second Life is “techne within techne”. We have the tools WITHIN the tools.
Maybe what SL can do is to humanize our engagement with technology. Maybe it’s the place where rather than technology being an appliance, like a phone, or a piece of software, we can interact from inside the code. And maybe somehow that’s humanizing, and maybe as we keep on coding the Grid, we’ll start coding stuff other than a door script, we’ll start coding, I dunno, protein foldings or something.
So maybe there’s something in that “Second Life” thing…it’s life, only better. It’s technology, only it doesn’t FEEL like technology. It’s being able to do cool stuff with code but not knowing that you’re coding. I’m not sure.
And that’s the problem. You don’t have to sell me on the product. You don’t have to make me any more religious about virtual worlds than I already am. And I create lots of brand halo recommending it to friends and clients.
And while I believe that virtual worlds are transformative, I have a hard time putting a finger on that brand aspiration – that brand value, that nugget at the heart of it, the one that sounds a lot like creativity, and maybe spirituality, and certainly community.
Which is the nub isn’t it? Because here we stand, on the precipice of what could very well become one of the great brands, and it is predicated on a product which, yeah, is a bunch of code that the Lab built and serves up but which is also, at the day, nothing without the contributions and imagination of its users.
Because this is Your World, and Your Imagination. And maybe that’s all the aspiration we need. And as we head into a community convention that’s not such a bad place to start: to revisit the aspirations we hold for the world, to ask ourselves how to articulate those dreams, to question how far we dare take them, and to wonder whether, if we were to slip towards the sea, we could build a boat with sails that are wide enough and a hull sturdy enough to carry us across the waters and to ponder where it might lead.
[...] Nethnology (255), SL (74), Web (1,348) Dusan Writer asks: Can Second Life Become a Great Brand? http://bit.ly/GJXCO [...]
Dusan, it’s not about liking Starbuck’s coffee. There was a study done on commercially made coffees and caffeine content. Apparently, Starbuck’s had 300 milligrams of caffeine per shot of espresso, and the next closest competitor was Tully’s, at 170 milligrams per shot. I always go to Starbucks. It’s the only way to make the headache go away. For the record, I don’t even like coffee…
Come to think of it, Second Life is a little like Starbucks in that regard. There are a whole bunch of things not to like, but when it comes right down to it, the closest competitor isn’t even close. Nobody else gives users the kind of access that Second Life does. Nobody else allows for a fully participatory experience. Nobody.
I had been wondering, idly, in that abstract, cerebral, comfortable-with-technology way that I have, how we, as a species, were going to integrate these new, world-altering technologies into our lives.
Each new technology required greater and greater abstraction, making it more and more remote from the interests of the average person. Most people are concrete and experiential. They have no affinity for code. I saw a split beginning to occur in our world, with technology becoming a tool of a minority with disproportionate power—like the Morlocks and the Eloi.
But Second Life puts a face on it. It yanks technology down out of the ether and puts it back into the hands of, well, everybody. I would hesitate to say it will save the world, but it is profoundly democratizing. It is, as you put it, tech that doesn’t _feel_ like tech. It folds our human strengths back into the batter.
“Your world. Your imagination.” Oh yes. Every last messy, emotional, impulsive, hyperbolic bit of it. For everyone.
Actually, Second Life /is/ a great brand. Maybe you have your own vision of what Second Life (and the metaverse) is about Dusan, but that’s not necessarily what either the rest of us or Linden may have in mind.
In terms of great brands, Second Life already has many of the hallmarks of the greatest: A fervent, dedicated audience that has (and will) stick with it. Consider some of the crap SL residents have had to put up with over the last 5 years or so – and yet they stay: Care to name any other brands that inspire that kind of loyalty? Hmmm….Apple?
Whatever course Second Life takes to its own greatness, let’s hope it isn’t distracted by armchair “experts” telling them what they need to be.
Wow, excellent stream-of-consciousness post.
Also spot on IMHO. It’s move it or lose it time for LL. Staying still will inevitably consign them to irrelevance.
I’m not sure that Second Life really constitutes a brand in any effective sense. Linden Lab, now, there’s a brand.
What Second Life describes feels too diverse to have any real brand-identity.
Hmmm – tateru – not sure I entirely agree, mainly because I wonder what the name recognition for Linden Lab is…I always think of them and they’re often mentioned in the context of “Linden Lab, makers of Second Life”.
But maybe I don’t understand the context – you’re saying the Lab has a clear brand identity and SL doesn’t is that why?
If that’s the case, I agree, and I suppose that’s my point. If SL itself doesn’t do a better job articulating a “brand identity/aspiration” as opposed to a “platform name”, say, then it can have tons of momentum but risks going the way of AOL or something.
@JSG – I’m not sure what part of my vision is in conflict with the Lab or residents but regardless I totally agree that SL has all the HALLMARKS of greatness. And heaven forbid I’m an armchair branding consultant – I’m just making some observations and voicing my own opinion, I’m not asking for the keys to the Lab.
livin large in River City..lol
Brands need to reivent themselves to new audiences every few years. thats what great brands do.
IBM did it from the office to home
Apple from “pictures” to “music” to “phones”
AOL, Yahoo, and Google will not do this. though googles fate is still up in the air, all depending when the “pyramid” that felled AOL/ Yahoo- web advertising rates/schemes/ROI – fails again to do anything for those vc brands paying for it:) at that point google will have to demand its junior entitle users of free- to PAY for tools…..
or the house of cards will fail…. just like Netscape and AOL before…in their day..lol they WERE the brands of the wisdom of the crowds….
so much for another SF myth:)
Cube – you just KNEW I popped in the AOL and Netscape references just for you.
Yes, companies need to reinvent themselves. But it’s a kind of “Built to Last” thing.
To quote from the book:
“”A visionary company,” they wrote, “doesn’t simply balance between preserving a tightly held core ideology and stimulating vigorous change and movement; it does both to the extreme.”"
So, sure, IBM reinvented itself, but it maintained its tightly held core ideology. Same with Apple.
For the first, “Technology Working”, say, and for the second, “Simplifying Life’s Experiences” maybe.
Core ideologies. You can practically TASTE it for both Apple and IBM. I have no idea what it was for AOL or Yahoo or Netscape and that’s the problem.
So while companies should stimulate vigorous change (and heaven knows Linden Lab is good at that), this must be coupled with tightly held ideologies.
So what’s SLs?
Oh…and while we’re on the Built to Last thing, here’s more of their list from ‘excellent companies’:
“The authors discovered that the visionary companies did certain things very differently from their duller rivals, things that in large part were more about the internal than the external and had little to do with technology or number-crunching. Among these were having “cultlike cultures”; adhering to an ideology that went beyond the simple pursuit of profits; relying on homegrown management; focusing on creating a lasting organization — called “clock building,” as opposed to “time telling”; and having the ability to see things not as either-or propositions (the “genius of the ‘and,’ ” in the authors’ words, as opposed to the “tyranny of the ‘or’ “).”
I agree that they need to simplify the viewer significantly. As currently presented, SL is not a tool for the masses. It’s for the techies…and near-techies. It needs an information architecture overhaul to reach my mom.
I’m not sure 2010 isn’t too late for what you suggest, especially considering the competition on the horizon from both the Blue Mars-types and the open sourcers.
Until then, I’ll just keep twisting prims and watching performers from all parts of the globe.
I agree, I relate Second Life to, say Internet… I think Lindens make or break is whether are able to be the ICANN of the 3d world, or they just would like to be remained a closed service like AOL or Prodigy.
They should be heading toward a direction where like Open Sim you can host your own servers, but Linden Lab/Second Life is the method of registration/payment/oversight
If millions come into SL right now Dusan, would SL hold up over the stress?
Exactly- What is the “real” TAO of Linden?
Im not sure how many times youve been to SF or worked here, but whats said and done, and whats meant to be said and done, usually are not the same here.:)
Malaby found it…it was found in whats NOT said, not what is:)
Your diary in SF sounds much like my “report” back to NYC when i came out here to look- to move west in 1995 at the birth of the 3dweb and online web1.0 bubbles…..:)
good luck finding a taxi.
I believe that when Second Life (or any other virtual world for that matter) becomes synonomous with Dreaming and just as easy-to-access and just as ubiquitous then it will become a great brand, just as Coke is synonomous with soft drink, IBM with computers, Apple with graphic interfaces (or music or phones, Starbucks with coffee (an it is awful coffee) and MacDonalds with food (hamburgers).
But when it does will I still remember it in the morning?
Sleep.. what a wonderful brand..mmmm…
zzzz. ah:)
Hi Dusan – this is just such a great post! Gives me lots to think of in prep for speaking at SLCC on saturday. You really captured a big idea in that concept of ‘humanizing’ computing. I’ve thought about that before and I agree that is probably the right way to think about a big brand around the whole Virtual World idea.
I was recently reminded of just how real and important that ‘humanizing’ element is while helping 26 local educators from schools in Cabarrus County, North Carolina, learn to get started and find their own value in Second Life. (Julie LaChance even brought cupcakes for their rez day.) When we showed pictures of meeting SL friends at Disney or in New York or at ISTE/NECC they really lit up, something that is impossible to see in a purely virtual workshop session, by the way (Linden Labs needs to hire Juanita).
I have often said how much I dislike the name ‘Second Life.’ This is just life in different forms. When most people see that, they buy in and later realize the value of disconnecting from reality for a bit perhaps.
Great post Dusan. Obviously a lot of thought behind it.
dang, dusan, you were caffeinated when you wrote this
w/r/t Starbucks, it reminds me of the best/worst that someone said to sum up McDonalds: “[no matter where you are and visit a McDonalds] you know what you’re getting”.
As I was reading between the lines of your looking at SF and trying to make sense of it, you had a frame of reference, a collection of expectations, and you were holding that up to the immersive reality of now and trying to see what did and didn’t fit.
You are also playing with another kind of frame of reference, looking at histories of other technologies and companies that try to package and sell them, and compare that to the unfolding of virtual world technology under the LL/SL brand. You’re like a surfer who’s been studying the waves and how they come in, and trying to extrapolate that knowledge while sitting on your board in the bay, hoping to read them as they come in and start to form, so you can be in the right spot at the right time to catch a big one and have a bitchin ride.
You’re obviously in a mellow, grooved mood to not rip on Malcom Gladwell as you talk about tipping points
As I think about the inculturation of virtual worlds into our mainstream of interaction, I was pondering a conversation I had last night with one of my in-world friends. He’s lost most all of his interest in SL, saying for him, “the game is played out” (The metaphorical irony i saw in that was that it isn’t a game, per se…).
So as I looked at your blog about the financial report, and you and the comments were wanting to tease out some real meaning in the rather vague metrics, I have another kind to add… it seems to me, the accounts that are oldest and active are those who have developed a vested interest, mostly of a business kind, that keeps them active. It would be interesting to be able to measure and understand the excitement and interest levels of people over time. I saw one of the anthropologists talking about trying to get a handle on the dynamics of social groups, for instance, how they form, attract members, and what the life cycle of that is like in a virtual world compared to in other venues of our lives.
What I suspect is “your world; your imagination” only works as long as one is inspired to imagine, build, sell, or own. Unless SL fills some particular need for us that nothing else delivers, why stay? What is the types of life cycles of user interest, and what does that tell us about the potential horizons for this technology?
“You really captured a big idea in that concept of ‘humanizing’ computing.”
good to hear we humans factored in there somewhere.;)
much of what has happened in 30 years has been the “computerizing of humans”. Proven as i need to run out and fill a meter every 2 hrs and with a printed card, cant rely on any goodness of heart for a left over 5 minutes, or dime refill from a street walker of good intent.
cube3
I cannot believe you used “tipping point” in your arguments. I’m sure Malcolm will send you a box of chocolates.
“Humanize our experience with technology” doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue Dusan. But I’d argue that if it were more linguistically aesthetic it is precisely what Apple does and currently SL does not.
Apple’s products are so intuitive and resilient that they each are a gateway drug – to more Apple products. And when you’ve become a junkie, you ignore the fact that they are violating the very core values that so many of their fan boys embrace. That’s a strong brand – one that even when it crosses the line you are still waving the flag, marching into the valley of death.
I agree with Tateru, I don’t believe “Second Life” will ever be a strong brand and if I were at LL I would be working like hell to build a brand under which the service Second Life would live, in part to diminish what is now a painfully confusing and fractured set of products, or services, or those things that define the “resource offering tools and support for 3D content creation in these areas”.
The Lab itself is creating this fractured image. Ask any Apple fanatic the difference between an iphone and an ipod touch. Now ask any ardent SLer the difference between what’s here:
http://secondlife.com
and what’s here:
http://secondlifegrid.net/
or what’s here:
http://work.secondlife.com/
Who is the brand manager at the Lab? They would make a good SLCC panelist on this topic.
Hmmm, Grace….I’m wondering if you think the new Web stuff is starting to be a little more coherent? Work.SL is certainly more in line with the main site, which is still due an overhaul (and isn’t one coming? Or did I get that wrong?)
What I wish they’d do is kill that Flickr postcard image thing that you get at Secondlife.com if you aren’t logged in – it’s a messy exercise in branding to say the least.
I actually think we’re in a sort of holding pattern – parts of the new Web look and feel have been rolled out, part haven’t, and it’s looking like a fractured mess, but I think it’s because they’ve done it in stages. But maybe I’m wrong.
Having said that, a coherent set of Web sites does not a “brand aspiration” make. What we’ve seen so far is serviceable, effective, and seems to be driven by a lot of benefit statements and ‘use case pathways’ – but I don’t get a ‘wow’ feel like I do when I see an Apple ad or whatever.
Which comes to advertising. And there isn’t any. And maybe there never will be.
As far as brand managers presenting at SLCC – maybe we can get M and Pip to comment….they’re about as manager-y as you can get haha.