The experience economy expands

welcome business—like Second Life, There.com, Entropia Universe and others.

Metaverse marketing

Second Life (SL) is generating significant press and attracting hundreds of Fortune 500 companies to create virtual world experiences to test new customer concepts. The average age in SL is 32, and most residents are not past gamers. The audience has purchasing power, and many are active researchers monitoring the rich media experiences rapidly evolving in SL.

Launched in 2003, SL’s virtual world was developed by Linden Research. A downloadable client program enables users, called residents, to interact with each other through avatars. Residents, for example, can explore, socialize and participate in group activities or purchasing experiences or trade properties and services with each other in the SL virtual world.
In our research, we have learned that new approaches to marketing and brand management are evolving from the new metaverse experiences in SL, and that the same underlying principles for effective knowledge sharing and collaboration apply.

So what is the major innovation?

The most important point is that rich media and 3-D experiences are rapidly entering the Internet world and taking advantage of knowledge and collaboration best practices. The rich real estate dynamics are generating a new trading economy that has the potential to revolutionize new real estate market dynamics. Although early-days metaverse sites like SL do not have the user adoption or proven ROIs, they serve as an excellent vision of how virtual world experiences are striving to simulate real-life
experiences.

There is no question that virtual worlds extend our experience economy capabilities. KM practitioners, who want to be on top of their game, must ensure they experiment and learn from virtual world experiences, because they will evolve into a new purchasing power segment.