Lately a lot of the buzz seems to be centered around the emergence of online games and virtual worlds as a great place to meet and attract new clients. I have had a number of agents who had never heard of Second Life before approach me ask me what I thought about the idea and whether they should expand their practice into the Second Life world.
My answer to each was “if you play Second Life by all means explore it else I would focus my efforts on developing a solid web presence and tapping into the emerging social networks, Second Life has a lot of hype around it but to my opinion the cost of implementation will for the present outweigh the benefits of participation”.
Turns out I am not the only person in the room questioning the hype surrounding Second Life. A consulting group called The Yankee Group has taken a look at Second Life’s numbers and written a report called Whither Second Life. In this report they state that the growth rate of Second Life users reached its peak in October 2006 and has since slowed. The other area The Yankee Group measured Second Life on is user engagement (much like web stickiness, engagement is simply a measure of the average time per user spent logged into the system) what they found is that the average user spends just 12 minutes per month logged into the system.
Wow that is a very low number when compared to social networking sites such as Facebook and Linkedin, both of which are experiencing steady growth in user population and site stickiness. Facebookâs has seen their site stickiness grow to 186 minutes per month or an increase of almost 25% over the past 6 months.
So to all of you out there who have been hearing about Second Life and feel like you are missing the boat ask yourself these questions.
- Do I have a blog?
- Do I have a Facebook profile?
- Do I have a Linkedin account?
If you answered no to any of those questions then do yourself a favor and explore those channels before diving into Second Life. My reasoning is this if Facebook users are spending an average of 186 minutes per month which is roughly 15 times more engagement than the 12 minutes of Second Life your investment will have much more potential growth though perhaps less hype.
Now don’t get me wrong I love Second Life. The platform is incredible, the rich diversity the online community that you can explore and some of the innovations they have put forth in game play are going to dramatically reshape game play as we know it and are certainly worth exploring. With the positives come the reality which is the interface is cumbersome, it has no mobile access depending entirely on a fat client to access and requires consistent attention to participate. What I mean by the last part is you can setup a Facebook profile and people can visit and interact with it while you are offline however with a Second Life branch you need to staff the branch and pay rent so there are more costs associated.
For larger brokerages such as Coldwell Banker which are seeking to broaden their generational appeal and tap into the hype Second Life offers the potential to be part of something new and explore emerging markets which will develop in time and may prove to be a revenue channel in the future, because they can absorb the costs now both in staffing and rent without reaping any immediate benefits other than press coverage. However for small to medium brokerage with limited staff it does not seem a good investment to dedicate time to staffing a virtual kiosk, unless of course you are already playing the game in which case consult your accountant and perhaps you can write off your “game” as a business expense.
No comments yet.
Comments RSS TrackBack Identifier URI
Leave a comment
No Comments