Today’s Post on FIT @ SL Blog

Here is my post from the http://fitsl.wordpress.com/ summerizing my Presentation at FIT last Friday 11/30/07 and today 12/04/07 along with Beth Harris, Shenlei Winkler, and Nyla Kazakoff. Here is a link to some Flickr images from SL. Hopefully Beth or Shenlei will add some RL images.

FITat SL POST: ELaine Polvinen:
Teaching Fashion in a Virtual Environment 

Left to right: Shenlei, Elaine and Nyla in SL
Elaine is wearing one of Nyla’s fashions

Buffalo State Fashion Student Exhibit SURL 

Beth spoke about her first experiences in SL and that she too was questioning the value that a virtual world could provide to educators. She spoke about how excited she felt when she arranged to meet up with a RL friend that she had not seen in a long time in SL. The emotional connection she experienced meeting that person in SL was totally new to her and far more connected then she thought could be possible in a virtual world. She has been researching the teaching possibilities every since.

Nyla [House of Nyla] spoke about how her virtual SL development is extending her RL designer brand on an international level and Shenlei Winkler [FRI] spoke about her research with the speed and cost effectiveness of product development in a virtual world. Shenlei is a RL fashion design product developer on a mass market level.  She stated that the entire fashion product development process is currently undergoing rapid transformation over to virtual development. Development in a virtual world will enable fashion product developers to instantly “connect virtually” to work on design, develop and prototype a new product in a fraction of the time it take in the RL. Here is an article titled, ” Will your SL wardrobe soon be coming to a closet near you?” by Scarlett Qi that was posted today about her work in the SLNN Business News.

Nyla and Shenlei will be posting their summary on the FIT @ SL soon.

Beth and Shenlei were there in person and Nyla and I were in Second Life. This was a real experience for me especially since I was in the middle of a SUNY Project LIVE presentation at Monroe Community College last Friday and I left to participate virtually in the presentation at FIT. Talk about multi-tasking! At the same time my BSC students were watching audio/videos that I made to cover our weekly class scheduled at the same time. Whew! Technology is wonderful ….when it all works.

When it doesn’t you must always have a plan A, plan B, plan C, etc.

Second Life Retail Branding?

  

There is an interesting quote in the article “Virtual style? In Another Life, “9/19/07 in the London-based Financial Times by Sabrina Dent, alias Sabrina Doolittle, of Linden Lifestyles, Second Life “is an excellent platform for building relationships, cementing brands and building consumer loyalty – yet few real-life brands are doing those things correctly” adds Dent.This article is an excellent resource for anyone interested in retail branding and marketing in Second Life – it’s a must read. It addresses how Second Life can change the way we shop – but from what I have been seeing – avatars of all types are already changing the way we shop. My Virtual Model and E-Mees are well on their way to achieving that retail marketing goal – virtual worlds like Second Life are the logical next step. Here is an interesting piece about the making of the sidebar image (pictured above).

iVillage and Avatars….

What happened? I know that iVillage ran Virtual Fashion Week in Second Life last February designed to coincide with Fashion Week but the overloading of avatars attempting to attend caused extreme “chaos” and ‘delay” as one blogger put it. Currently there are limitations of about 40 avatars per sim for live events in Second Life. I see the iVillage event used 4 sims so that would expand avatar limit to 150-160 for the event.

The in-world show can be viewed here and at the Girls Night Out at the i-village in Second Life site. It looks like they had great plans in the beginning but the limitation of virtual worlds are for major events are still a major obstacle. Some bloggers that attended expressed their frustrations. The concept was really great but it was ahead of it’s time – technology needs to catch up with it. The dilemma is that as the technology advances and the capabilities increase – users need to also upgrade to keep up.  I spoke to some members of the iVillage group to ask if they had any communication from iVillage about events and happenings since the Girls Night Out Show in SL last Feb. No one has heard a thing – including myself. I did teleport over to the i-village Loft on Sheep Island (39,156,25) but it looks very vacant there – the HUD Tour was not working. One of my contacts stated that repeated attempts were made to contact iVillage regarding in-world events but there was no reply. 

iVillage was ahead of their time planning for too large an event in Second Life but they started out with the key to building a successful virtual marketing strategy. They promoted well in the real world, started a group in-world and they created an on-line Girls Night Out blog in the real world – but it seems that they did not follow up. The last entry in the iVillage blog was Feb 2007 and no in-world events that I am aware of occurred since the Girls Night Out show . If I missed something or If anyone knows what is going on there – please let me know.

You can see from reading my previous posts that retailers like H&M and Sears are discovering that the secret to virtual marketing is by first embedding and integrating the brand and/or product into a social networking and/or game virtual environment.  iVillage seems to have had the ball early on but dropped it after experiencing a setback based on large mega in world events that experienced technology constraints and perhaps too large of a learning curve for users new to virtual environments. Maybe they should have shifted their focus to regularly scheduled smaller in-world social events and worked to build on the social connection of the real world blog with lots of interconnectivity to the main iVillage site (especially the avatar related links). There is the “virtual hair stylest at iVillage, that is powered by the Hairstyler.com. iVillage also has the MVM and the Makeover O-Matic: Virtual Makover on their site. The virtual makeover lets the users customize hairstyles, make-up and accessories.

 Makes one wonder if their media strategy and marketing company bit off more then they could chew with this start with a bang end with a fizzle virtual promotion campaign.

Perhaps the article from Communication Overtones titled” How to Successfully Promote Your Company in Second Life,” sums it up well. They concluded that to build a successful brand, companies need to create experiences vs. destination. I will add to that by suggesting that building social communities in controlled self-contained virtual environment like the H&M and Sears marketing strategies are currently doing will enhance and strengthen the brand identity as well as serve to provide a smooth transition (learning curve) for the target market to move seamlessly into a larger virtual environment in the near future.

Part 4: Avatars for Retail Marketing? Help Me Find More…

Previous postings have focused on avatars being used to:

•  visualize the fashion product itself on a 360 degree rotation as with the 360 promo product.

• cater to the mass customization trend by enabling individual customer fashion garment fitting using MVM.

• “push” market new products and services as with the MVM i-mail product.

• create social and game communities that directly connect to the online retail products as with Sears e-Mes.

• initiate retail/game brand merging to create a retail familiarity and brand identification for the target market as with H&M and the Sims.

• market fashion products simultaneously in the global virtual world and in the real world as the House of Nyla is currently doing.
   

This article titled, “Avatars Give Retail Websites That Important “Personal” Touch,” by Associate Marketing Professor Julie Baker is interesting. She states that the results of research concludes that “avatars to be potentially powerful marketing tools” for retailers and I tend to strongly agree with her. Can you help me find more examples of avatars that are directly being used to market products?

This example is from a company called Gizmoz has an interesting use of personalized avatars. Did anyone watch the 2007 MTV VMA awards 9/9/07? In addition to the Brittney meltdown they played a commercial ‘AVATARSMENT’ sponsored by Taco Bell. It represents a partnership between a company called Gizmoz, MTV and TacoBell®.

 
This note is from the Taco Bell® site:“Taco Bell® has chosen three lucky fans to star as virtual actors in an ad for Fourthmeal. The winners were chosen as part of Taco Bell’s TV Me! contest, in partnership with Gizmoz and MTV. In less than two weeks, consumers created more than 17,000 Gizmoz clips, which were viewed more than 920,000 times.”Here is a link to the final commercial ‘AVATARSMENT’ that was created from the winning entries.