I have no idea whether campaigns within Second Life can be effective for marketers and whether Second Life, as a business, has long-term potential, but I wouldn’t dismiss a service because its users are predominately located outside of the United States. In fact, services that don’t successfully find ways to serve international users are, at the very least, leaving money on the table.

As word-of-mouth marketing via new media becomes an increasingly important component of global business, might it not be the case that Second Life increasingly has exactly the right worldwide audience for these brands?

(hold aside the fact that many of these companies are not executing particularly interesting or sustainable in-world programs and that Second Life is still a very niche product. Also that i’m fully biased from having worked at Linden Lab several years ago.)

*ducks*

I think it’s narrow and niave to think that everything has to target the U.S. Sure, if you don’t sell in Europe, it’ll matter, but global brands would be wise to take advantage of niche communities and platforms to reach people in other places.

It’s very obvious that Europe is becoming a hot bed for tech - in innovation, start ups and usage. I think if you can play there, you should.

1) SL is growing. Maybe not at the rate of the hype, but it is growing none-the-less. There’s value to being a first-mover in new technologies.

2) Raw numbers are not often as important as the demographics. I’ve read some profiles on SL users that would make your head spin. Lots of people may not watch golf on television but that doesn’t keep companies from buying up tons of ad space. The same thing is going on with SL. These are folks with a good deal of discretionary income: young, hip, rich…

In terms of there being value in non-US based users and readers certainly isn’t lost on me as I type this response from my home office on a Sunday afternoon in the South West corner of Western Australia, so no need to preach to me.

The point I made, and still make (and I’d note I’ve been a registered user at SL for over 2 years) is that the value in the flood of American companies into SL trying to target American users doesn’t add up when clearly the bulk of SL’s active user base is non US based, and indeed the number of active US users isn’t particularly high.

Is there some great scope for European firms to join SL? yes, but we aren’t seeing a flood of those currently, although I would have thought that without actually writing it that a natural conclusion from the post was that SL is hot in Europe.

It is the fact to understand that even if you just think you do have an US based audience it is worth the time to look at the market outside.

Linden Lab has understood this and fosters local “liasons” - and it will be worth their money.

I do not see the numbers they projects, especially due to the amount of ‘guessing’ included, but Linden themselves provide numbers on their active users - a simple look at them will provide oyu with interesting numbers for Europe (that is if you understand which country does belong to Europe of course …)