Kami Harbinger

Apparently the spammers have my email address, which was bound to happen sooner or later; I don't do anything to guard it, because I'd rather that real people be able to reach me, too. But I don't just get any kind of spammers, I get ontologically confused spammers. Spammers who do not quite understand the distinction between reality and Second Life:

I am Dr.Jude Benn Harris, a financial consultant. I have a client civil servant fron NIGERIA due for retirement come jude 29th 2007. He want to buy a residential property from you/your company as he intends to relocate to your country after his retirement.

While the Lair of the Fiendish Dr. Harbinger has a lovely empty-sim seaside view and quite reasonable rent, I think it might be difficult to relocate into from Nigeria, or anywhere on the material plane.

Dear Sir,
I am a Liberian Refugee, Lining in Ghana and also a member of Secondlife.com where I got your contact from. Pleae if you can help me with my project please let me know.
Sir, i wanted you to help me market Diamonds that I have here with me on Secondlife.com. I am ready to work with you and have the Diamonds sent to you if you can help me to market them.
Thank you and I look forward to hearing from you.

Gimme a second with the rez tools, and I'll have some diamonds in SL, too! Heck, stop by Pellucidar, and if you can work the power crystal generator, you can have a spinning, glowing power crystal! Nuts to diamonds!

I'm baffled by what American Apparel thought they were going to get. Putting some mediocre clothing, vastly inferior to what most residents sell, in a small store and then never doing any events, never changing anything... Did they expect to actually make real-world money out of SL sales? Didn't they understand the exchange rate?

As a marketing effort, it succeeded initially; like most people, I'd never heard of them before they came to SL, and I went and looked through their shop. But their clothes were unimpressive and uninteresting. I found nothing I would ever wear. They did nothing to hold interest. It's like putting up a bare gray web page with a low-rez picture of a shirt, and expecting to get a lot of sales out of it.

Companies who want to use SL for marketing need to make in-world products and events which are interesting in comparison to what is already in SL, and then funnel the results of that interest over to their real world product.

Nissan did much better. The SL Sentra is great. It's one of my favorite vehicles in SL, because it was designed to handle well in SL's alleged physics. They've put real effort into their sim; there aren't any regular events to draw me back, so there's room for improvement, but I still tell newbies to go there and get a good car. And when I next buy a new car in RL, they've earned at least a fair comparison from me by doing this.

Aloft have a good build, but didn't do any events, either. So the place was a ghost town. It was impossible to visit and not think of the Overlook Hotel from The Shining, which I'm pretty sure was not the marketing message they wanted to send. Maybe they'll learn something with their relaunch?

Second Life, to a real-world company, is about marketing your brand. Marketing takes effort, not just one billboard or web page.

(And hey, anyone who wants some real, practical help with these things... IM me or send me email and we can discuss rates.)