Strategy Verdict - Strategy Brand presence in Second Life

Trying to integrate a brand into an established and, to an extent, elitist online community is extremely difficult. Brands that have attempted it so far have found themselves getting a lot of negative feedback from the community they say they were attempting to integrate with.

Yet these same brands have also successfully generated a fair amount of hype outside of the Second Life community as a result, arguably positioning them as more innovative and forward thinking. You have to wonder whether this was, in fact, the incentive for doing it in the first place.

Does the PR of a brand using Second Life outweigh the subsequent attack from the actual people who play the game, and then write blogs criticising marketers for not understanding the needs of the Second Life community?

Probably. Especially considering the relatively small size of the Second Life community, currently just more than a million people worldwide, with a heavy US bias.

I suspect that people building offices and just translating their offline commercial selves online will continue annoying the Second Life community.

But valuable content that generates genuine involvement in the virtual world could win valuable brand advocates. As with any new product launch, whether the outcome of Vodafone's initiative is positive depends heavily on the product.

An SMS service within Second Life sounds like a good idea and I'm told would be a genuinely useful in-game service.

If it's free, I'm sure Second Life users would embrace Vodafone with open arms and welcome it into their world.

If not, the danger for Vodafone is that the community will see it as another brand trying to exploit the Second Life phenomena.