As people increasingly turn to virtual worlds to create identities, it becomes increasingly difficult for marketers to determine who it is they need to market their products: an avatar, or the person behind the avatar?

An article at iMedia Connection, a site that connects marketers, tries to find answers to this marketing dilemma where consumers exert an unprecedented amount of control over their identities and self-expression by looking at WeeWorld and Second Life.

After studying WeeWorld, the authors have discovered that most people (mostly younger people) tend to replicate their real selves online. In Second Life, though, character duping is common, and the separation between real and virtual personas tends to be keen, though not all the time.

The authors, then, offers a solution based on three buzzwords: “content, conversation, and community.” They look at recent studies and the failures of recent marketing efforts in SL, variously shifting blame on the marketers, the platform, and the consumer (?), but with the goal being to solve this dilemma.

Using L’Oreal’s recent successful venture into SL, the authors realize that simply setting up a SL island does not work. Marketers need to cede to the unique demands of virtual worlds (the buzzwords above) - which in this case, involved “seeding” SL retailers with L’Oreal product (not sure what this has to do with ‘content, conversation, and community.’)

The authors conclude thusly:

As a marketer, it is your responsibility to learn about the virtual community that you are looking to market in (just as you would enter a community in the real world). Unfortunately there is no single marketing solution that will be effective for all virtual communities (just as there is no one solution that will work for every website) but the diligent marketer will take our advice, learn the attributes of a given community (just as KZero did with Second Life) and add value to the community through integration, collaboration and co-creation.

Not exactly news, but nice to see continued reminders that the brands that failed in Second Life over the past year didn’t quite “get it”, although there’s a counter argument that there wasn’t a wide enough audience to get in the first place and so they’ve decamped for wherever the eyeballs are.