Creating a virtual concept

Let’s shed some light to my thoughts about the possibilities about virtual worlds as Second Life®. About 8 months ago on a rainy friday evening I was a bit over eager and decided to contact the UK musiclabel Fierce Angels.

Why Fierce Angels? Well personally I like their music and a company like that could seriously do brandgagement (create goodwill amongst people) inside a virtualworld.

So after some searching I came across the email adress of it’s owner, Mark Doyle. Mark’s been a man of vision, he created the brand Hed Kandi (perhaps better known) and at the end of 2005 he left his creation to start fresh again…

I wrote him an email asking him if he’d be interested in me pitching him a concept for introducing the Fierce Angels brand into Second Life®. Somehow I never expected to hear back from him ofcourse, but two days went by and he replied.

He said he was interested and that everything related was handled by Rehabstudio, their internet/design company. He promised me to forward the mail I sent to them and have them contact me.

The next week I pulled out everything I had in me to come up with solid ideas for them. Different, stylish and crossing the digital and virtual borders. I was tired of seeing RL companies come into Second Life® with big bucks, big buildings and totally not getting what possibilities the virtualworld had in store for them, so I was determined to let Fierce Angels become the one to prove them different.

We had developed the vife-rule for succesful brandgagement so I based the inworld presence on it, and tied it into their RL marketing strategies.

In the next couple of posts on this short series, I’ll explain the concept I presented more in detail, but I’ll continue with what happened afterwards in this one.

After sending Mr Doyle, and the contact from Rehabstudio the pitch they were enthused and agreed to work together on idea, to see what was doable and what wasn’t. I couldn’t believe my bold move started to look promising!

Me and Mark (the guy from Rehab) started working on some several small things before we were going to work on the presence itself. Days passed… weeks… until finally the word came out: they wouldn’t commit financial resources.

I couldn’t believe what I heared. First of all I offered to help establish their presence free of charge and secondly if you think a few hundred bucks spent on marketing is to much…. then really, what’s the point of being in the entertainment business?

I know, that may sound harsh, it’s not intended but sometimes it’s difficult to imagine professional people (tech/marketing jobs related) not seeing the potentials of getting your feet wet when clearly the market starts to shift from a push towards a pull system. It’s not a flaw of insight from Mr Doyle, but to my personal opinion a flaw of the people at rehab.

Yes, Second Life® in itself doesn’t earn your company any money, but neither does your catering department…

And for a company like Fierce Angels, who thrives on their fans, who’s active in the constant changing music industry I think it’s necessary to reach out to their community. Second Life® may not be the ultimate form we’ll embrace in five years from now, but so far, it’s the only non themed completely user-generated virtual world out there…

Ok that’s it for now : ) In my next post I’ll go step by step into using the vife-rule and how we envisioned the Fierce Angels presence.

Jim.