FreshNetworks Blog

I often get asked to explain why SecondLife (SL) is more than just a geek and sex fest. Millions of people have visited this virtual world only to give up and abandon their avatar on day one (over 10 million according to Wikipedia). I don’t blame them. SecondLife isn’t ready for the mainstream. And nor is it SecondLife per-se that’s important.

SecondLife isn’t the future of life online. But what it is is an indicator of the kind of behaviour online that may soon become as mainstream as YouTube. SecondLife is really a live innovation of means of interacting online. It is used by a relatively restricted number of people and often quite fanatically by these. It isn’t mainstream and couldn’t become so until we all have significantly better computing power at home.

This is what makes SecondLife so exciting. It’s difficult to visualise what it represents; what virtual worlds will become online. It’s the same as how difficult it was to imagine what the internet would be like when the web was just a couple of computers connected together.

I think that the innovation that is being developed through the use of SecondLife will bring real change to our behaviour online. A company will make the innovation leap necessary to extend avatars and virtual worlds to the mainstream. I don’t know who, when or how this will be done, but the ingredients and beheviours typical of innovation are present and so it will happen.

Today I came across a company that shows one potential development of integrating virtual worlds into our online experience. RocketOn turns the entire web into a virtual world where your avatar travels with you. And as you read a page you come across the avatars of others’ who also happen to be visiting. Could this be the future of forums? Or online communities? I think it’s a fantastic idea and it seems pretty well executed (see the Techcrunch post) and watch this video to get an idea of how it works:

When people talk about new media, social media or Web 2.0, there is often one thing in common: user generated content (UGC). This is really what the essence growth of Web 2.0 is. Web sites are crammed full of videos, photos, reviews and articles written by users. This reflects a shift not only in the amount of time people are spending online (more), but also a change in the reason for going online. People no longer go just to read and find a piece of information; they go to contribute information, share ideas and interact with other users. Wikipedia has over seven million articles in 200 languages – all user generated content. YouTube has over 150,000 new videos uploaded every day. People want to contribute to the debate and we need to give them the opportunity to do this.

The internet has changed from being about individual users interacting with websites, to individual users interacting with each other through websites.

This change is massive and the opportunities it opens up for you are equally large. For brands it’s about getting rid of traditional marketing approaches and engaging customers in what you are doing – involve them and use the content and ideas they generate to help you.

One simple but effective way to start use UGC in your business is to get customers to rate products on your site and write reviews. Many firms are worried about this, but they really shouldn’t be. Businesses like Amazon have been using customer reviews on their main site for years, others like Expedia have a customer reviews site that sits separate to the ecommerce site (TripAdvisor in their case).

To get the use of UGC in this way right, there are a few simple rules to follow:

1. Be clear why people are reviewing – they should be doing it so that they can let other people know what they think about the product rather than it just being feedback to you on your brand.
2. Allow people just to give a rating and use a five point scale. People tend to be very positive, in fact the average score given to products when rated online is 4.3 out of five!
3. Allow people to post reviews in real-time. You can moderate them afterwards and letting them see that their post is live will be the reward they need for taking the time to write something.
4. Don’t fake reviews. Not only is this going to become illegal, there is also no need. I’ve heard of companies that fake positive reviews, and ones that fake negative reviews. There’s no need to do either, so don’t.

Pretty soon your reviews will become an integral part of your site. It stops being somewhere customers go to perform a transaction and starts being somewhere they go to interact. They spend more time on the site and research suggests will spend more money with you. Products with reviews generate a much higher conversion rate than those without. Now there’s a real benefit of UGC!

Next time we’ll build on this and look at a range of ways you can start to engage customers online.